Chapter IV

"I AGREE THAT YOU ARE OBTUSE . . . ." SUCCESS ON THE HIGHEST INTELLECTUAL AND SOCIAL LEVELS PUSHKIN, SECRET SOCIETIES, THE TEMPERING EDGE OF INCREASING REACTION

Tsarskoe Selo offered Chaadaev a change of pace from the busy social life of the imperial capital. It was a world by itself, one grand and elegant, but still one limited to the official life of the palace and the daily military routine of the hussars' barracks. However, Petr's time afforded him the considerable pleasures of reflection amid the beauty of the spacious lawn bordering the east side of the huge, three hundred-yard-long palace. If he tired of the lawn or the palace, he could enjoy the delicate grace of the Cameron gallery, the calm of the Turkish pavilion with its small lake, and the forests of pine and birch which surrounded the palace. Also, the presence at Tsarskoe Selo of N. M. Karamzin offered Chaadaev the intellectual stimulation of one of the finest minds of the Aleksandrian epoch.

Petr often visited Karamzin, who at this time came to Tsarskoe Selo every summer and stayed in a house provided by the Tsar. It was at Karamzin's that, in May or June of 1816, he first met the young poet from the Lycee, Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin. Before Chaadaev came to Tsarskoe Selo, Aleksandr Griboedov, his friend from his years at Moscow University, had told him about the poems written by this young student on the occasion of Alexander's return to Russia in 1815, and it is probable that Petr intended to seek Pushkin out. In the summer of 1815, Karamzin was nearing the completion of the first eight volumes of his History of the Russian State, and it is likely that the evenings which Chaadaev and Pushkin spent with the historian included wide ranging discussions of Russia's past and the development of its history.

Six years older than his sixteen year-old curly-headed friend, Chaadaev was far more sophisticated than the rowdy students of the Lycee who had been Pushkin's companions during his first years of study.

Sportive, ardent and greedy for enjoyment, Pushkin undoubtedly felt for the hussar an attraction of a kind other than that offered by the banquets which served as an indispensable part of the activities of every such circle of . . . youth. It is known that Pushkin attended them quite zealously. But this did not keep him from feeling a special sympathy for a person of another sphere--from becoming a friend of Chaadaev, though he found that he possessed neither gay songs . . . nor a dissolute character. Pushkin, having given in to the will of his ardent youth, having paid so much tribute to the understandable enthusiasm of his passionate nature, felt the demand to drive his spirit to the peaceful refuge where all conversation was of spiritual and intellectual life. He continually visited Chaadaev and found pleasure in his enlightened conversation . . . . Chaadaev always studied and he often studied together with his young friend.

Zhikharev concluded that the essence of the friendship between Pushkin and Chaadaev consisted simply "in the contact of two exceptional minds." Pushkin himself later recalled that when he was with Petr Kaverin they went for a stroll, but when he was with Chaadaev they read and talked. Trying to define his feelings for Chaadaev, he composed a brief quatrain:

In this brief portrait Pushkin betrayed the deep impression made on him by Chaadaev's social and intellectual brilliance. While a student at the Lycée, Pushkin had been involved in several adolescent escapades. Chaadaev who, according to Pushkin's future close friend, Prince Petr Andreevich Viazemskii, was "not at all a reveler" helped, at least temporarily, to exert a stabilizing influence on his new friend.

During the year that he spent at Tsarskoe Selo, Petr's military career continued to progress and on July 15, 1816, he was promoted to lieutenant. He also maintained his active participation in freemasonry. His lodge, the United Friends, belonged to the Grand Provincial Lodge--one of the two "mother lodges" of which F. F. Vigel' had spoken.

In December 1816 a rift began to appear among the United Friends: some wanted to remain subordinate to the Grand Provincial Lodge which operated under the influence of mysticism, others wanted to declare their allegiance to the Grand Lodge Astrei which followed humanitarian and rationalist ideals. The fraction loyal to the latter won out and on February 28, 1817, the United Friends joined the Grand Lodge Astrei. The change left some of the members unhappy and at least one, the future Decembrist P. I. Pestel', left the lodge. The remaining United Friends apparently felt that their Masonic activities needed a new identity and on March 18, 1817 they formed a new lodge, the Friends of the North. For his part, Pestel' claimed that he joined the Lodge of the Three Virtues "because there they used the Russian language, whereas in the first [the United Friends] they used French." The membership of Pestel's new lodge comprised, among others: Nikita Murav'ev, Matvei and Sergei Murav'ev-Apostol, Prince Sergei Trubetskoi, and Ivan Iakushkin-- all friends of Chaadaev and all future Decembrists. However, Petr chose to go his own way and remained a member of a lodge that operated by the Swedish system and used only the French language. This was again indicative of that part of his character which valued institutional status (for example "the full-dress coat of the hussars") over personal friendships. It is also the first sign of an attachment to the French language that this brilliant intellect, who later so strongly lamented the lack of things that were truly Russian, would never outgrow.

Finally, according to his cousin Ivan Dmitrievich Shcherbatov, during his stay at Tsarskoe Selo, Chaadaev became acquainted with Colonel Pavel Khristoforovich Grabbe. Iakushkin recalled in his memoirs that when they first met, Grabbe was no liberal, having in his possession a short hussar's raincoat and a jacket with fur trimming which he intended to give to Count Arakcheev. It was only through a discussion of the ancient historians, Plutarch, Titus Livy, Tacitus, and Cicero that the two men found any common ground. This was also very likely the mutual interest which Grabbe and Chaadaev shared.

With the beginning of the summer of 1817 both Pushkin and Chaadaev temporarily went their own ways. The young poet's career at the Lycée ended with the graduation exercises held on June 9, 1817. After a brief visit to his father's estate of Mikhailovskoe, he returned to Petersburg and began government service as a functionary in the College of Foreign Affairs. Meanwhile, by the beginning of the summer, Alexander I had decided to make his first visit to Moscow since Napoleon's occupation of the city in 1812. The guards regiments accompanied the court, leaving St. Petersburg on August 5. On August 14 the cavalry set out for the old capital, and, according to Longinov, Chaadaev accompanied the Akhtyrskii Hussars.

As the autumn of 1817 turned to winter, Chaadaev presumably had the opportunity to renew old friendships in Moscow. It is possible that he may have seen Dmitrii Obleukhov for the first time since 1811. However, no information about his specific activities has survived. During the time when many of his friends were involved in the transformation of the Union of Salvation into the Union of Welfare, Chaadaev disappeared from their memoirs, their diaries, and their correspondence. The obvious explanation is that Petr was not involved in their activities. It is possible that he passed much of his time Moscow in reading and he may also have spent some time at Alekseevskoe, the estate of his aunt, Princess Shcherbatova.

It is also possible that Petr Iakovlevich occupied many hours in politicking among certain important persons in the Court and the army in the hope of gaining a promotion to the position of aide-de-camp to Prince Ilarion Vasil'evich Vasil'chikov, the Commander of the Guards Corps. At any rate, he was given the promotion on December 11, 1817 and set out for St. Petersburg shortly before Christmas to begin his new duties. This appointment and Chaadaev's decision to accept it, whether or not he had actively sought it out, marked an important turning point in his life. It effectively removed him from the ranks of his fellow officers and elevated him to the level of assistant to one of the two or three most important generals in the Russian army. He may have felt at the time that it offered the prestige of another glittering social success, but its legacy was to be a bitter one. For it removed him from the volatile day-to-day social and political activities of his former friends who were active in the growth and development of what came to be known as the Decembrist movement. Most of these men became, as the months passed, no more than mere acquaintances. The promotion set him apart from the day-to-day development of his generation. As a result this move, Petr completed the process of becoming a lonely, introverted intellectual which he had begun, three years before, when he had transferred out of the Semenovskii regiment after the battle of Lützen.

New Developments in Literary Criticism

Between the time of Petr's return to St. Petersburg and his transfer to Tsarskoe Selo, he had gradually become aware of some major developments in Russian intellectual life which had begun while he was a student at the University of Moscow, but which had not taken on significant form until the time of the Russian victory over Napoleon. In short, as he looked back to the beginning of his university studies, Chaadaev realized that Russian intellectual life had moved forward at a rapid pace. While he had not been directly involved in these developments, the ideas which resulted from them would eventually influence his perception of Russian society and culture.

