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The Scare of the Self: Sentimentalism, Privacy, and Private Life in Russian Culture, 1780-1820

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Andreas Schönle
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Extract

This century may be called the century of openness in the physical and moral sense: look at our sweet beauties! … Before people used to hide in dark homes behind the cover of high fences. Nowadays, one sees bright homes everywhere with large windows facing the street: please look in! We want to live, act, and think behind a transparent glass

–Nikolai Karamzin, Moia ispoved

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 57 , Issue 4 , Winter 1998 , pp. 723 - 746
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1998

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References

I wish to thank Margaret Foley, Rebecca Friedman, and Naomi Galtz, die organizers of the Conference on Private Life in Russia held in October 1996 at die University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where I presented an early version of diis paper. The debates during die conference helped me sharpen and refine my dioughts greatly. Thanks are also due to my anonymous reviewers, who wisely proposed important adjustments to my argument.

1. On the Russian travelogue in the years 1790–1840, see T. Roboli's influential formalist typology presented in “Literature puteshestvii,” Russkaia proza (Leningrad, 1926), 42–73. Reuel K. Wilson offered a somewhat pedestrian discussion of the “literary merits” of some of the major works of the genre in The Literary Travelogue: A Comparative Study with Special Relevance to Russian Literature from Fonvizin to Pushkin (The Hague, 1973). E. S. Ivashina contributed a well-documented discussion of the travelogue's place in Russian literary history. See her dissertation “Zhanr literaturnogo puteshestviia v Rossii kontsa XVIII-pervoi treti XIX veka” (Ph.D. diss., Moscow State University, 1980) and her article “O spetsifike zhanra ‘puteshestviia’ v russkoi literature pervoi treti XIX v.,” Vestnik moskovskogo universiteta. Seriia 9: Filologiia, no. 3 (1979): 3–16. Viktor Guminskii addressed some cultural themes of the travelogue throughout the history of Russia in his Otkrytie mira, ili Puteshestviia i stranniki (Moscow, 1987). Sara Dickinson sheds useful light on more obscure travel texts in her “Imagining Space and the Self: Russian Travel Writing and Its Narrators, 1762–1825” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1995). And I attempt a cultural study of the travelogue in my “Authenticity and Fiction in the Russian Literary Journey, 1790–1840” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1995).

2. On the philosophical sources in Scottish Enlightenment of a concept of the private sphere as a realm of noninstrumental, elective affinities, see Silver, Allan, “‘Two Different Sorts of Commerce'—Friendship and Strangership in Civil Society,” in Weintraub, Jeff and Kumar, Krishan, eds., Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy (Chicago, 1997), 43–74.Google Scholar

3. Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 155–62.Google Scholar

4. Ibid., 363–67.

5. Ibid., 361–63, 375. On Rousseau's dialectic creation and annihilation of the autonomous self, see also Gutman, Huck, “Rousseau's Confessions: A Technology of the Self,” in Martin, Luther H., Gutman, Huck, and Hutton, Patrick H., eds., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst, 1988), 99–120.Google Scholar

6. Quoted by Taylor, Sources of the Self, 375.

7. For a solid recent survey of Russian sentimentalist literature, see Kochetkova, N. D., Literatura russkogo sentimentalizma: Esteticheskie i khudozhestvennye iskaniia (St. Petersburg, 1994)Google Scholar. For a perceptive discussion of sentimentalism in the arts, with a careful attempt at contextualization, see Alekseeva, T., Vladimir Lukich Borovikovskii i russkaia kul'tura na rubezhe 18-go-19-go vekov (Moscow, 1975).Google Scholar

8. On the Russian reception of Rousseau, see Lotman, Iurii, “Russo i russkaia kul'tura XVIII-nachala XIX veka,” Izbrannye stat'i (Tallinn, 1992), 2: 40–99 Google Scholar. The Russian response to Enlightenment philosophy in general is addressed by Raeff, Marc in “The Enlightenment in Russia and Russian Thought in the Enlightenment,” in Garrard, J. G., ed., The Eighteenth Century in Russia (Oxford, 1973), 25–47 Google Scholar. See also Marc Raeff's “The Impact of Western Ideas,” in his Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth-Century Nobility (New York, 1966), 148–71.Google Scholar

9. For a discussion of the various meanings of the public/private dichotomy and the various intellectual frameworks in which it occurs, see Jeff Weintraub, “The Theory and Politics of the Public/Private Distinction,” in Weintraub and Kumar, eds., Public and Private in Thought and Practice, 1—42.

