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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
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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 

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