through moral reform. Scholars have explored how eighteenth-century intellectuals
deployed the Orthodox theme of Russia as a worldly paradise into a preoccupation
with pastoral and paradise imagery. Not only did they describe the realm as a
harmonious garden, blessed by God, they also cultivated their gardens as spaces to
express their botanical interests or explore their own sentimental introspection.
Placing themselves in so harmonious a context expressed a basic contentment with
state, society, and self.
Russia’s nobility was diverse, to be sure, in politics, culture, and behavior.
Certainly some yearned for social justice, as attested by the proliferation of Masonic
lodges, where political discussion was generally liberal. Certainly, as Priscilla
Roosevelt and Douglas Smith have shown, some noblemen manipulated their
serfs as objects in imaginary worlds. But neither of these extremes represents the
general experience of nobility and educated elite in the eighteenth-century Russian
empire. Russia’s elite was fundamentally conservative, seamlessly blending teach-
ings of Enlightenment liberty and self-development with“enlightened Orthodox”
moral imperatives to change organically from within one’s soul, one’s family, and
one’s community. Even in their day, Russian nobles lamented the cultural chasm
they saw developing between themselves as a Europeanized elite and their trad-
itional peasantry; Nikolai Karamzin allowed himself an uncharacteristic criticism of
Petrine Europeanizing reforms in these terms. But their path to repair that chasm
was through personal improvement, not institutional change.
One should not exaggerate the angst of Russia’s educated elite in the eighteenth
century. This was a century of confidence. Noblemen were proud of their empire
and of their autocrat; they thought of themselves as an honorable elite; they were
committed to their country as a European state moving on a progressive path; they
were committed to their Orthodox faith. In the eighteenth century, Russia’s
nobility and educated elite looked forward confidently and expansively.
*****
English translations of the Table of Ranks of 1722, Emancipation Charter of 1762, and
Charter to Nobility of 1785 are in Vol. 1 of Paul Dukes,Russia under Catherine the Great,
2 vols. (Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1977). The two 1785 Charters
are translated with excellent commentary in David Mark Griffiths and George E. Munro,
Catherine II’s Charters of 1785 to the Nobility and the Towns(Bakersfield, Calif.:
C. Schlacks, Jr., 1991).
On Enlightenment in Russia: Marc Raeff,“The Enlightenment in Russia and Russian
Thought in the Enlightenment,”in J. G. Garrard., ed.,The Eighteenth Century in Russia
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 25–47; Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter,
“Thoughts on the Enlightenment and Enlightenment in Russia,”Journal of Modern
Russian History and Historiography2 (2009): 1–26.
On the nobility as an imperial amalgam, see Andreas Kappeler,The Russian Empire:
A Multiethnic History(Harlow: Longman, 2001). For biographies of non-Russians in
tsarist service: Donald Ostrowski,“Semeon Bekulatovich (?–1616)”and Sean Pollock,
“Petr Ivanovich Bagration (1765–1812),”in S. M. Norris and W. Sunderland, eds.,
Russia’s People of Empire(Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2012), 26–35,
92 – 103. On the endurance of elites, see Jonathan Powis,Aristocracy(Oxford and New
York: B. Blackwell, 1984).Nobility, Culture, and Intellectual Life 447