10. Weintraub underscores the double and variable meaning of the private as that which is hidden from the public and hence invisible and that which is individual. See Weintraub, “Theory and Politics of the Public/Private Distinction,” 5. The term privacy clearly refers to the former signification, while private life also alludes to the latter.

11. See Roger Chartier, “Les pratiques de l'ecrit,” in Philippe Ariés and Georges Duby, eds., Histoire de la vie privée, vol. 3, De la Renaissance aux Lumiéres (Paris, 1986), esp. 127–61.

12. Thomas, Brook, “The Construction of Privacy in and around the Bostonians,” in Aram Veeser, H., ed., The New Historicism Reader (New York, 1994), 162 Google Scholar. The common-law right to privacy was first argued by Samuel D. Warren and Justice Louis D. Brandeis in 1890 in “The Right to Privacy,” reprinted in Schoeman, Ferdinand D., ed., Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy: An Anthology (Cambridge, Eng., 1984), 75–103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. See Philippe Ariés, who charted, alongside changes in the relations between a particular and the state, the history of a change of sociabilities, from anonymous commerce in a public setting to the restricted but more personalized interaction within the family. Philippe Ariés, “Pour une histoire de la vie privée,” in Ariés and Duby, eds., Histoire de la vie privée, 3: 16–17.

14. Raeff, Marc, Understanding Imperial Russia: State and Society in the Old Regime (New York, 1984), 41–87 Google Scholar. For a brief survey of the destiny of privacy in Russian history and culture, see Boym, Svetlana, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 73–81.Google Scholar

15. On the philosophy behind patriarchy and on the pervasiveness of this notion, even among Enlightened writers such as Nikolai Novikov and N. M. Karamzin, see Baehr, Stephen Lessing, The Paradise Myth in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Stanford, 1991), 124–28.Google Scholar

16. Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Burger, Thomas (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 28–30.Google Scholar

17. See Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia, 43–47, and Pipes, Richard, Russia under the Old Regime (New York, 1974), 180–83.Google Scholar

18. “Catherine's Charter to the Nobility, 1785,” in Cracraft, James, ed., Major Problems in the History of Imperial Russia (Lexington, 1994), 205–12.Google Scholar

19. Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia, 97.

20. Baehr makes it clear that patriarchal conventions remained valid even under female rulers. Baehr, Paradise Myth in Eighteenth-Century Russia, 124.

21. Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, 180.

22. Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia, 98. See also Wirtschafter, Elise Kimerling, Social Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, 1997), 29–30 Google Scholar. Wirtschafter emphasizes the ambiguity of the nobility's rights and privileges.

23. Elise Wirtschafter discusses the interaction between legal framework, societal self-definition, and individual self-fashioning in nineteenth-century Russia in Structures of Society: Imperial Russia's “People of Various Ranks” (DeKalb, 1994), 18–37, 118–25. She emphasizes the importance of culture, rather than legal status or economic condition, in the construction of social identity.

24. Fonvizin, D. I., Nedorosl', in Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow and Leningrad, 1959), 172.Google Scholar

25. Irina Reyfman stuthed the spread of the duel in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century as the nobility's response to the authorities’ systematic violations of their personal rights and dignity. The duel was the only recourse a nobleman had to restore his good name and his personal rights, which the state had failed to protect. The duel took on this political and social function despite the nobility's awareness of its intrinsic irrationality and inefficiency, as an institution that gives any slanderer and scandal-mongerer the opportunity to provoke a respectable person into a potentially lethal duel. In fact, Catherine had banned duels because of their threat to individual rights, rather than on political grounds. Reyfman, Irina, “The Emergence of the Duel in Russia,” Russian Review 54, no. 1 (1995): 26–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26. Lotman, Iu. M., “Poetika bytovogo povedeniia v russkoi kul'ture XVIII veka,” Izbrannye stat'i (Tallinn, 1992), 1: 251–52Google Scholar, and Lotman, Iu. M., “Teatr i teatral'nost' v stroe kul'tury nachala XIX veka,” Izbrannye stat'i, 1: 269–86Google Scholar. For a discussion of theatricality and the ideology of “talk” at the beginning of the nineteenth century, see also Todd, William, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 10–44.Google Scholar

27. See Todd, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin, 18–25, on language, taste, and fashion as exclusionary mechanisms.

28. Elias, Norbert, La société de cour (Paris, 1985), 29 Google Scholar. The role of the family as a unit of social representation, rather than a sphere of intimacy, is another reason why the concept of privacy developed by Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere fails to be applicable to aristocratic and noble culture.