For example, in the realm of literature and criticism, several developments, which came to be important elements of the intellectual environment from which Petr created his critique of Russian culture, had emerged. The first of these was expressed in a study by Ivan Martynovich Born, secretary to the Grand Duchess Ekaterina Pavlovna and the tutor of her children. In his Short Guide to Russian Letters, published in St. Petersburg in 1808, he took a position against Shishkov's literary conservatism, declaring that the "evolution of a [nation's] language and literature were necessary conditions for the development of [its] enlightenment." Expressing this idea, Born went on to argue against the servile imitation of foreign things, that is, against the extremes of Karamzinism. Or, as Born himself asserted: "In the nineteenth century, we can no longer speak and write as our ancestors did, living in complete separation from contact with other Europeans; but we also need not be servile and imitate that which is foreign when we often have something far better." This was not the first time a Russian intellectual had called on his peers to cease their imitation of foreign customs or foreign art. However, it was one of the first of what would become a rapidly increasing number of warnings against imitation in Russian literature. As such, it marked the beginning of an awareness of the lack of an original, national Russian literature, a problem that would be confronted again by Wilhelm Kiukhel'beker in 1817, by P. A. Viazemskii in 1822 and by several other critics before Chaadaev transferred its orientation, by way of Herder's philosophy, to question the existence of a genuinely Russian historical experience.

As Russia's relations with Napoleon became increasingly strained, the followers of Shishkov became even more insistent in their demands for the development of a non-imitative Russian literature. Finally, to strengthen further his position, Shishkov formed a society of his followers which met for the first time on March 14, 1811 and called itself the Symposium of the Lovers of the Russian Word (Beseda liubitelei russkogo slova). The Beseda came to attack vigorously the imitation of French literature and, in this respect, carried on the outlook of which I. M. Born had been a principal formulator. In his Conversations about Letters, Shishkov continued to develop this outlook. He asserted: "We threw ourselves upon the novelties of foreign languages and in translating from them began to adhere to their qualities . . . . These needless imitations lead us away from special beauties of our language and, hindering its movement, are harmful to our literature."

Thus, at the time that Chaadaev entered the Semenovskii regiment, Shishkov had begun "the struggle for a national poetry and a language of the people . . . . His activity . . . was subsequently developed by Katenin, Kiukhel'beker and Griboedov. Despite the [conservative] foundation of Shishkov's literary and linguistic ideas, his thought played a serious role in the formulation of the concepts of nationality (narodnost' of these future Decembrists." The exchanges between Shishkov and his opponents continued until the outbreak of the war against Napoleon when from considerations of patriotism, the followers of Karamzin, who nearly all thought some degree of French influence necessary for the nourishment of Russian letters, fell silent.

The insistence that Russian authors stop looking abroad for their themes, stories, and styles and begin to develop their works from the mainstream of Russian national experience gained a new impetus from the pride and patriotism created by the recent victories over Napoleon. In the summer of 1813, while Chaadaev's regiment was encamped in the Silesian village of Lang Bilau, a new Moscow periodical, Son of the Fatherland (Syn otechestva) began to publish a series of "Letters from Moscow to Nizhnii Novgorod" ("Pis'ma iz Moskvy v Nizhnii Novgorod") by Ivan Matveevich Murav'ev-Apostol, a high-ranking official of the government service and the father of Chaadaev's friend Matvei Ivanovich Murav'ev-Apostol. Like Born and Shishkov, I. M. Murav'ev-Apostol called for the development of originality (samobytnost') in Russian literature and demanded that it be liberated from slavish susceptibility to French tastes. In addition, he showed how this concern over a national literature had the potential to be expanded into a critique of a national culture such as Chaadaev would produce with his First Philosophical Letter. Expressing in more detail the brief statement that the author of the 1804 review in the Patriot had borrowed from Herder, Murav'ev-Apostol told his readers: ". . . if you want to have a more basic understanding of the characteristics, the advantages, and the shortcomings of nations, it is best ascertained in their letters (pis'menakh)."

But what was the true state of Russian letters, of the cultural, social, and moral life of the nation that had played the decisive role in restoring order to the Europe which had been so severely shaken by Napoleon? It was a state bordering on despair. In much of Russian literary criticism from the post Napoleonic era there can be felt a sense of longing for some undefined goal suspended in a void, a feeling of despair at being unable to identify with a unique or original Russian character, a feeling of anger that Russia, in adopting the traditions of others, had developed no vital traditions of its own. Such feelings Chaadaev would eventually gather into an overwhelming, concentrated cry of anguish.

One man who, at this time, did succeed in creating a successful analysis of some of the shortcomings of Russian literature was the writer-translator, Nikolai Ivanovich Gnedich. While Chaadaev was returning to Petersburg with the last units of the Russian army, Gnedich, in St. Petersburg on November 2, 1814, delivered an address entitled: "A Discussion of the Causes Slowing the Development of Our Literature." In his speech, given at the opening of the new Public Library, Gnedich asserted that the "few successes" of Russian literature "must be attributed neither to the small number of our gifted writers nor to the weaknesses of their nature," but rather to the fact that "we make poor use of their gifts." Pointing out what he believed to be the misdirected emphasis of Russian education, he called for renewed study of the authors of ancient Greece.

If the poetry and eloquence of the ancients had served as models for our literature, even if during the past century we had not . . . based our epics on the meager structure of French poetry, had not made our theater by the sole presentation of love adventures, had not allowed foreigners to forestall us with their deep knowledge and studies of our history, had not allowed aliens to depict before us our great Tsars and to describe the deeds of our heroes; if we had not allowed them to steal this honor, our Homers and Pindars, Sophocleses and Thucydideses with the superlative force of our words and the fineness of their creations would have enraptured all the enlightened peoples, and the glory of the Russian language would already have been carried about the universe like the thunder of Russian arms.

If Russian authors had failed to be creative because they were tempted to imitate foreign styles, Gnedich found yet another problem which hindered their success: "the secret of mastering a language." Although he was a follower of Shishkov in that he opposed the wholesale introduction of Gallicisms into the Russian tongue, he realized the weakness of Russian as a literary language. But he went on to assert that experience, with a wider range of reading and the consequent development of a more refined taste, were helping to strengthen the Russian language. However, there was another problem which hindered progress in this direction: educated society did not speak Russian and persisted instead in trying to prove that there was one nation in the world "in which French could be spoken as though by the French, and that that nation was Russia!" Finally, Gnedich concluded with the warning that there could be no respect for the writer where there was no respect for language. As time passed, Gnedich found his views on the Russian language accepted by most critics. It is a singular irony that Chaadaev who, with respect to Russian culture and history, was one of the most outstanding intellects of the post-Napoleonic era, was an exception to this trend in that he could rarely bring himself to write in Russian.

By early 1815 when Chaadaev arrived in St. Petersburg the debate on the old and the new style was about to die out, but a few months later it ignited again by an unexpected spark. The resulting controversy produced a new literary society that very nearly was transformed into a group motivated solely by social and political aims. The source of the controversy was the premiere of a play: A Lesson to Coquettes, or Lipetsk Spa (Urok koketam. ili Lipetskie vody) by A. A. Shakhovskoi. In 1805 Shakhovskoi had satirized the works of Karamzin in his play The New Sterne (Novyi Stern). His new play was a parody of the life and works of Karamzin's friend, Vasilli Andreevich Zhukovskii. The resentment of the friends of both men led to a gathering in October 1815, at the St. Petersburg home of Sergei Semenovich Uvarov, Chairman of the St. Petersburg School District and a frequent contributor to the newspaper Conservateur impartial. This gathering resulted in the formation of a group that called itself the Arzamas Society and intended to counteract the activity of the Shishkovites.

Many years later, Uvarov described the society's activities:

Arzamas had no definite form. It was a society of young people (some of whom later attained the highest positions of state service) united by a lively feeling of love for their native language, literature, and history, and gathered around Karamzin whom they accepted as their guide and leader. The direction of the society, or better to say, of these friendly conversations was primarily critical. The persons who formed the society were occupied: with the strict examination of literary works, with applying to their native language and literature all the sources of ancient and foreign literature and with seeking principles which would serve as the strong foundation for an independent theory of language.

