Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-m42fx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-22T23:51:05.587Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Construction of a Utopian West: The Russian Nineteenth-Century Intelligentsia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Dmitry Shlapentokh
Dmitry Shlapentokh*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Indiana University at South Bend, South Bend, Indiana, 46634-7111, USA. Email: dshlapen@iusb.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

A person’s image of a foreign country is often not related to an actual encounter, but limited and one-sided based on the environment of the person’s native land. Consider, for example, the Russian elite perception of the West in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Peter the Great’s reign shook Russia’s traditional society and led to the spread of promiscuity and general immorality. Consequently, for many Russians, whether or not they traveled, the West, epitomized by France, was a place of erotic pleasures and easygoing life. By the beginning of the nineteenth century some members of the Russian elite started to question the political system of their native land. For some of them, like Peter Chaadaev, the West stood as a symbol of the ideal political institutions and Russia for the dead end of history.

Type
Focus: Nihilism
Information
European Review , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , May 2014 , pp. 335 - 354
Copyright
Copyright © Academia Europaea 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1.Terras, V. (1990) Handbook of Russian Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press).Google Scholar
2.Quinn, F. (2008) The Sum of all Heresies: The Image of Islam in Western Though (Oxford: Oxford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3.Farmer, S. A. and Pasternack, C. B. (2003) Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).Google Scholar
4.Pynchon, T. (1973) Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Viking).Google Scholar
5.Kleims, A. and Mesenhöller, M. (2009) Ein Kampf un Ordnung. Europa die Steppe, die Leinwand and das Nichts, Behemoth. A Journal on Civilization, 2, p. 37.Google Scholar
6.In some cases, the animal elements of Oriental life and sexuality were preserved, but at the time they were mentioned just to underscore the absolute license Europeans enjoyed outside restrictive, moralizing, metropolises. Indeed, the colonies, and implicitly the Orient, were a place where a ‘fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit.’Google Scholar
7.Levin, E. (1989) Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900–1700 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).Google Scholar
8.Farr, J. R. (1995) Authority and Sexuality in Early Modern Burgundy (1550–1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9.Riley, P. (2001) A Lust for Virtue: Louis XIV’s Attack on Sin in Seventeenth-Century France (Westport: Greenwood).Google Scholar
10.Burgi, R. (1954) A History of the Russian Hexameter (North Haven: Shoe String Press).Google Scholar
11.Forbes, I. and Underhill, W. (eds) (1990) Catherine the Great (Durban: Clearway Logistic Phase, 1).Google Scholar
12.Kon, I. (1995) The Sexual Revolution in Russia, from the Age of the Czars to Today (New York: Free Press).Google Scholar
13.O’Malley, L. D. (1998) The Dramatic Work of Catherine the Great: Theater and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Aldershot: Ashgate).Google Scholar
14.Kingston-Mann, E. (1999) In Search of the True West: Culture, Economics, and Problems of Russian Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15.Gorbatov, I. (2006) Catherine the Great and French Philosophers of the Enlightenment: Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and Grim (Bethesda: Academica).Google Scholar
16. Chaadaev did travel extensively in the West, but he was not a permanent resident of any European country and finally returned to Russia. From this perspective, he was quite different from Vladimir S. Pecherin and Alexander Herzen, his contemporaries.Google Scholar
17.Ia. Chaadaev, P. (1991) Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i izbrannye pisma (Philosophical Letters & Apology of a Madman), 2 vols (Moscow: Nauka).Google Scholar
18. Quotes in the text below are translated from this edition. Chaadaev’s works continued to be reprinted in post-Soviet Russia as well..Google Scholar
19. This vision of European history was popular in European Romanticism and was undoubtedly known to Chaadaev’s correspondents. This idea continued in Russian conservative thought in the late nineteenth century, Konstantin Leont’ev for example.Google Scholar
20. The Russian-Mongol/Tatar ‘symbiosis’ would be developed by the Eurasianists, a group of 1920s’ Russian émigrés. Neo-Eurasianism was popular in late Yeltsin-early Putin Russia.Google Scholar
21. This explanation was popular in Chaadaev’s time. It was suggested, for example, that serfdom emerged in France because the Franks, Germanic conquerors and outsiders, imposed their will on the native population.Google Scholar