706 Ch. 1 8 • The Dominant Powers in the Age of Liberalismbooks entered Russia just in the 1847—1849 period, most ending up in Saint
Petersburg and Moscow.
In Eastern and eastern Central Europe, the Russian and Polish intelli
gentsia stood as separate social groups who felt responsible for leading the
fight for social and political change and for national independence. Many
were gentry who could survive well enough without a university position or
government post. Part of an educated elite, they could afford to write, even
if the public audience they reached was small indeed. Unlike their coun
terparts in Western countries, they were not absorbed into the liberal pro
fessions and maintained their identity as a group.
During the 1830s and 1840s, some gentry were overwhelmed with guilt
that they were well off while the masses suffered. Alexander Pushkin
(1799—1837), whose mother exiled two serfs to Siberia with a nod of her
head after they failed to bow as she passed by, attacked serfdom in his
short stories. Steeped in a variety of intellectual currents, the intelligentsia
brooded in small groups, or “circles,” in Saint Petersburg and in Moscow
over how Russia might emerge from autocracy and relative backwardness.
Several important writers emerged from this underground hotbed of intel
lectual and creative ferment. Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), who adhered
to populism and the Pan-Slavist cause, presented brilliant psychological
depictions of his characters. These included disturbing portraits of troubled
individuals like himself whose actions reflected not rationality but aberra
tion, even madness, in such novels as Crime and Punishment (1866) and
The Brothers Karamazov (1879—1880). Sentenced to death by the authori
ties in 1849 for participation in a reading circle that discussed socialism, he
was hauled out of jail early one morning, blindfolded, placed before a firing
squad, and then, after a cruelly staged mock execution that understandably
shattered his nerves, sent to prison in Siberia. He described his own suffer
ing, but also that of Russian society, in the crucial years following defeat in
the Crimean War. Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), another great Russian
realist writer, was a wealthy landowner who served in the Crimean War. He
emerged as a moral voice against violence. His monumental War and Peace
(1869) depicts the struggle between his country and the West.
Pyotr Chaadayev’s Philosophical Letters slipped by the censors in 1836.
Chaadayev (1794—1856) presented a thinly veiled condemnation of Rus
sia’s cultural history. Officials declared him to be mad, and the police
hounded him for the rest of his life. He pessimistically provoked heated dis
cussion by suggesting that cultural backwardness would keep Russia from
joining the ranks of civilized nations. Philosophical Letters opened the
debate between “Westernizers”—those Russian intellectuals who, like Tsar
Peter the Great in the seventeenth century, looked to the West for a model
for progress—and “Slavophiles,” who believed that Russia could never be
reconciled with Western values. Like Westernizers, most Slavophiles were
social critics of autocratic Russia. Westernizers like Chaadayev regarded the
development of parliamentary institutions and industrialization in Britain,