In the first months of their activity, the members of Arzamas were deeply involved in their literary quarrels and played no significant role in the development of a critique of Russian culture. However, the society was finally moved in a new direction by the future Decembrists, Mikhail Orlov, Nikolai Turgenev, and Nikita Murav'ev, who joined it in 1817. On becoming a member of Arzamas, Orlov made a serious speech to the society.

Having accepted me as a member in the Arzamas Society, you think perhaps that you will find me a serious collaborator in its affairs. But . . . by what services to literature might I have attracted your attention? Where are the books I have published? Where are my works? Where are the fruits of my labor? . . . I could, of course, spread even further this description of my negative gifts and qualities, but speaking about myself, I fear that you, honored friends, are accustomed to enjoying yourselves and not to being bored by the compositions of your fellow members . . . . I, myself, feel that a comic style is not suitable for my inclinations and even the fact that I decided to draw up this clumsy presentation was solely in order not to contravene the laws which you have established . . . . And so joyfully I return to a modest silence awaiting that happy day when by your general agreement you will define an aim for our society that is truly worthy of your gifts and warm love for the Russian nation. Then . . . there will begin to glide from the free shores of Arzamas, proudly carrying from region to region, from country to country not light entertaining vessels, but ships filled with the abundant fruits of your wisdom and the products of a moral art. Then there will . . . begin for Arzamas that glorious age when the true freethinking of a powerful hand will cast the dark prism of prejudices beyond the borders of Europe.

This call to some kind of undefined social action directly reflected the influence of the goals of the Union of Salvation and its successor, the Union of Welfare. Orlov and Turgenev suggested that the aim of Arzamas should take the form of publishing a journal. However, the other members of the society were never able to agree on turning these possibilities into action. By early 1818, while Chaadaev remained intent only on furthering his military and social career, many of the society's most prominent members had left St. Petersburg and by the summer of that year Arzamas had ceased operation.

A Generation Gap

To understand the motivation behind the efforts of Orlov and Turgenev to reshape Arzamas, it is necessary to examine the increasing resentment of the policies of the Tsar which led Chaadaev's friends to active participation in the formation of secret societies. Petr's closest friend Ivan Iakushkin was actively involved in the events which led in 1816 to the founding of the first of the secret societies of the Decembrist movement. He later recalled that

At that time, Sergei Trubetskoi, Matvei, and Sergei Murav'ev and I lived in the barracks and very often visited with the three brothers Murav'ev: Aleksandr, Mikhail, and Nikolai. Nikita Murav'ev was also often seen with us. In these visits our conversations usually revolved about the situation in Russia. Here we discussed the principal evils of our society: the obdurateness of the people, the conditions of serfdom, the cruel treatment of the soldier whose service for the period of twenty-five years was almost penal servitude, general extortion, robbery and finally, clear disrespect to people in general. What was called higher educated society for the most part consisted then of old men for whom being concerned by some of the questions with which we were occupied would have seemed like a terrible crime.

In this last statement, Iakushkin pointed out a fundamental fact of the time: the gap that separated the elder leaders of the Russian state from the young officers of the Russian army. After the social upheavals resulting from Napoleon's drive for supremacy in Europe, these high government officials wanted only to obtain social stability at any price. But the eyes of the young officers of the Russian army had been opened to the social injustices of their own country when they had compared their way of life to that of the nations of Europe. They refused the invitation of their fathers to look with callous indifference on the continued maintenance of poverty and ignorance among the masses of the Russian people.

The abortive coup of December 14, 1825 would become the culmination of the rising discontent of these young officers. The youth of the dissidents is strikingly shown by the Russian government's own statistics regarding those arrested for suspected complicity in the events of December 14. Five hundred and sixty-eight men were arrested and investigated in the aftermath of the coup. About eighty percent of these were freed, five men were executed and the remainder sent into exile. The government report resulting from the investigation gives the ages of 284 men, half of those arrested. There were:

The median age of the suspected "criminals" in 1825 was 28; in 1816 these "average" Decembrists were only 19. Of course, it would be misleading to carry this median all the way back to 1816, for this would not take into consideration those youths who joined the movement after 1817 and would imply that the age of the youngest was well below the threshold of political maturity. However, what such a hypothetical median does emphasize is that approximately half of those later to be arrested were, in 1816, between eighteen and twenty-five years old. Chaadaev, age 22 in 1816, was to be among them. Ivan Iakushkin, Sergei Murav'ev-Apostol, and Nikita Murav'ev were twenty. Matvei Murav'ev-Apostol was twenty-three and Sergei Trubetskoi was twenty-six. In the years which followed, the decisions made by Alexander and his intimate advisors in the areas of education, censorship of the press, treatment of the serfs, and operation of the military, to mention only a few, were in general willingly carried out by the fathers of these young officers. As the months passed and turned into years, the elder statesmen of Russia continued an increasingly conservative, repressive rule, oblivious to the growing alienation of their children.

Iakushkin later recalled how, in one of the meetings which occurred in 1816, the decision to form a secret society was made.

On one occasion Trubetskoi and I were with Matvei and Sergei Murav'ev; Aleksandr and Nikita Murav'ev came to them with the suggestion to establish a secret society, the aim of which, in the words of Aleksandr, should be construed in opposition to the Germans who had found themselves in Russian service. I knew that Aleksandr and his brother were enemies of every "Kraut" [nemchizna] and said to him that I would in no way agree to enter into a conspiracy against Germans but that if there existed a secret society, the members of which were given the duty to labor with all their strength for the good of Russia, then I would willingly enter such a society. Matvei and Sergei Murav'ev said almost the same things as I to the suggestion of Aleksandr. After some debate Aleksandr admitted that the suggestion to establish a society against the Germans was only a trial proposal and that he himself, Nikita Murav'ev and Sergei Trubetskoi had agreed even earlier to establish a society, the aim of which was in the widest sense the good of Russia . . . . It was agreed to compile statutes for the society and at the beginning to admit to it only members who met with the agreement of all six of us.

The society was called the Union of Salvation (Soiuz Spaseniia) and by the end of 1816 had received many new members.

The young author and critic Aleksandr Bestuzhev accurately saw 1817 as the year of most significance in the development of the Decembrist movement. It was a year of abolishing old methods and formulating new approaches. From the standpoint of the government, it saw the creation of a combined Ministry of Public Instruction and Ecclesiastical Affairs which was designed to achieve "the salvation of Russian society by means of wholesale application of Christian principles (as interpreted by the government) to the entire range of Russian intellectual life." It was a time when moves toward greatly tightened censorship were enacted and when the influence of the highly conservative Russian Bible Society began to increase. From the point of view of many young officers of the Guards and other dissidents, it was the year of transition from the Union of Salvation to the more broadly based Union of Welfare (Soiuz blagodenstviia). It witnessed the decline of the literary Arzamas Society and heralded plans for the foundation of the Green Lamp, a secret literary society with political overtones. In the words of Bestuzhev:

With 1817, everything changed. Those who saw evil and wished improvement, thanks to the mass of spies were forced to talk secretively about it--this was the beginning of secret societies. Government officials oppressed deserving officers and this irritated men's dispositions. Then the military began to ask: "Did we free Europe in order to be placed in chains ourselves? Did we grant a constitution to France so that we ourselves dare not talk about one, and did we buy with our blood, superiority among nations that we might be humiliated at home?" The . . . persecution of education forced us, in utter despair, to begin considering some important measures.

Bestuzhev presented here a very concise summation of his reaction and that of most of his friends to the changes taking place around them. The events that followed during the next decade would finally bring Chaadaev to "utter despair." But in 1817, he apparently was still more concerned with his reputation and career than with the direction of Russian society and politics. Therefore he did not become directly involved in the efforts of his friends to work "for the good of Russia" through a secret society.

The Guard Corps arrived in Moscow at the end of the summer of 1817. They remained there for nearly eleven months. The members of the Union of Salvation, virtually all of whom belonged to one of the regiments of the Guard, found themselves thrown together in new and unusually close quarters. They soon realized that they had the opportunity of doing something about the structure of their society which, as new members had joined during the previous year, had become too rigid in the opinion of many. The dissolution of the old organization was decided upon and a new, temporary Military Society under the leadership of Nikita Murav'ev and Pavel Aleksandrovich Katenin was established. At the same time, four men were selected to draft a constitution for a new society which would replace the Union of Salvation. Shortly after they had begun work on their new task, they received a copy of the constitution of the German Tugendbund which they took as the general basis for their work. The new constitution, known also as the Green Book, was completed four months later.

