The Noble Servitor and His World 53
new-model forces which contained a high proportion of foreign officers; some
of these had assimilated and signed in Russian, while others used their native
language. Stevens points out that the overall literacy rate (55 per cent) was high
by intcinationa! standards, but it Ytouk: be rash tu draw ~u1uJu:siuns from ihis
about the cultural level of Russian privileged servitors. These men left no
memoirs, letters, or other personal documents, and so any conclusions as to
their state of mind must be tentative. The impression one gains from official
records is that their outlook was grossly materialistic and job-centred, 114 but
this may be a little unfair.
Among metropolitan nobles we do find, by the last quarter of the seventeenth
century, individuals who were beginning to reflect on the nature of their
world. The boyar elite by and large upheld traditional attitudes and tried to
live up to the Orthodox ideal, spending money on pious or charitable
purposes; one man in ten donned a monk's cowl before death. Courtiers and
officials rather than soldiers, they valued ceremonial and were obsessed with
questions of family honour and standing, ever fearful lest some accidentshould cause them to fall from their lofty station. (^83) If there were a few indi-
viduals among them who took a critical or reformist stance, this owed less to
influences from the Protestant countries of northern and western Europe, as
commonly supposed, than to the model offered by neighbouring Poland-
Lithuania.
Those foreign soldiers of fortune who came to Muscovy, especially in the
wake of the Thirty Years War, certainly made a contribution to Russian life,
but this lay chiefly in the technical military domain. Culturally they had little
to offer, and some of them converted to Orthodoxy, married Russians, and
settled down.comfortably on the estates they were granted. A few Common-
wealth subjects (mainly eastern Slavs) took the same course, but the influence
from this quarter was of a different order. Its aristocratic culture was attrac-
tive to men in leading Moscow families, including the ruling Romanovs, who
sought to emulate the courtly refinements of their counterparts across the
border; a few learned Polish or Latin. (^86) The religious divide was of course a
formidable barrier to genuine intimacy-but was this what leading Russians
sought? Rather they looked on Muscovy's ancient rival as a land differing
from their own mainly in its more secularized culture and in the superior status
of its nobility. By emulating the Commonwealth's attainments in those fields
alone, might not Russia surpass it in excellence?
The implication was that the metropolitan nobles at least should be eman-
cipated from the constraints of the liturgical service state. This was the motive
84 Hellie, 'Muse. Prov. Elite', p. JOA.
85 Crummey, Aristocrats and Servitors, pp. 135-63.
86 Rogov, Russko-po/'skiye svyozi; on the mediating role of the Ukraine: K. V. Kharlampovich,
Molorossiyskoye v/iyonie no velikorusskuyu tserkovnuyu zhizn', Kazan·, 1914. Klyuchevsky's
well-known account (Soch. iii (1959). 282-98; Rise of the Romonovs, tr. L. Archibald, London,
1970, pp. 292-320) plays down the Polish element.