Masculinity, Autocracy and the Russian University, 1804-1863

Masculinity, Autocracy, and the Russian University 1804–1863 Rebecca Friedman Masculinity, Autocracy, and the Russian ...

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Masculinity, Autocracy, and the Russian University 1804–1863 Rebecca Friedman

Masculinity, Autocracy, and the Russian University, 1804–1863

Masculinity, Autocracy, and the Russian University, 1804–1863 Rebecca Friedman Florida International University

© Rebecca Friedman 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–3918–7 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Friedman, Rebecca. 1968– Masculinity, autocracy and the Russian university, 1804–1863 / Rebecca Friedman p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–3918–7 (cloth) 1. College students–Russia–History–19th century. 2. Men–Russia– Psychology. 3. Masculinity–Russia. 4. Universities and colleges–Russia– History–19th century. 5. Russia–Intellectual life–1801–1917. I. Title. LA838.7.F74 2004 378.1′98′04709034–dc22

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For Jon, Simon, and Joseph.

Contents Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction: Revising Old Narratives – Masculinity and Autocracy in the Nineteenth Century

1

1 Respectable Servitors, Obedient Men, and the Autocracy’s Administrative Ideal

14

2 Tavern Sociability

39

3 Fraternities, Dueling, and Student Honor

53

4 Friendship, Romance, and Romantic Friendship

75

5 Loyal Sons and the Domestic Ideal

99

Epilogue: Beyond the Nicholaevan Ideal – Russia in the Coming Years

125

Conclusion

137

Notes

143

Bibliography

183

Index

193

vii

Acknowledgements This project has been supported over the years by many institutions, mentors, colleagues, friends, and members of my family. The research for this book was conducted with the support of the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), various institutions at the University of Michigan, including Rackham Graduate School, the Department of History, the Center for Russian and East European Studies, and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. While in Miami at Florida International University, I have had the benefit of generous support from the Office of the Provost, the College of Arts and Sciences at the Department of History. The idea of writing on the history of Russian masculinity was first sparked in Bill Rosenberg’s graduate research seminar in the winter of 1993 in Ann Arbor. Jane Burbank and Bill Rosenberg, my two dissertation advisors, have been unwavering sources of support and encouragement ever since. Special additional thanks go to Kathleen Canning, Valerie Kivelson, and Abby Stewart. In Russia, I received much needed guidance from the staffs of many archives and libraries, including Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA), Tsentral’nyi istoricheskii arkhiv Moskvy (TsIAM), Gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii muzei (GIM), and Natsional’nyi arkhiv Respubliki Tatarstan (NART). I am especially indebted to the assistance of Olga Vainshtein and Lyena Weintrab for friendship, conversation, and practical advice during my trips to Moscow and St Petersburg. Many individuals have provided me with camaraderie, friendship, and intellectual exchange over the years, they include (and the list is by no means exhaustive), Kate Brown, Jane Burbank, Kathleen Canning, Barbara Clements, Deborah Cohen, Paul Deslandes, Dan Healey, Lara Kriegel, Stephen Lovell, Jon Mogul, Karen Petrone, Debbie Field, Amy Randall, John Randolf, Bill Rosenberg, Alison Smith, Abby Stewart, Olga Vainshtein, Lyena Weintraub, Mary Wheeler, Kirsten Wood, and especially Kristin McGuire, who has been there for me until the bitter end. Jane Burbank, Barbara Clements, Dan Healey, Isabel Hull, Alan Kahan, Catriona Kelly, Stephen Lovell, Jon Mogul, David Ransel, Bill Rosenberg, Richard Stites, and Kirsten Wood all read parts of this manuscript in various forms and offered much needed advice. ix

x Acknowledgements

I am grateful for their guidance. At Palgrave Macmillan, I gratefully acknowledge Luciana O’Flaherty, Daniel Bunyard, and the anonymous reviewer. In addition to the individuals mentioned above, I owe a debt of thanks to my many friends and colleagues in Miami, Surfside, and the History Department and Humanities Program at Florida International University. I am also very fortunate in having had the help of Raisa Kirsanova in securing the image that appears as the jacket illustration to this book. Last, but not least, I thank my family, both native and new (Max and Ellen Friedman, Sonia Friedman, Jerry, Sam and Angela Weinhouse, Jack Glazer, Louis and Kathy Mogul, Jeff Mogul, Patty Page, Judy Mogul, Danny, Ilona, Hannah and Josh Kramer) for their encouragement and much needed distraction over the years. I dedicate this book to Jon, Simon, and Joseph Mogul, all three of whom have seen me through this and – somehow – still allowed me to live with them. All errors are of course my own. A few sections of this book have been published elsewhere. Both Palgrave Macmillan and The Russian Review have generously allowed me to reprint them here. In transliterating Russian titles, words, and names, I have generally used the Library of Congress system, except in the case of names or places that are already familiar to readers in alternative spellings: Nicholas instead of Nikolai; Alexander instead of Aleksandr, for example. I have also consistently tried to use modern diction when possible: moskovskogo instead of moskovskago, etc. All translations from the Russian are my own, unless otherwise indicated. Surfside, Florida July 2004

