War and Russian Europeanism

Session 7 “Historiosophy of the Russian Way”

It is impossible to get away from the question of the consonance between Russia and Europe. Another stimulus for reflection on the construction of historiosophical images were various wars. Some of them threatened Russia's very existence, others were aimed at expanding its territory, and others were generally waged without Russia's involvement. All of them have raised the question of the very idea of Europe. Novalis' essay Christianity or Europe is one of the most important texts dedicated to the idea of Europe. It was written in the midst of the revolutionary wars. This work is consonant with various currents of Russian social thought: Pyotr Chaadaev, Slavophiles, et al. At this point it should be noted that the Russian social thought is based on the European romanticism.  The Romantic period was the heyday of Russian culture and thought. Romantic culture shaped the discourse of Russian thinkers.

Let us dwell on several episodes of the development of the Russian idea in conjunction with the idea of Europe. Romantic culture penetrated into Russia before the philosophical Romanticism of Odoevsky and others, and it seems interesting to me that in the Alexander era, the German mystics who influenced the Russians also influenced the German Romantics. As a rule, German mystics frequently turned eastward, i.e. to Russia. There is a well-known story of Quirin Kuhlman, a follower of Jacob Böhme, who believed that the salvation of Europe would come from Russia, and who was burned on the Red Square.

The conservative movement is associated with the personality of Admiral Shishkov. It's often contrasted with the mystical. It also began to function as an incipient romantic nationalism. This is evident not only in the similarity of ideas, but also in the personal connections. Andrey Shishkov translated texts by Kampe, who preached similar ideas in Germany during the Napoleonic Wars. It is a fact that a significant number of German intellectuals ended up in Russia. They were Shishkov's colleagues, especially Ernst Moritz Arndt, who wrote the poem "The German Fatherland". In the poem, Arndt says that the German fatherland is to be found where the German speech can be heard. The connection of the national spirit with the language took place in the Romantic period under the influence of the Great European War.

Special attention should be paid to the letters of the Russian officer Fyodor Glinka. How did he perceive Europe? On the one hand, he often expresses the characteristic idea that all Europe's weapons tried to destroy our great Fatherland to rubble. But he also sees the war as a fair fight for the destiny of Europe. I quote his order on the occasion of a performance of the Guards in 1815: "His Imperial Majesty deigns to summon all the regiments of the Guards and Grenadier divisions to take part in the great feat of the militia of Europe... The private peace of each nation and the common sacred cause of all Europe are at stake in the current just war." About the Triple Alliance, he writes: "The three strongest monarchs of Europe, heeding the voice of God in the voice of their peoples, form a Triple Alliance." That is to say, the Russian Tsar is defined as the European monarch, the arbiter of the fate of Europe. Some experts on the subject believe that the Triple Alliance was formed under the influence of some kind of spiritual union that the Emperor formed with Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling. Finally, the military and political power that Russia gained as a result of the Napoleonic Wars largely allowed the generation of young archival men to shift their focus to the cultural and spiritual influence of the West. For them, the physical war was no longer of much importance. The Russian people had to play a decisive role in the spiritual and cultural sense.

The German philosopher Johann Baptist Schad, who taught at the University of Kharkov, should also be mentioned. In 1814, he wrote: "It may be said that universal domination (of Napoleon) would bring to humanity such a desirable good as perpetual peace, saving us from the worst of evils, which is war. Although this is not true, let's still admit it. How despicable such a world acquired at the price of freedom and human dignity would be. Isn't it absurd to say that all nations should obey one master, like a herd of animals? As nations confront each other, the desire to improve will vanish into thin air. It is not eternal peace, but the spirit of rivalry, always accompanied by war, that determines the welfare and eternity of the human race. Man is equally destined to war and to peace; therefore he must be inspired simultaneously by the love of peace and by the love of war". In this sense, Schad takes up Kant's idea that an organism contains a goal in itself and that it is in motion. In this way, war appears as an instrument of the highest wisdom for the realization of the highest goals that are hidden from human beings. The ultimate goal of the motion is culture. The idea of correcting morality through war was also something Kant had in mind.

In Russia, a series of Asian wars accompanied the long peace in Europe established by the Napoleonic Wars. The Empire expanded, reaching far beyond the borders of civilization. The most interesting character here is Andrey Bestuzhev (Marlinsky) was a Decembrist, an officer. He was one of the first to describe the Caucasus from an artistic point of view. His literary and historiosophical ideas are of interest. He proclaims the 21st century to be the century of Romanticism and at the same time a historical century in which history is no longer a fairy tale legend, but is constantly present in life. Romanticism is, and I quote: "the desire of the infinite human spirit to express itself in finite forms." He considered the Gospel to be the source of Romanticism and all idealistic philosophy. According to him, it is a romantic poem imbued with the idea of the brotherhood of all peoples. His military notes leave a twofold impression: on the one hand, there is an ecstasy of battle in them, on the other hand, they contain a lot of humanistic reflections on human suffering. As a distant goal toward which Providence is pushing people, he writes of the ultimate goal of unity and harmony among peoples. At present, the nation is divided, but this does not mean that the duty to the Fatherland ceases to exist. All the conquests of the human race are justified by the spread of Christianity as a victory over barbarism. For him, Europe, Christianity, and civilization are the same thing.