29. Karamzin, N. M., Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika (Leningrad, 1984), 365 Google Scholar. Feminists have criticized the private/public distinction as a way to inscribe and perpetuate gender inequalities. See Cohen, Jean L., “Rethinking Privacy: The Abortion Controversy,” in Weintraub, and Kumar, , eds., Public and Private in Thought and Practice, 133–65Google Scholar. Evidendy Karamzin's assigning women to the private sphere, at the same time as he argues for its importance, is a case in point. For a recent narratological study of Karamzin's fiction, see Hammarberg, Gitta, From the Idyll to the Novel: Karamzin's Sentimentalist Prose (Cambridge, Eng., 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Iurii Lotman offered an important and stimulating, if speculative, discussion of Karamzin's intellectual evolution in Sotvorenie Karamzina (Moscow, 1987).

30. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, 366.

31. Ibid., 274, 267, and 298, respectively.

32. Ibid., 380–81.

33. Ibid., 381.

34. See, for example, Shalikov, P. I., Drugoe puteshestvie v Malorossiiu (Moscow, 1804), 79 and 85Google Scholar, or Dolgorukii, I. M., Slavny bubny za gorami ili puteshestvie moe koe-kuda 1810 goda (Moscow, 1870), 87 and 175.Google Scholar

35. Makarov, P. I., Pis'ma iz Londona (1803–4)Google Scholar, in Korovin, V. I., ed., Landshaft moego voobrazheniia (Moscow, 1990), 501.Google Scholar

36. Ibid., 509.

37. Ibid., 501.

38. Ibid., 513–14.

39. Ibid., 514.

40. Ibid., 510.

41. Ibid., 501.

42. N. I. Grech, Sochineniia Nikolaia Grecha, vol. 2, Poezdka vo Frantsiiu, Germaniiu i Shveitsariiu v 1817 godu (St. Petersburg, 1855), 334–35.

43. Grech echoes the perception of French moralists of the day that the café leads to the breakdown of the family. In fact, however, as a recent study has demonstrated, Parisian working-class café culture strengthened rather tiian weakened the family, providing a space of conviviality that the family could inhabit. Indeed, the evidence shows that in contrast to eighteenth-century forms of public sociability, the working class in the nineteenth century asserted and obtained a right to privacy in public, so that it could discuss familial affairs in a café without fear of meddling from other customers. In an era of housing shortage, the café facilitated private life, rather than destroying it. See Scott Haine, W., The World of the Paris Café: Sociability among the French Working Class, 1789–1914 (Baltimore, 1996), 33–58 Google Scholar. Grech is also blind to the political function of cafés, which facilitated the development of class consciousness and the recourse to political action; see Haine, World of the Paris Café, 207–33.

44. Ariés, Philippe, “The Family and the City in the Old World and the New,” in Tufte, Virginia and Myerhoff, Barbara, eds., Changing Images of the Family (New Haven, 1979), 29–41 Google Scholar. See also Kumar, Krishan, “Home: The Promise and Predicament of Private Life at the End of the Twentieth Century,” in Weintraub, and Kumar, , eds., Public and Private in Thought and Practice, 204—36.Google Scholar

45. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, 255–56.

46. Ibid., 337.

47. Shalikov, P. I., Puteshestvie v Malorossiiu (Moscow, 1803), 1: 100.Google Scholar

48. Shalikov, Drugoe puteshestvie v Malorossiiu, 244–45.

49. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, 165.

50. Karamzin, N. M., “Mysli ob uedinenii,” Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Leningrad, 1984), 2: 120–23.Google Scholar

51. Batiushkov, K. N., “Progulka po Moskve,” Sochineniia (Moscow, 1989), 1: 294.Google Scholar

52. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, 102.

53. Ibid., 366.

54. Ibid., 105.

55. Grech, Sochineniia Nikolaia Grecha, 2: 362–64.

56. Radishchev, A. N., Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu; Vol'nost', ed. Zapadov, V. A. (St. Petersburg, 1992), 47.Google Scholar

57. Radishchev, A. N., “Dnevnik odnoi nedeli,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow and Leningrad, 1938), 1: 143.Google Scholar

58. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, 66.