Introduction: Revising Old Narratives – Masculinity and Autocracy in the Nineteenth Century

Nostalgically recalling his days as a Kazan’ University student in the 1840s, Nicholas Osviannikov described how the university constituted ‘a cherished dream of every young boy’ and how ‘a young man could instinctually feel that here he would experience everything he needed for his future conscious life.’1 To another student memoirist, the university seemed ‘an enchanted island in the middle of the sea … where one experiences a baptism of the soul.’2 A third student recalled that his admission to Moscow University was ‘the first notable achievement in my life, not to mention the most important … It indicated an entrance into a new age and a new walk of life … Childhood had now passed … We became adults … With such pride I wore my [university] blue color and sword, the accessories of an adult – man!’3 In memoir accounts such as these, men who had attended Russian universities in the first half of the nineteenth century remembered their student days as a formative period. At universities, young men developed enduring intellectual and ideological commitments, embarked on careers of loyal state service or revolutionary opposition, and started friendships that lasted decades. To be sure, the university sent men on disparate paths, intellectually, politically, and personally. But, regardless of where they ended up, former students looked back on the university as a place where they had come of age. This book explores the notions of masculinity that students encountered and created during their three or four years at universities, and especially those in Kazan’, Moscow, and St Petersburg. It considers both the university as a formal institution, and the conduct and views of the students and administrators who populated it. Rather than singling out any particular group of university students – whether future 1

2 Masculinity, Autocracy, and the Russian University

radicals, reformers, or bureaucrats – it highlights the common experiences of cohorts of young Russian men at a crucial point in their lives. The book focuses on the reign of Nicholas I (1825–55), the so-called apogee of autocracy. During these decades, the Russian government turned to the universities as an instrument for the cultivation of obedient, respectable men, ideal servitors of the autocratic state. But even as students learned to act as administrators as the university regulations demanded, they also created their own social spaces and forged and transmitted their own masculine ideals, which were often at odds with official prescriptions. Even at the height of autocratic control, men were ‘agents in their own making.’4 By examining the making of masculinity through the interplay among different agents – government officials, university administrators, and students themselves – this study sheds light on key areas of Russian history in the decades before the Great Reforms.

Masculinity in modern Europe Within Russian studies, the history of masculinity, until recently, has been a neglected field of inquiry. In recent years, as scholarship on masculinity in Russia has emerged, it has tended to focus on the Soviet and post-Soviet eras.5 The study of masculinity, however, grounded in the broader field of gender studies, has figured prominently in a number of historians’ accounts of other European societies in the nineteenth century. These accounts offer a useful starting point for considering the Russian experience. Historians and theorists of gender have shown how norms of masculinity and femininity are never monolithic, but rather encompass a range of contradictory and complementary impulses.6 Influenced by feminist theory, gender historians tend to reject natural, transhistorical understandings of masculinity and femininity, and instead explore how gender ideologies change over time and across space. Once independent of sex, gender ‘becomes a free-floating artifice’ subject to change by ‘individuals, groups, institutions and societies.’7 European historiography has built on these theoretical frameworks and emphasized that masculinity, like femininity, has a history. Historians have explained the shifting and contested nature of societal expectations of what constitutes appropriate manliness – from the Hellenic image of homoerotic attachment to the bourgeois ideal, which combines physical strength and domesticity.8 This historiography connects changing ideas about masculinity not only with femininity, but

Introduction 3

also with broad social, economic, and cultural dynamics, such as the emergence of new social groups, the birth of nations, changing political ideologies, and the relationship between state and society.9 A number of scholars of modern Europe have highlighted the profound changes in gender norms that were underway in the early nineteenth century. 10 They have suggested, in particular, that at the dawn of the nineteenth century, monarchs, modern states, and social institutions were negotiating for control over the formation of social identities, including the transformation of gender norms. Isabel Hull describes how in Germany-speaking central Europe, over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, absolutist states began not only ‘to relinquish [their] … monopoly over public life,’ but also to oversee the making of an independent civil society. 11 With their control over the lives of their subjects diminished, regimes no longer attempted to retain exclusive power over the regulation and molding of behavior.12 In the emergent spaces of civil society – from voluntary associations to the press – groups of individuals (composed of male members of the middle classes) articulated their own notions of respectability and morality. Male subjects became male citizens as they began to shape their own social and gender norms.13 The nineteenth century thus witnessed the birth of a new hegemonic norm of respectable masculinity, emanating from within institutions of civil society, and a diminishing role for the state.14 Scholars have described how this new nineteenth-century man was distinctly a product of the emergent middle classes.15 This respectable masculinity was one of the ways in which members of the bourgeoisie defined themselves vis-à-vis both the excesses of the aristocracy and the ‘filth’ of the working classes. The decent bourgeois man, in theory, minded his manners and his morals. He was modest, clean, polite, and self-controlled, particularly with respect to his sexual desires. His manhood also rested on his status in the domestic realm, as husband and father.16 The new Victorian middle-class man derived his power – and asserted his masculinity – from within the institutions of social, political, and domestic life.17 The conduct of Russian men, by contrast, was overseen by the state, to varying degrees, from the days of Peter the Great (1682–1725) through the nineteenth century. The modern Russian state actively attempted to regulate the behavior of its elites through institutional, legal, and – in same cases – coercive means.18 Petrine prohibitions on beards and prescriptions for dress were meant to help transform Russia into a modern polity complete with a westernized elite. Peter’s efforts