His brother, Pyotr Bestuzhev, who was discharged from the army because of a mental disorder and was generally overburdened by his military career, enthusiastically describes the attack in which he himself was wounded. "Throughout Europe, the sound of hammers will rise from the forging of the Cross, from St. Sophia, and the descendants of Pericles and Socrates, exhausted with the unequal struggle, will rise as well..." His view of the war was that it was a common cause of all Christian Europe. Another interesting detail about Bestuzhev (Marlinsky), a kind of poetry of fate, is that he participated in the pacification of the Highlanders who rebelled under the leadership of Gazi Muhammad, a former preacher of Muridism. Muridism is a movement in Islam that assumes rigid fatalism and determinism. Fatalism and determinism, from the point of view of Andrey Bestuzhev (Marlinsky), contradicted Christianity, because it implies the abolishment of human freedom. However, according to letters and military notes, Marlinsky was a fatalist himself. Perhaps he experienced an inner struggle between his own fatalism and certain Christian ideas. On the outside, it was a struggle with the followers of Muridism. He wrote that before the battle he could see those who were destined to die, and he predicted his own death as well. When he received the news of Pushkin's death, he said that his own death would also be violent and very soon. And so it was: he died in 1837 during an amphibious operation at Cape Adler.

It should be clear that in the 19th century the imperial frontier was not called Russia yet, but for Bestuzhev it was already considered as a part of a single Fatherland. In his worldview Andrey Bestuzhev (Marlinsky), of course, was a European colonizer, but he still sought to understand the people of the Caucasus at least through the prism of romantic Orientalism. In his military notes, he often praised the Highlanders, especially those who sided with the Russians. He describes them in such a strange and curious way: "The Highlanders have already been driven to Europeanism by their winter; they have always been, and will always be, more intelligent and more belligerent than the inhabitants of the valleys." According to him, Peter the Great snatched Russia from the slumber of Asian kingdoms.

Russia as the empire of Peter the Great, the successor to the empire of Charlemagne, is also one of the central ideas of Fyodor Tyutchev's world view. Tyutchev constantly raised the question of the consonance between Russia and Europe to spite de Custine's famous book "Russia in 1839". He writes that despite its non-integration into the pan-European system of feudalism, Russia was able to defend both its national independence and the national independence of other peoples. Romantic, he opposes creating or destroying states by force. For him, the state is an organic structure. Although before the Crimean War he spoke about the need to absorb Austria, deprive the Pope of secular power, etc. But the Crimean War, which put an end to the era of the Holy Alliance, made his foreign policy concepts fantastic. He continued to encroach on a part of Austria calling for the annexation of Galicia, but he has already stopped talking about the revival of Eastern Europe. In other words, he no longer sought to create a parallel Eastern Europe as a legitimate part of the Christian world. In a letter to Pogodin, he writes: "The slogan of tomorrow is the revival of Eastern Europe, and it's time for our press to use "Eastern Europe" as a certain political term...". And here is a letter to Ivan Aksakov: "It's time to show Western Europe in the most decisive way that there is an Eastern Europe, too, and that its name is still the same damned Russia, so suspiciously hated by the whole civilized world for a long time!"

They say that the image of Versilov from the novel The Adolescent by Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a reflection of Tyutchev's world view. This version is subject to dispute. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the concept of the "Russian European" from Dostoyevsky's Pushkin Speech and the same concept by Tyutchev are different. Dostoyevsky speaks precisely of Russia as a true Europe, while Tyutchev invented another Europe. The ideas of the Russian European are well known: they emerged against the background of the Franco-Prussian War. It is curious that the Franco-Prussian War is mentioned in F. Dostoevsky's Demons, but it takes the form of a kind of farce when La Marseillaise and Mein Lieber Augustin are played alternately on the piano.

Russian idea and the idea of Europe emerge in Russian public thought in the context of European Romanticism. When we speak of a hostile West, we mean specific countries with which we have had confrontations, not the united and hostile West itself. The development of the Asian frontier is an example of the absolutely European self-consciousness of the Russian thinkers who were so fond of it. Russia is perceived not just as a part of Europe, but either as a genuine Europe, or as a kind of a unique Europe. And the problematization of Europeanism seems to me to be a rather productive trend. It allows us to understand the idea of Europe better than if Russian thought did not problematize its Europeanism.

The fact that East and West are not identical with the definition of Europe and non-Europe is another important point of Russian social thought. For example, the German historiosophical constructions of the Romantic era are labeled as Eastern nationalism, associated with mysticism and the germs of totalitarianism, and not rational. At the same time, there is a kind of Western nationalism based on the ideals of civil society, individual freedom, etc. In his work, Hans Kohn even draws a line between the nationalism of the West and that of the East along the Rhine.

To conclude, I'd like to say that a literal transfer of the concept of the 19th century to the present is impossible. Russian social thought shows a constant desire for synthesis in subsequent generations, when the contradictions of the previous generation are eliminated. And now Westerners are writing about the meaning of Slavophilism, while the Slavophiles have inherited the ideas of Shishkov on the one hand, and the ideas of the German mystics on the other. I think this is an important lesson that can be learned from the history of Russian public thought of the 19th century.

Translated by Ekaterina Dobrina and Sophia Polyankina