The usual picture of the intellectual life of this time derives from the narrative constructed by the victorious revolutionary leaders of our own century and focuses on the few oppositional figures whom later revolutionaries counted as their inspiration. The story begins with Peter Chaadaev, a thoughtful and conscience-stricken military officer who left the army after Alexander I’s brutal repression of the Semenovskii guards regiment. His writings criticized the idealism of the Decembrists and their futile attempt to impose foreign political institutions on Russia, but he is best known for his ringing indictment of government propagandists and the self-congratulatory stance of Official Nationality. The only one of his ‘philosophical letters’ to be published during Nicholas’s reign inveighed against the sterility and backwardness of every aspect of Russian life, beginning with the empty ritualism of the Orthodox religion and continuing on to the country’s intellectual poverty and useless veneer of Western institutions devoid of the true spirit of the Western political order. The outburst—the later revolutionary Alexander Herzen called it ‘a shot resounding through a dark night’—was so unimaginable in the highly censored press of the era that when it appeared in a prominent magazine in 1836, Nicholas pronounced its author a madman and subjected him to regular medical examinations. The unfortunate publisher suffered a worse fate—exile to Siberia. Chaadaev was aberrant, however, only in having the courage to speak out. Others were writing and saying similar things in private. Educated Russians had no wish to leave the definition of Russia’s proper purpose and destiny to government propagandists.
Even before the publication of Chaadaev’s letter, young Russians had been coming together in small groups, ‘circles’ as they were called, at regular weekly meetings to discuss literature, philosophy, and national purpose, but Chaadaev’s letter crystallized many issues and forced the young thinkers to define their stance towards Russia’s development. Some accepted the position that Russia was a European country whose social evolution lagged behind the rest of Europe and whose political institutions had been deformed by the unbridled power of autocracy. These ‘Westernizers’ saw Russia’s proper course in liberalism, constitutionalism, the rule of law, and Western enlightenment. Others adopted a nativist position that superficially resembled the government’s programme of Official Nationality. However, these thinkers, known as Slavophiles, regarded the government as an alien institution imposed by Peter the Great and responsible for breaking Russia’s natural evolution from the seventeenth-century tsardom, which the Slavophiles believed was characterized by a familial attachment of the people to their tsar, by Orthodox piety and a sense of community among the people and between the people and the ruler. Like the Westernizers, the Slavophiles were opposed to serfdom, bureaucratic supervision of social and intellectual life, and the militarism of Nicholas’s regime. In other words, the famous debate of the 1840s between the Westernizers and Slavophiles was a contest over the meaning of Russia’s past and Russia’s future. Both sides opposed the Russian present.
Our inherited narrative ends the era of more or less open discussion of these matters with a celebrated exchange in 1847 between Nikolai Gogol and the literary critic Vissarion Belinskii. In a work titled
