Russian #

The reason Russia feels so alien to most Westerners is that it has never been Latin (and was never disciplined by either the Reformation or the Counter-Reformation).

The reason it feels so threatening is that its alienness is less immediately apparent than that of the other “East” (Near, Middle, or Far), while looming much larger because of its size, proximity, and imperial expansion. And of course the less coherent and self-confident “the West” is, the more it needs an outside threat.

It was Peter the Great who opened Russia’s window to the world by going on long tour to be educated in Western ways. He and his large entourage brought back new ideas in industry and ship building. Catherine the Great furthered the cause by encouraging the aristocracy to study abroad - mostly in Paris. French became the language of the court as in most European ones.

French thinkers, like , Michel de Montaigne, B: 1534, who questioned everything, urged people to be comfortable with uncertainty. In an age demanding dogmatic certainty about salvation, politics, morality, Montaigne recommended doubt. Deeply disturbed by the savage brutality of the religious wars, he kept neutral, but lost his faith in all religions.

Rousseau (1712 - 1778) argues that the progression of the sciences and arts has caused the corruption of virtue and morality. His second, work, was The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. The central claim is that human beings are basically good by nature, but were corrupted by the complex historical events that resulted in present day civil society.

Rousseau’s praise of the natural state of man and his major work The Social Contract: published in 1762 caused great controversy in France and were immediately banned by Paris authorities. Rousseau fled France and settled in Switzerland.

The social base of Western liberalism, a commercial middle class, was almost entirely lacking in nineteenth-century Russia. Liberalism’s appeal there was not economic but intellectual, and its proponents were not businessmen or industrialists but enlightened noblemen, professionals, and academicians.

The first Russian authors began to appear after 1800, with Pushkin the most popular.

Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, #

1799, - 1837, (aged 37)

Widely revered as the founder of Russian literature, in 1820, at the age of twenty, he was banished from St. Petersburg for writing anti-authoritarian verses (notably “Ode to Liberty,” which was later found among the possessions of the Decembrist rebels). Pushkin was banished from St. Petersburg in May 1820 to a remote southern province. Sent first to Yekaterinoslav (now Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine), and later to Crimea.

The collapse of the rising had been a grievous experience for Pushkin, whose heart was wholly with the “guilty” Decembrists, five of whom had been executed, while others were exiled to forced labour in Siberia

In 1826, he was allowed to return to Moscow—with Tsar Nicholas I as his personal censor. He eventually went back to St. Petersburg, where he died, at the age of thirty-seven, after an eminently avoidable duel.

His serially published “Eugene Onegin,” often considered the first great Russian novel, starting in the eighteen-twenties, at a time when much of Russian aristocratic life was conducted in French.

Boris Godunov dramatises the succession after the death of Ivan the Terrible, who is presented as the murderer of Ivan’s little son, Dmitri. The development of the action on two planes, one political and historical, the other psychological, is masterly and is set against a background of turbulent events and ruthless ambitions.

The play owes much to Pushkin’s reading of early Russian annals and chronicles, as well as to Shakespeare, who, as Pushkin said, was his master in bold, free treatment of character, simplicity, and truth to nature.