131 Russification and the Return of Conquestimplications of these ideas within the context of empire. The influ-
ence of Nikolai Danilevskii was particularly important. As was the
case with Khomiakov and Kireevskii, Russia in the portrayal of
Danilevskii was unique and special, and the key to its unusual
strength lay in its continuing reservoir of indigenous culture and
“originality” (samobytnost’), untainted even by the reforms of Peter
the Great.^31 A “world-historical type” in its tribal phase underwent a
“long preparatory period” for its “future conscious activities.” Dur-
ing the “ethnographic period” its “tribal particularities,” such as the
development of its language, the expression of myth and legend, and
its way of life, percolated in the background of the world stage,
awaiting their entrance.^32 Russia might have been a latecomer to the
world stage, but its time had arrived.
But not all civilizations could boast of such a future. Thinkers who
drew on the Romantic heritage in the late nineteenth century were far
more explicit about just who qualified and who did not to benefit
from these ideas about historically young peoples and their future
cultural expression. The Westerners had been accustomed to making
similar distinctions, although according to a different set of criteria.
Belinskii, for example, made note of those peoples with “fewer
sources of spiritual life,” by which he meant a less-fertile soil of prov-
erbs, sayings, parables, songs, tales, and legends from which litera-
ture might emerge – in short, a less-developed sphere of custom.
These peoples would never “rise to the significance of a universal-
historical people.”^33 Belinskii notably excluded even Ukrainians from
this picture.^34
Danilevskii, as well, emphasized that not all peoples were capable
of “originality” or of attaining significant levels of culture and civiliza-
tion; they “are born, achieve their various levels of development, age,
deteriorate, and die.” Predictably, the Slavs, headed by the Russians,
were one of those “cultural-historical types” destined, in Danilevskii’s
view, to play a decisive role in the history of the world. Small peoples
on the Russian frontier such as those of the Middle Volga, on the other
hand, were to play the role of “ethnographic material,” “that is, some-
thing like inorganic matter that makes up the composition of historical
organisms.”^35 Danilevskii did not consider this process of assimilation
a cultural insult or certainly not a political conquest, and instead felt
that peoples at the mere stage of “ethnographic material” were in fact
fortunate to contribute to the strength and richness of a genuine “cul-
tural-historical type.” Mountaineers in the Caucasus did not even
make it this far, and instead, with their “fanatical religion, their way of
life and habits, and even the land they inhabit,” they were little more
than “natural [prirodnye] predators and robbers.”^36 For Danilevskii,