Superficially at least, the new constitution abandoned the idea of a secret society, for Book I, Article 4, explicitly stated that "the Union hopes for the good will of the government." However, in practice, the Union retained a secret conspiratorial aspect with two levels to its membership. The majority were treated as sympathizers with the purposes of the society. A trusted minority were received into full membership and were informed that the society had liberal political goals about which they pledged to maintain complete secrecy.

In keeping with its goal of working for the well-being of Russia all members were offered four fields, in one of which they could concentrate their activities and in which politics was noticeably absent. The fields were philanthropy, justice, national economy, and education. Philanthropy involved building and maintaining hospitals and orphanages, establishing homes for the aged and for invalids, and advocating humane treatment of serfs. In the field of justice, members were to right bribery and corruption and to pledge to report all violations of the law to the proper authorities. In the area of national economy, members were urged to fight for agricultural and commercial development and to promote the establishment of insurance companies and any other "agencies which would stimulate national prosperity."

At the end of 1817 the leaders of the Union of Welfare apparently did not judge Chaadaev's political and social views to be close enough to the goals of the society to include him in the firsthand discussion of their plans. Nevertheless, during the next two years, through several of his friends who were members of the Union, he would become aware of the goals that it had established in the fields of education and literary criticism. Furthermore, in 1819 he would join Wilhelm Kiukhel'beker and Nikolai Turgenev in discussions aimed at the founding of a journal which, in accord with the suggestions set forth in the Union of Welfare's field of education, would enlighten the public in matters of concern to its authors. Since, during its comparatively brief existence, the Union of Welfare played a considerable role in the development of criticism of Russian society, and since Chaadaev was involved in a project that was an outgrowth of its efforts, it will prove useful to examine in some detail the instructions of the Green Book regarding education and criticism.

Thus, in the field of education, the Green Book declared that members could participate in any or all of three sub fields: the propagation of moral principles, the education of youth, or the dissemination of knowledge. To propagate moral principles, members were called upon to fulfill their "family, as well as their public obligations, in a superior manner," to "disparage the vicious, scorn the unworthy and promote the virtuous in every place" to the full extent of their ability. Along with many other promises, they also pledged "to try to convince their fellow men that a virtuous citizen must always prefer the useful to the pleasant and the native to the foreign." These stipulations all shared a quality of vagueness which had the advantage of not publicizing a specific program that might become the subject of government repression and which, by their self defining nature, permitted a wider range of opinion among the Union's members.

The instructions under the second sub field, "the education of youth," were also vague and generalized, but certain clauses show that the framers of the Union's constitution wished to try to counteract the increasingly reactionary direction of the Russian Bible Society and the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs. Specifically, members were instructed to secure "participation in the administration of educational institutions in order to give the proper direction to the education of youth. Where this was not possible, members were instructed that they had "an obligation to establish schools for the education of young people, and that these institutions should be inclined toward the aims of the Union." Members were asked to point out to their friends and acquaintances that "little attention was being paid to true education." It was agreed that "the main object of education must be morality (nravstvennost')" which was formed and strengthened by adherence "to the principles of faith" or the right belief (Pravilakh very). This admonition could be understood by those who were so inclined as true faith, that is, orthodoxy. But certainly in no way did it restrict itself to the Russian Orthodox Church or even to Christianity. Rather, it seems to have been a deliberate, ambiguously-phrased term designed to appeal to a wide range of opinion, including the conservative government hierarchy; for the proposed school curriculum in the "exact sciences, history and the political sciences" would otherwise hold little attraction for this segment of Russian society.

The final sub field, the dissemination of knowledge, was the one most important for the Union of Welfare's influence on the development of literary criticism. For it was in this area that the Union declared itself to be a proponent of the liberal, civic (grazhdanskii) strain of literary criticism that was being formulated in the reviews and other writings of Chaadaev' friend, A. S. Griboedov, and also in the works of Pavel Aleksandrovich Katenin, Wilhem Karlovich Kiukhel'beker, and others. The Union wanted to be certain that Russian literature developed into a force which would "speak" to a large public and not just a narrow circle of authors. In one sense, everyone who functioned in this area of the Union's activities was to be a critic for he undertook "to explain the need for a national literature, to defend good works and to point out the defects in bad ones," as well as to "demonstrate that true eloquence does not consist in the pompous wrapping of meaningless ideas in loud words, but in the modest expression of useful elevated, and fervently experienced thoughts." Finally, these members undertook to review well-known books, and to establish "periodical publications" which would contain "discussions of various scholarly subjects, news of different discoveries, reviews of recent books, and small compositions plus poetry."

The program of the Union of Welfare was a serious attempt on the part of the leaders of Russian youth to carry forward the idealistic and liberal outlook that had been the legacy of the Napoleonic campaigns. It was also an attempt to develop a meaningful social role which could offer a sense of satisfaction and reward that was not to be found in service to the state. It attempted to take the philanthropic goals that had been common to Novikov's Masonic circle and apply them, by means of a larger group of activists, to broad areas of Russian society. In the realm of criticism, it asserted that the critic's role need no longer be merely a-supportive one designed, according to Karamzin, to point out to the reader those works which educated the sentiments. According to the criteria established by the Union's constitution, criticism was to assume a more active function. If a work possessed beauty, the critic was to point it out. However, if it fell short of expressing what he considered to be socially desirable goals, the critic was also to point out this and, within the bounds of what the censorship would allow, was to feel free to formulate his own understanding of the path that the author might have taken. Eventually the Union found its program frustrated, in part by action of the government and, in part, because of dissension within its ranks. This frustration was to be only one failure in a series of disappointments that would alienate from Russian society the leaders of the Decembrist revolt and eventually become a major source of the alienation that gave rise to the pessimistic appraisal of Russian culture expressed by Chaadaev in the First Philosophical Letter.

At the time of the formation of the Union of Welfare, there occurred changes in the application of the censorship that altered the literary and journalistic environment for the remainder of Alexander's reign. In 1811 a special committee of the police had been created and instructed to review the censorship of published books and periodicals. This was the first of a series of crippling restraints to be imposed on the freedom of the press. But it was 1817 that witnessed the most severe tightening of control as the Minister of Public Instruction and Ecclesiastical Affairs, Prince Golitsyn, instructed the censorship to refuse to pass any material discussing the government or its policies. At the same time, there was introduced what came to be known as the "plural censorship" under which, before going to the general censor, material had to be approved by the Ministry of Public Instruction and Ecclesiastical Affairs. In 1818 serfdom was added to the forbidden topic of domestic politics, and Prince Golitsyn organized a special department of his ministry which would undertake the responsibility of approving or denying requests for permission to publish new periodicals.

The effects of these new regulations on the literary and journalistic activity of the next decade were profound.

In the strengthened ties of the censor's yoke private periodicals . . . lost the right to deal with the social and political life of Russia; foreign information was curtailed. This resulted in journalists, so to speak, disappearing from the pages of their publications. For comments and judgments on topical themes, the reader had to search in learned articles on history, philosophy, political economy, geography, belles lettres and criticism. Frequently, debates on scientific or literary questions acquired a political coloring. It was no accident that in many of the leading journals and almanacs, there were opened departments of literary criticism, a genre which grew especially at this time. This criticism was called upon to educate its contemporaries not only in aesthetic feeling but in the correct way in which to view the world.

A book published at this time by Chaadaev's friend Nikolai Turgenev clearly demonstrated the rapidly growing ability of writers and critics to clothe their political and social ideas with the veils of learned theory and, by so doing, to shield their aims from the censor who seemed always to be one step behind their increasing sophistication. Turgenev's book bore the title of a learned treatise: the Theory of Taxes (Teoriia nalogov). It was a scholarly study but, as he asserted in his memoirs, it was also something more.