59. Ibid., 187.

60. Ibid., 367.

61. On friendship as the private relationship par excellence, see Silver, “Two Different Sorts of Commerce, '” 46.

62. Lubianovskii, F. P., Puteshestvie po Saksonii, Avstrii i Italii (St. Petersburg, 1805), 1: 34.Google Scholar

63. Iakovlev, P. L., Chuvstvitel'noe puteshestvie po Nevskomu Prospektu (1820; reprint, Moscow, 1838), 422.Google Scholar

64. Shalikov, Puteshestvie v Malorossiiu, 32.

65. Radishchev, Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu, 63.

66. Ibid., 111.

67. Schönle, “Authenticity and Fiction,” 58–60.

68. Radishchev, Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu, 41.

69. For an exposé of the Slavophiles’ philosophy, see Walicki, Andrzej, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought (Oxford, 1975)Google Scholar. The Slavophiles’ views on the peasant commune are summarized by Khomiakov, A. S. in his “O sel'skoi obshchine: Otvetnoe pis'mo priiateliu,” Sochineniia A. S. Khomiakova (Moscow, 1900), 3: 459–68.Google Scholar

70. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, 119–20.

71. Ibid., 208–9.

72. Radishchev, Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu, 51–53.

73. Ibid., 51–52.

74. Long, A. A., Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics, 2d ed. (Berkeley, 1986), 179–204. Google Scholar

75. See ibid., 164, on the attempts of stoicism to counter the critique that its determinism leaves no room for human freedom. See also Foucault, who describes the antique sources of a kind of cultivation of the self that does not lead to individualism or to an affirmation of private life. Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, The Care of the Self (New York, 1986), 41–68.Google Scholar

76. Lotman attributes this desire to visualize eminent literary figures to the Russian religious respect for the artistic Word, which required those uttering the Word to be held accountable for translating it into their everyday existence. Lotman, Sotvorenie Karamzina, 59–61.

77. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, 72.

78. Ibid., 173.

79. Ibid., 21.

80. Ibid., 74.

81. Ibid., 75.

82. See the anonymous “Moia progulka” in Ippokrena, 1799, no. 6: 545–49.

83. V. F. Malinovskii (?), “Rossiianin v Anglii,” Priiatnoe i poleznoe preprovozhdenie vremeni, 1796, no. 12: 366.

84. On changes in reading behavior—from public to private and loud to silent—in eighteenth-century Germany, see Schön, Erich, Der Verlust der Sinnlichkeit oder die Verwandlungen des Lesers: Mentalitätswandel um 1800 (Stuttgart, 1987)Google Scholar. See also Darnton's, Robert “Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity,” in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984), 215–56Google Scholar. Darnton seeks to capture a new quality of reading, inspired by Rousseau, in which the readers strenuously attempt to link their readings with their private lives, deriving practical and moral guidance from involvement with books. See the following excerpt from a German manual on reading quoted by Darnton: “We must relate everything we read to our ‘I, ’ reflect on everything from our personal point of view, and never lose sight of the consideration that study makes us freer and more independent, and that it should help us find an oulet for the expression of our heart and mind” (250–51).

85. Gladkova, M., 15-ti dnevnoe puteshestvie 15-ti letneiu, pisannoe v ugozhdenie roditeliu i posviashchaemoe 15-ti letnemu drugu (St. Petersburg, 1810), 6 Google Scholar. In the same line, see Lubianovskii's introduction to his four-volume travelogue: “I am not an author, but this thought that I am not an author already encourages me to come out onto the stage with my trifles, written not in an author-like fashion, but solely to entertain myself.” Lubianovskii, Puteshestvie po Saksonii, Avstrii i Italii, 1: 5.

86. A. A. Bestuzhev, Poezdka v Revel’ (1821), in Sobranie sochinenii (St. Petersburg, 1838), 6: 99–100.

87. Gladkova, 15-ti dnevnoe puteshestvie, 39.

88. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, 7.

89. Gladkova, 15-ti dnevnoe puteshestvie, 8, 21, 28, 41.

90. Izmailov, V. V., Puteshestvie v poludennuiu Rossiiu, 2d ed. (Moscow, 1805), 1: 8, 92.Google Scholar

91. Shalikov, Drugoe puteshestvie v Malorossiiu, 159.

92. See, for example, Brusilov, N. P., Moe puteshestvie ili prikliuchenie odnogo dnia (St. Petersburg, 1803), 40.Google Scholar

93. “Zamechaniia o neschastiiakh, vozbuzhdaiushchikh priiatnye chuvstvovaniia,” Ippokrena, 1799, no. 1: 374.

94. For a semiotic analysis of the high incidence of pretenders in Russia, see Uspenskii, B. A., “Tsar’ i samozvanets: Samozvanchestvo v Rossii kak kul'turno-istoricheskii fenomen,” Izbrannye trudy (Moscow, 1996), 1: 142–83.Google Scholar