CULTURE, COHESION, AND STATE POLICY
Jonathan Powis underscores the importance of lifestyle habits in defining a cohesive
social group. That could include dress, education, marriage patterns, language,
leisure time, and a unifying myth or sense of self. These were particularly important
in forging nobility in Russia’s situation of economic and ethnic diversity. The
problem was not unusual: by the seventeenth century the Polish-Lithuanian
nobility (Catholic, Orthodox, Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian) developed a myth
of identity, expressed in dress and ideology, to paper over vast economic inequality
and regional diversity. Called the“Sarmatian”myth, it attributed to the Polish
nobility descent from“Sarmatian”warriors of classical antiquity and promoted an
ideology of brotherly equality regardless of wealth. In Parliament magnate and
impoverished country gentry who might be patron and client addressed each other
as brothers; in dress they affected a Turkish-style kaftan and ornate sash. By the
eighteenth century, many Polish noblemen saw the Sarmatian ethic as a conserva-
tive obstacle to change and adopted European frock coats, Enlightenment culture,
and a rhetoric of national resistance. For Russia’s eighteenth-century nobility, their
Europeanized culture became their identifying myth.
The nobility’s dress, language, and education differentiated it not only from the
taxpaying populace but also from clergy and merchant classes. As we have seen,
Russia’s bishops in the eighteenth century were highly educated, acculturated in
Enlightenment thinking, and socially and culturally on a par with the court elites,
but the parish clergy constituted a less educated, more insular social group.
Similarly, Russia’s merchants were Europeanized in dress and culture, and many
aspired to become noblemen, but as a rule their educations were more practical,
their dress more somber, their lifestyles less lavish, their households (deprived of
landed estates and serfs) more self-sufficient. Only the very small educatedrazno-
chinetsclass—scholars like Lomonosov and Trediakovskii—could keep up with the
nobility by virtue of their scholarly talents.
The state engendered the Europeanization of the elite across the century. For
Peter I, European education and behavior created a service-oriented elite. As Jan
Kusber notes, for Catherine II, imbuing her nobility with Enlightenment ideas and
urbanity helped to create an orderly empire-wide nobility analogous to the ration-
ally planned towns and gardens of her empire and the overarching myth of the
empire as harmonious garden. Legislation and institutions to inculcate European
culture rained from the center. Decrees as early as 1697 and 1700–2 mandated that
elite men and women (not peasants) were to wear north European dress. In 1717 a
handbook of etiquette derived from contemporary European sources,The Honor-
able Mirror of Youth, introduced European civility to Russia’s young noblemen.
They were to become good courtiers, learning how to dance, how to eat properly at
table, how to converse in pleasant company, how to speak foreign languages. They
were to be respectful to superiors, particularly to their patrons. Unlike its sixteenth-
century Muscovite counterpart, theDomostroi, it gave little attention to piety and
religion, at least for men. Women, on the other hand, were expected to know
European manners, conversational skills, and dancing, but also to adhere to
Nobility, Culture, and Intellectual Life 435