I pointed out . . . the moral effects produced by the study of political science and especially political economy. I tried to demonstrate that economic and financial theories as well as those of government were viable only as long as they were based on the concept of liberty. With eagerness I seized every opportunity to speak of England, of her power and her riches and to attribute these to the institutions which, of all the European countries, she alone possesses. It is thus that while expounding the theory of taxes, I allowed myself many excursions into the higher levels of politics. The problem of individual taxation gave me the chance to speak of serfdom and I did not pass up the opportunity. These excursions had in my eyes much more importance than the principal theme of my work . . . . The novelty of this subject . . . was sufficient to attract the attention of the public. This was the first work on financial theory written by a Russian in his native language, but in fact, the excursions of which I spoke about, were what led people to read the work.

Turgenev's book offered a demonstration of the increasing attraction of the role of author-critic which, as Alexander's policies grew more oppressive, eventually came to be one of the few remaining meaningful social alternatives for the youth of Chaadaev's generation. Finally, the Theory of Taxes offered an example of the extent to which the critic's subject matter had broadened since the time when Karamzin had been editor of Vestnik Evropy.

For a deeper understanding of the potential power that resulted from being virtually the only persons able to question the official view of reality, these young critics began to turn their attention to the study of Herder, August Schlegel and Madame de Staël. From Herder they gained the basic understanding of the interrelationship between the development of a nation's history and its culture and literature. Most came to accept the idea that the influence of the physical environment and that of the national culture in which a writer matured would affect the development of his creativity. They were also shown how a national literature should avoid the limitation of foreign styles and should, instead, be developed from a nation's own customs and traditions.

Russian critics found the intellectual justification of their trade in the writings of August Wilhem Schlegel, who decided that there could not be a history of art or literature, that is a history of the progression and development of a culture, without individual theories of criticism. For without some selectivity and evaluation on the part of a critical author, a history of art or literature would be only a chronicle. Schlegel saw the development of cultural history as being motivated by "all individual geniuses which were but single parts of the one great genius of mankind that could not perish and continued to regenerate itself towards the achievement of ever greater perfection." Thus the young critics of Chaadaev's generation were granted the psychological security of belonging to the "one great genius" of the European tradition which had been their inspiration and to which they hoped to have Russia make important contributions.

In 1800 Madame de Staël had completed her De la Littérature Considerée dans les Rapports avec les Institutions Sociales. This book pointed out the potential power of criticism in depicting the "influence of religion, manners and laws on literature and what the influence is of literature on religion, manners and laws." Madame de Staël considered Rousseau to be the greatest French writer because he "set everything on fire." This stirring of the feelings she saw as the primary function of literature. It should be "emotional and rhetorical but also moralistic and utilitarian." When the reader was confronted by a masterpiece of literature, virtue would "become an involuntary impulse, a movement which [would pass] into the blood." She was certain that in the future, literature would have only "eminently social and practical" effects, and declared that the writer could "save innocence, overthrow despotism and devote himself to the happiness of mankind." In other words, "literature must have a social effect. Its emotions must lead us to virtue . . . enlightenment and liberalism."

Such a role for criticism could not help but appeal to the young members of the secret societies of the post-Napoleonic era in Russia. Faced with what they considered to be a harsh and repressive government which was beginning to see conspiracy and revolution lurking everywhere, and virtually powerless to protest openly against government policies, these young activists eagerly seized hold of any theories which told them that they were not completely "disarmed" in their struggle to create a Russian environment that was conducive to the free expression and interplay of conflicting political and social opinions. However, Madame de Staël had yet another contribution to offer to the development of Russian criticism.

In her second major work, De l'Allemagne, published in 1813, she showed how literature could create "a sketch of national psychology and sociology," in short "a general characterization of the nation." Thus, she also emphasized literature's potential as a proponent of the vast growth of Russian national consciousness that had begun during the reign of Catherine the Great and had reached a climax during the Napoleonic campaigns. Many of the works of Herder, Schlegel, and Madame de Staël were to be found in Chaadaev's library and though in 1817 or 1818 he was not yet an active critic, he had almost certainly assimilated these author's ideas when he began to write the Philosophical Letters.

In 1818, N. I. Nadezhdin who eighteen years later would become Chaadaev's publisher formulated the following summary of the emerging criticism of Chaadaev's generation.

To teach people the good is the duty of the poet

He is the awe inspiring bringer of enlightenment

He is the true herald, the dread teacher of the world,

His task is to strike down and unmask vice,

To teach and guide people onto the true path.

A Christian poet is the organ of eternal truths.

In June of 1821 N. I. Gnedich would give the critic's duty an even stronger definition in the statement of his "credo":

Yes, the pen will be in the hands of the writer what the scepter is in the hands of the Tsar: firm, noble, majestic! The pen writes for posterity what is outlined in the hearts of contemporaries. For them, the author fights against the ignorance of the insolent, against the vices of the powerful and summons the strong of the earth from their silent graves to the judgment of posterity.

On December 14, 1825 the sword would be raised against the Tsar by many of Chaadaev's friends. Their attempt to change the Russian system by force ended in dismal failure. In 1828, recalling the words of Gnedich, Chaadaev would take up his pen to diagnose the ills of the society in which he lived. He would hope that at some time in the future a broader understanding of Russia's social and cultural deficiencies might clear the air and create favorable conditions for their amelioration. He would feel that, for the present, such a diagnosis would increase his understanding of Russian society and somehow might make his life in that society more tolerable.

From Literature to History to Social Action

Early in 1818 an event occurred which was unique in the history of Russian publishing. It was also one which pointed out the extent of a previously untapped reservoir of interest in Russian history. This event was the publication of the first eight volumes of Karamzin's History of the Russian State (Istoriia Gosudarstva rossiiskogo) in a fifty-five ruble edition of three thousand copies which sold out in twenty-five days. The fact that Alexander I had allowed it to be published without being submitted to censorship increased the curiosity of the public who proceeded to devour it, searching for a deeper understanding of their nation's history, while also hoping to find some portent of the direction of present-day domestic politics. Many of Chaadaev's friends did not like what they saw. A brief verse by Pushkin concisely characterized the reaction of the young liberals.

In his History, eloquence and simplicity

Prove to us without any bias

The necessity of the autocracy

And the charm of the knout.

Nikita Murav'ev offered a more detailed critique. He began by stating his understanding of the meaning and value of history. "History belongs to a people. In it they find the true depiction of their virtues and vices, the principles of their power and the causes of their well-being or their disasters." To this view, which he had borrowed from Herder, he contrasted Karamzin's outlook, which granted the possession of history not to the people but to the state.

Karamzin says: "The ordinary citizen should read history. It reconciles him with visible imperfections in the order of things . . .; it consoles him in the time of state disasters, giving witness that similar things had happened before, that even more horrible things had happened and the state was not destroyed." Of course, imperfection is an inseparable comrade of the whole world, but must history only serve to reconcile us with imperfection, must it plunge us into a moral dream of quietism? Is there not found in history a civic virtue which a national portrayal of morals is obligated to ignite? No peace but rather eternal scorn should exist between good and evil.

Murav'ev's essay is an excellent example of the kind of criticism encouraged by the statutes of the Union of Welfare. It examined an author's work and judged it not as an end in itself but rather by the social attitude or outlook that it would encourage in its readers.

As the winter of 1817-1818 turned to spring, it became apparent that a dichotomy had come to separate Alexander's domestic and foreign policies. In March the Tsar traveled to Warsaw to address the opening of the diet. In his speech he declared that the "organization existing" in Poland enabled him to grant to it "liberal institutions." Calling upon the Polish representatives to prove to Europe that "free institutions . . . are not a dangerous dream," he declared that he was able to grant Poland that which he had long been preparing for Russia, that "which it will enjoy as soon as the foundations for such a matter reach the necessary ripeness." In April, he made a similar speech before the closing session of the diet. His remarks became known as the Warsaw speeches and they quickly ignited fervent and-heated discussion on the streets and in the press of Moscow and St. Petersburg during the remainder of 1818.

The speeches had been given in French and reached St. Petersburg in a Russian translation in which the word "organization" had been translated into Russian as "education" ("obrazovanie"). This aroused the anger of many, who quickly pointed out that this was but one more insult to Russia on the part of Alexander who considered their fatherland too poorly educated to grant it a constitution. However, in the expectation of better things to come, many greeted the speeches with the greatest enthusiasm. Karamzin made the most perceptive evaluation of the situation. Troubled by the creation of expectations that would probably go unfulfilled, he wrote to his friend Ivan Ivanovich Dmitriev: "The Warsaw speeches have strongly reechoed in the hearts of the young. They see the constitution while asleep and awake. They talk, discuss and even begin to write about it in Syn otechestva . . It is both ridiculous and pitiful."

At home it seemed Alexander had become intent on the creation of a draconian military state. The resentment of the young officers of the Guards had grown to such an extent that late in 1817 Ivan Iakushkin offered to assassinate Alexander. The idea never went beyond the stage of frustrated discussion but the hatred remained.

Emperor Alexander, the protector and virtual coryphee of the liberals abroad, in Russia was not only cruel, what was even worse than this--he was a senseless despot. Trooping the colors, parades and military shows were virtually his sole occupation. He worried only about the military colonies and the construction of great roads over all of Russia and for this he spared neither the money, nor the sweat, nor the blood of his subjects.

Frustration and a muted anger were, at this time, the only weapons that Chaadaev's generation could turn against the autocracy. Nikolai Turgenev later recalled that in 1818 discussion at the secret meetings of the Union of Welfare centered not on any active conspiracies but rather on "the powerlessness of the society to undertake anything of consequence."

However, in the autumn of 1818 a new current of action arose. Certain members of the Union of Welfare and the Masonic lodge of the Select Mikhail (Izbrannyi Mikhail) formed an organization which they hoped could coexist with the government's reactionary politics and survive its inherent suspicion of private initiative. By their action they hoped to undertake something of consequence, something that would give meaning to their hope of educating and thereby uplifting the mass of Russian society. The principal organizers of the Free Society for the Establishment of Schools of Mutual Education (Vol'noe obshchestvo uchrezhdeniia uchilishch vzaimnogo obucheniia) were Count Fedor Petrovich Tolstoi, a future Decembrist, Nikolai Ivanovich Grech, editor of the highly popular journal, Syn otechestva, Fedor Nikolaevich Glinka, a poet and future Decembrist, and Wilhelm Karlovich Kiukhel'beker, poet, literary critic and future Decembrist.

By schools of mutual education, the founders of the Free Society meant Lancaster schools named after Joseph Lancaster who had developed the idea in London, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In these schools, "instead of being instructed by trained teachers, the students were trained by 'elders' chosen from among the most learned and most capable students."

The "elders" themselves also studied and were not considered teachers in the proper sense of the word. In fact, teachers were still used to instruct the "elders" and to oversee the operation of the schools . . . . The typical method of instruction involved the seating of the students in a semi-circle which would enable all to see the "lesson tablets" that were used in place of books. The tablets were large sheets of paper printed with huge letters and figures, and were used to teach reading, writing and arithmetic. Thus, even when a single student was reciting, all the others could follow along on the tablet.

The Russian government had already taken the preliminary measures for establishing its own system of Lancaster schools when Fedor Glinka brought to the attention of S. S. Uvarov, one of the officials actively engaged in the government's effort, a proposal for the creation of a Society for the Establishment of Schools of Mutual Education. The proposal stated that the Society's aim would be to further the education of "honest hardworking citizens, loyal to the fatherland." The bureaucracy found it virtually impossible to oppose such a goal and on January 14, 1819, Alexander I approved the statutes and the society came into being.

The leaders of the Society, however, had a understanding of education that differed from that of the government. Their position was taken from the statutes of the Union of Welfare which declared that the goal of education must be morality, designed to stimulate "a love for everything good and great," and that this was to be found primarily "in the history and the political sciences," subjects which the government had come to view with suspicion. In the first months of its existence, the Society was highly successful and established Lancaster schools in St. Petersburg and fifteen other cities. For a while it began to seem as though the Lancaster schools might provide the organizers of the Society with a social function that was genuinely rewarding to them. But it turned out that the government was not prepared to allow them the satisfaction of successful autonomous activity.

A special committee on the creation of Lancaster schools was established by the government. Led by two of the most conservative officials of the Russian Bible Society, Mikhail Magnitskii and Dmitrii Pavlovich Runich, it held its first session on June 10, 1820. The committee turned its attention at once to the Society for the Establishment of Schools of Mutual Education and decided to investigate some of its schools.

After only a preliminary inquiry Runich surmised that in the schools of mutual education the Lancaster system was not used, that the catechism was taught in them in an unlawful way, and that tablets which could not bring about any good consequences were used for reading. The committee informed Prince Golitsyn that the Society "did not conform to the views and intentions of the government."

On January 21, 1821, the committee reached a final conclusion: the Society for the Establishment of Schools of Mutual Education should be abolished. Golitsyn was not well disposed towards the Society but he did not openly move against it. Nevertheless, he achieved his desired goal, for early in 1822 its Chairman, Count Tolstoi, claimed that he had been placed under police surveillance and resigned 2S the Society's head. "He was followed in this by his fellow members with the result that the Society, weary of the interminable attacks upon it, simply ceased to exist."

Ever since the end of the Napoleonic campaigns and the return to the boredom of life in St. Petersburg, the officers of the Guards had been attempting to find some sort of role outside the daily life of the drill field. Usually they had found themselves thwarted (as when the artel of the Semenovskii regiment had been disbanded on the orders of Alexander I in 1816). Some had found meaningful roles in journalism or literary criticism, even though their activity had been subjected to severe constraints by tightened censorship. Others, like Chaadaev, found freemasonry rewarding; but this would be denied them in 1822, forbidden by the Tsar. When the Society for the Establishment of Schools of Mutual Education was hounded out of existence in 1822, for most officers, virtually the only remaining alternatives were those of participation in secret societies, retirement to a life of study and contemplation or the extended holiday in Western Europe that would be chosen by Chaadaev.

Chaadaev and Pushkin

During the first months of 1818 Petr renewed his friendship with Pushkin in St. Petersburg. Pushkin's parents had moved from Moscow to St. Petersburg in the autumn of 1817 and, when Chaadaev arrived in the new capital to take up his duties as aide-de-camp to General Vasil'chikov in January, 1818, Pushkin was living with his parents in a modest seven-room flat in a Petersburg suburb. Chaadaev occupied some rooms in the Demut Inn.

His acquaintances of the time recollected that he devoted the mornings to his favorite studies and the evenings to socializing - at which he played a glittering role. His courtesy, his enlightened mind, his adroitness, and his handsome appearance all brought him to the forefront of affairs . . . . Pushkin often visited him and continued the lively debates of Tsarskoe Selo. But everything suddenly changed when there came to Chaadaev's the unwelcome visits of his socialite friends who had only a superficial reputation of being wise and proper. Pushkin at once fell silent, sat cross-legged on the couch in the corner and stubbornly shunned any relations with such visitors.

Nothing is mentioned of Petr's military duties, which apparently did not demand an exceptionally large amount of his time. Pushkin, receiving the nickname "Cricket," had joined the Arzamas Society in its declining months and had witnessed the efforts of Mikhail Orlov and Nikolai Turgenev to move it in the direction of social and political criticism. Late in 1818 he became a member of the secret literary society, the Green Lamp. This society was composed of many of the liberal youth of Petersburg who met twice a week to read their essays and poetry and speak of their hopes for political change in Russia. At this time Pushkin was also a visitor at the homes of Aleksandr and Nikolai Turgenev. There "Pushkin heard frequent denunciations of conditions in Russia which must have whetted his own appetite for social betterment. The Cricket was surrounded by conspirators. Many future Decembrists and members of secret societies were his intimate friends." Such were influences of the life in the capital that Pushkin was moved to express his emotions in a poem to Chaadaev.

The hopes of love, of quiet fame

This deceit has not been caressing us for long

The amusements of youth have vanished

Like a dream, like the morning mist;

But in us desires still boil

Under the oppression of a deadly power

With impatient spirit

We listen to the fatherland's appeals;

We await with longing hope,

The moment of sacred freedom

As a young lover awaits

The moment of a faithful rendezvous.

While we are inflamed by freedom,

While our hearts live for honor,

My friend, let us devote to the fatherland

The fine impulses of our spirits,

Have faith, my friend: it will arise,

The star of captivating happiness

Will awaken Russia from its slumber,

And on the ruins of autocracy

Will inscribe our names!

If Chaadaev's testimony at Brest in August, 1826 is to be believed, it was Pushkin who, at this time, was pushing him toward a more liberal position. For Petr asserted that in 1818, he himself had made a speech about masonry in which he expressed his "views on the senselessness and harmful activities of secret societies," and pointed out that a copy of this speech could be found among his papers.Since the speech has apparently not survived, Chaadaev's political opinions at this time cannot be formulated with any precision. What is known is that he did not take part in the activities of the Green Lamp and never joined the Union of Welfare.

The only society in which Petr apparently participated was the discussion group formed by Nikolai Turgenev in 1819 to aid his attempts to publish a journal. Turgenev's efforts may be traced back to late 1817 and the declining months of the Arzamas Society. On October 27, 1818 the following idea appeared in an entry in his diary: "For two days now thoughts about publishing a journal have been going round in my head; but oh, our present censorship!" The thoughts refused to go away and on January 3, 1819, Turgenev decided that the journal would be called the Russian of the Nineteenth Century (Rossiianin XIX veka) and that to facilitate its preparation he would form "The 1819 Society." On January 24 he wrote to his brother, Sergei:

I have decided to publish a journal. Its principal aim will be to spread sensible political ideas. To achieve this, the various parts of the journal will be: politics, political economy, finances, jurisprudence, history, and philosophy. This last article will consist of discussions on education and literature. I have told Kunitsyn about my idea. He has accepted it. Moreover we have been joined by a number of young people, former Lycée pupils and several officers. There are few among them who can write well, but in general they all have good principles and a desire to help. According to the police agent M. K. Gribovskii, who infiltrated the ranks of Turgenev's society as well as the Union of Welfare, the journal was to be distributed at the lowest possible price in order to gain the largest possible circulation. Deficits would be made up by contributions from the members of the society. Chaadaev, Wilhelm Kiukhel'beker, Fedor Glinka and Nikita Murav'ev were among those who attended the Society's meetings which began in January, 1819

Turgenev's efforts had brought him into contact with many members of the Union of Welfare and in late April, at the invitation of Prince Sergei Trubetskoi, Nikolai Turgenev became a member of the secret society. He had been hesitant to take this step because the Union had no avowed intent to work toward the abolition of serfdom, which had become his driving goal. Turgenev later recalled:

When I joined the Union of Welfare, I found no kind of organization: the statutes proclaimed the division of membership into different sections that would be concerned with certain particular objectives. They [ the statutes] also said that the direction of the society would be vested in a higher council, and so on. Nothing of all this really existed . . . . A secretary served as intermediary between the directors of the society and the other members. These latter were almost always either officers of the guard of literary men. Young, for the most part, and boiling with impatience, they never ceased to demand, through the mediation of the secretary, instructions on what they were to do, complaining of the inaction in which they were left and reproaching the directors for their lack of zeal. The perplexity of the latter equaled the ardor of the former: they didn't know what to reply to such demands. Seeing the need to act on the one hand, and, on the other, the powerlessness to do so, I resolved to draw their attention to the sad condition of the serfs; and, since arguing over the injustices of slavery was out of the question, my propositions were limited to obtaining from each member the promise to do at once everything in his power, first to stigmatize the institution of serfdom, and then to contribute to its abolition.

As Turgenev could easily see, the Union of Welfare had failed to make significant progress towards its ambitious goals of improving the state of education, philanthropy, justice, and economy. The signs of frustration over the Union's ineffectiveness, a frustration that played a major role in the decision of its leaders to abolish the Union in January, 1821, were clearly evident to Turgenev in the summer of 1819. Meanwhile, his own attempt to publish a journal was not going well and in November, 1819 he resigned himself to its failure.

As these events unfolded, Chaadaev's friendship with Pushkin continued. In 1818 they had become acquainted with Vasili Dmitrievich Olsuf'ev, a minor writer who was two years younger than Chaadaev and four years Pushkin's senior. As Olsuf'ev recorded in his diary, their usual occupations consisted in walks in the Summer Garden, dinner together, a visit to the theater and afterwards a late night tea. On March 28, 1819, not long after Chaadaev had keen promoted to staff captain, Olsuf'ev recalled that he and Pushkin dined at Chaadaev's and that Pushkin recited his poetry.

At about this time Ivan Iakushkin came to St. Petersburg and, dropping in to see Chaadaev, met Pushkin for the first time. Iakushkin recalled that during the Moscow visit of the Emperor, which had ended only a few months earlier, there had been rumors that Alexander I wanted to free the peasants. "It was all the more possible to believe this because he had already freed the peasants in the three Baltic provinces, although under such conditions that the peasant's freedom left them incomparably worse off than they had been before. In his relations with Europe, Alexander faced with shame the fact that more than ten million of his subjects were slaves." Such rumors had reached the ears of Pushkin. They produced an impression on the volatile spirit of the young poet that led him to write a poem which he called "The Village" ("Derevnia"). The poem told of the poverty and misery of the serfs and the final quatrain asked:

Oh friends! Shall I ever see the people unoppressed

And Slavery fall at the whim of the Tsar

And enlightened freedom over the fatherland

Will this wonderful dawn ever come?

Since this and several other poems of Pushkin circulated widely in manuscript form, it was not surprising that in late 1819, rumors about Pushkin's poetry came to the attention of the Tsar, who instructed General Vasil'chikov to obtain a sample of the poet's work. Vasil'chikov asked his aide-de-camp: "You who love literature, do not you know the young poet Pushkin? The Emperor would like to read his unpublished poetry." Chaadaev presumably went to Pushkin with this request. Together they decided to recopy "The Village" and give it to Vasil'chikov to deliver to Alexander. On reading it the Emperor allegedly instructed his General to "thank Pushkin for the good sentiments which his poetry inspires.

These events in no way foretold the storm which would burst over Pushkin's head in late April of 1820. In 1819 the Cricket presumably still had reason to hope that his dislike of serfdom expressed in "The Village" could exert a favorable influence on Alexander. But it was not long before a series of unforeseen events combined with Pushkin's own indiscretions to place him in severe political danger. In March, 1819 the German poet August von Kotzebue had been assassinated by a radical German student. Early in 1820 the Duc de Berry, the son of the younger brother of Louis XVIII and presumably the last heir to the Bourbon dynasty, was assassinated. Finally, a revolution broke out in Spain. In the midst of this atmosphere, which seemed about to confirm the worst fears of the most conservative members of the Russian government, Pushkin committed what he must have later realized was a foolhardy act. During the intermission of a performance at the Imperial Theater, he displayed a portrait of Louvel, the murderer of the Duc de Berry, on which he had inscribed: "A lesson to kings." Rumors soon arose that Alexander I had read Pushkin's "Freedom, an Ode"("Vol'nost' oda") and had been deeply angered by the poet's disrespectful reference to his father. Karamzin wrote to his friend Dmitriev: "Over the poet Pushkin, at present, there is not only a cloud, but a thunder-bearing cloud."

Meanwhile, early in January, 1820 Chaadaev had received a letter from his brother informing him that he was ill and had decided to leave the military service. On January 14, Petr wrote to Mikhail:

I am terribly glad that you will be going into retirement . . . . Tell me for God's sake what are you sick from? I am sure that you yourself imagined this and that you take boredom for an illness. From your letter it is evident that you are a respectable man; yes and Shcherbatov told me that he heard from Obleukhov that you were gay, healthy, stouter and not worn out by everything . . . .

On February 9 Chaadaev wrote again to his brother. During the previous month his personal situation and attitude had undergone a sharp change. After making a perfunctory inquiry about Mikhail's health, which apparently had improved, he launched into a tirade which showed both his agitated state of mind and his desire to speak in generalities that would be indecipherable if his letter, which he sent by the regular post, should fall into the hands of the censor.

You want me to tell you the reason why I need money. I am too respectful to argue with you and thus agree that you are obtuse, but this takes the cake for obtuseness. Did you really not know that 15,000 would not be enough for me? Did you really not know that this is caused by that fact that I live in an Inn? Did you really not know that I live in an Inn in order not to have to dress up as I would if I lived in an apartment? And so here is the reason why I need the money. If they are going to make a fool of me, then I will need, besides the 2,000 which I owe the prince, at least eight more in order to establish myself in a position to live in an apartment . . . . But, if they are not going to do this to me, then I will not need this money. Then I will go into retirement and without fail will go to live in Paris, having first separated from you and terminated everything. If they were to retire me now, then I would do this at once; I would go to you and in the spring would leave by sea. Do you understand now why I need the money? Read it once more and perhaps you will understand . . . . Finally understand one thing, that my income is too small to settle in Petersburg, and in an apartment. I will not ask you to send this 10,000 to me but only to prepare it and send it to me only when they make a fool of me so that I can live from thence and not run through more of my income.

It is impossible to be certain about the source of Chaadaev's troubles. However, it is probable that he was concerned about the possible consequences of his close friendship with Pushkin who by now was under police surveillance and, it seemed, headed for certain trouble. Petr apparently thought that he was faced with two alternatives: forced retirement from the service or being made a "fool." It is possible that someone had threatened to inform the government about certain details (real or imaginary) of his friendship with Pushkin and had demanded money in order to keep silent. After all, Petr had said that he would need the money only if they made a fool of him and it is doubtful that the apartment into which he contemplated moving could have cost more than what has been described as his "expensive suite of rooms" at the Demut Inn. Even if he was not threatened with blackmail, he was probably nervous about what might happen should Alexander ever read the poem which Pushkin had written to him in 1818 which ended with his name as well as Pushkin's triumphantly "inscribed on the ruins of autocracy." Certainly a forced early retirement might be one of the lesser punishments that he might expect.

In this letter we see the effects of the contradictions of Chaadaev's recent life beginning to surface. He had become aide-de-camp to General Ilarion Vasil'evich Vasil'chikov commander of the Guards Corps and by 1820 he was under consideration for promotion to aide-de-camp to the Emperor. During this time he was renowned for his foppish dress and extravagant life style. His sharp wit, brilliant intellect, and dashing manners had won him the attention of his fellow officers. He was as Erik Erikson would say forging "for himself a central perspective and direction, a working unity, out of the effective remnants of his childhood and the hopes of his anticipated adulthood." There is, however, a central part of Erikson's definition of identity with which Petr Iakovlevich was not coping successfully. By 1820 he had become increasingly unable "to detect some meaningful resemblance between what he had come to see in himself and what his sharpened awareness told him others judged and expected him to be."

On March 25, 1820 Petr wrote to his brother to inform him that the processing of his application for discharge from the government service had been completed. By this time he had calmed down in comparison to his state of nervous irritation of early February. His troubles had not gone away but it seemed that he was learning to live with them, for, though he envied his brother's retirement and wished that he himself might soon be in a similar position, he no longer feared that retirement would be forced upon him. He also told his brother of the recent duel between Vladimir Iakovlevich Lanskoi, the half-brother of his friend Petr Petrovlch Lachinov, and an adversary named Annenkov. Petr declared that Lanskoi "fell dead right on the very spot. I cannot tell you," he continued, "about the feeling that this has produced in me. This was a handsome man of only eighteen years, the only son. I did not know that I was so sensitive." Perhaps what Petr meant to say was that this was one of the first times that he had found himself transported from the world of books and philosophy to the arena of the passions and violence of human emotions.

Describing the events which followed the duel, Petr betrayed a deterioration in his relations with his commander, General Vasil'chikov, whom he called "my imbecile." At this point, he concluded with glowing praise of the recent successful Spanish revolution.

The revolution in Spain is over and the king finds himself forced to sign the constitutional act of 1812. An entire nation has risen, a revolution ended in about three months and not a drop of blood shed, no slaughter, no destruction, no excesses and finally nothing which would spoil a good work: how about that! In this case we have a good argument which can be passed on in favor of the revolutionaries, But in all of this there is one thing which touches rather closely. Shall I say it? Can I confide it to this indiscreet sheet of paper? I think I prefer to be silent. Do not they already say that I am a demagogue? The imbeciles! They do not understand that, a person who scorns the world does not dream of correcting it.

Here Petr expressed his attitude toward political change; his statement that a revolution may be desirable only if it results in no bloodshed, no slaughter, no destruction and no excesses," is far from radical. What he was afraid to confide to paper it is hard to say, Possibly he thought of refuting those who,- influenced by Pushkin's poem, had come to wonder if he had become some kind of radical demagogue. Or perhaps he was, thinking of some recent conversations with Nikolai Turgenev on the subject of serfdom.

It is known that he and Nikolai Turgenev discussed this subject on the day after he wrote to his brother. In a letter dated March 27, 1820 Turgenev recalled Petr's reasoning that the abolition of serfdom should be easier in Russia than it had been in France because the Russian nobility was not as dependent on it as the French nobility had been. Turgenev concluded with the following plea:

A single thought inspires me, I have but a single goal in life, a single hope still lives in my heart: the liberation of the serfs. By this you may judge if I could be indifferent to each intelligent lord, to each just idea and to those matters relating to them. Yesterday's conversation confirmed still more my opinion that you could promote the spread of sensible ideas about the liberation of the serfs. Make this, the most honorable of holy causes, the principal object of your actions and your thoughts.

Petr's enthusiasm for the liberation of the serfs was short lived. He never freed any of his own peasants and late in 1823, to raise funds for his continued travel in Western Europe, he would sell several of his serfs into service in the Russian army.

Chaadaev sent his letter of March 25 1820 by the regular post. Had he thought about it, he would have realized that from the point of view of arousing Vasil'chikov's anger and incurring forced retirement as a result there of, he was taking quite a chance should the letter be intercepted and copied. This is exactly what would happen, but late in March 1820, this was a risk that Chaadaev took -- and took Erikson would say, almost on purpose.

Pushkin Exiled

In March of 1820 a stranger attempted to gain entry to Pushkin's living-quarters and offered Pushkin's servant fifty rubles to be allowed to borrow the poet's manuscripts. The servant refused and when Pushkin returned, he told the poet what had happened. Pushkin was understandably shaken by this event and proceeded to burn all his papers. Not long thereafter Pushkin received an invitation to report to Count Miloradovich, the Governor General of St. Petersburg. After some indecision, he went to Miloradovich and, confessing that he had burned his papers, offered to recopy them from memory. The offer was accepted and Pushkin wrote until he had filled an entire copy book which was taken to the Emperor on the following day. Several weeks passed, during which time Pushkin was left to ponder the uncertainty of his fate. Suddenly, in the final days of April, Alexander made his decision: Pushkin would be exiled either to Siberia or to the Solovetskii Monastery located on an island in the White Sea far to the north. News of the decision spread extremely fast. "On hearing about it, Chaadaev, without losing a minute, ran to Karamzin's, arriving there when he was at work on his history and when no one would dare to disturb him. Not to be stopped, Petr burst "almost by force into the study of the historiographer."

Chaadaev broke through all the obstacles that Karamzin saw, recounted in all possible ways why he was morally obligated to take a petition on Pushkin's behalf to the Tsar, showed him that it would be unseemly for the glory of the Emperor to subject to such exile and confinement so priceless a guarantee of the glory and hope of the fatherland, and [finally] managed to persuade [Karamzin] to use his moral influence and credit in his petition [to the Tsar] . .

Certainly, Chaadaev played an important role in the appeal which resulted in a less severe sentence for Pushkin, but contrary to the impression given by Zhikharev, Longinov and Sverbeev, he was not the only person who acted to help Pushkin. Gnedich "with tears in his eyes" begged Olenin to do something for Pushkin. Zhukovskii and Glinka also used their influence on Pushkin's behalf. The appeal was partially successful. Alexander ordered that Pushkin be sent to the Caucasus, to Ekaterinoslav, to serve under Lieutenant General Inzov. And on May 6, 1820, Pushkin left Petersburg to begin what he thought would be only a brief exile.

Chaadaev had witnessed the capricious and arbitrary power of the autocracy under which he lived. Though he showed no inclination to become involved in the political conspiracies of any secret societies, by the summer of 1820 he had gained an understanding of the social problems and goals which motivated the actions of many of his friends. Nevertheless, he was still primarily concerned with the preservation of his "image" in Petersburg society. Perhaps the events leading to Pushkin's exile made him begin to doubt the wisdom of his service to the autocracy. The events which would follow the mutiny of the Semenovskii regiment in the autumn of 1820 would finally show him that such service no longer had any meaning.