at molding behavior, though, concentrated primarily on external conduct. Catherine the Great (1762–96) too relied on the law and police in her efforts to create a westernized, refined elite. But, unlike Peter, Catherine was also interested in promoting ‘the internal mechanisms of behavior regulation’ through programs of education and the spread of conduct literature. Under Catherine’s guidance, ‘the Russian population was to police itself as well as be policed’ by the autocracy.19 Alexander I (1810–25) concentrated on the creation of new institutions in order to shape behavior and mold the social identities of those who would serve in prominent state positions. As part of these efforts to train more young men for key positions within the civil service, he expanded the university system in 1804 and created the Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum in 1811.20 At these institutions, young men were taught to be honorable and polite. At the same time, Alexander never fully exerted autocratic control over these new institutions, allowing for a degree of autonomy in the curricular and personnel matters. Moreover, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, members of polite society could turn to other institutions for advice and direction. They read prescriptive literature in various forms – much of which came to Russia from Europe – and participated in institutions of a nascent civil society, from salons to more formal literary societies.21 This combination of institutional autonomy and access to ideas emanating from semi-autonomous arenas, including the press and literary societies, suggests that the autocracy’s priorities did not include complete control over the upbringing of its young men. Nicholas I, by contrast, formally granted no such autonomy. Armed with the Romantic conviction that autocracy was Russia’s only natural and legitimate form of governance, Nicholas sought to control autonomous impulses, strengthen the autocracy, and guarantee its continuation. Distrustful of institutions and their potential for the creation of diffuse loyalties, Nicholas put his energies into the cultivation of loyal individuals. He both created new institutions and used the regime’s available coercive structures to mold trustworthy men who would staff his bureaucracies and devote themselves to the Tsar and Fatherland. 22 The making of obedient, respectable Russian men was at the heart of the Nicholaevan project of state-building.23

Nicholas I and the ‘civilizing mission’ Nicholas I came to power in the shadow of the Decembrist Uprising, a loosely organized revolt by a group of Russia’s most elite military

Introduction 5

officers, following the death of his elder brother, Tsar Alexander I, in 1825. The Decembrist Uprising was a trauma that no doubt colored the first years of Nicholas’s reign. During his years in power, Nicholas took steps to prevent any repetition by building mechanisms of surveillance and censorship. Most famously, he established the Third Section of His Majesty’s Chancellery, or Russia’s first political police, with Nicholas himself directly in charge.24 But repression was not the sole instrument that Nicholas used to fortify the autocratic state. Under Nicholas, the Russian state took an active interest not only in quashing dissent and sedition, but also in positively shaping the values and behavior of its subjects. No group received more attention in this regard than elite young men, who were seen as both future leaders of Russia’s expanding civilian bureaucracy and military forces and as a potentially lethal source of unrest. By overseeing – under the threat of punishment – the gendering of its future servitors, the autocracy itself became the main motor behind what Norbert Elias, in the western European context, has called the ‘civilizing process.’25 Rather than relinquishing control over the moral upbringing of its subjects – as was taking place elsewhere in Europe – the Nicholaevan regime made a concerted effort to inculcate an official ideal of masculinity among its future servitors. Nicholas himself served as a role model of masculine appearance and behavior. The Tsar, by most accounts, cut a memorable figure. Even as a newborn infant he impressed his grandmother, Catherine the Great, with his extraordinary size and strength. ‘He was just over two feet tall,’ the Empress reportedly commented, with hands ‘only a bit smaller than my own.’26 The adult Nicholas was noted for his ‘particularly masculine beauty.’27 Standing six feet and two or three inches tall, broad-shouldered, with a trimmed mustache, he was compared to a bogytyr,28 a legendary Russian warrior, and remembered by one French traveler, the Marquis de Custine, as having a ‘naturally imposing’ presence with a ‘perfect Grecian profile.’29 A young man in the Cadet Corps recalled how, on the day that Nicholas visited his school, he got a clear view of ‘the manliness of his beautiful face’ and heard his unforgettable voice with its astonishing power.30 Richard Wortman argues convincingly that around this time European rulers went from being viewed as untouchable, angelic creatures (like Alexander I) to ‘exemplars of human conduct, modest virtue, to be admired by their subjects.’31 No longer ‘raised above the ordinary’ as Alexander I had been, Nicholas appeared before his subjects as a mortal to be emulated. Historians and contemporaries agree


that Nicholas projected an image of himself as a man with a singleness of purpose and iron will, who was most content when engaged in military exercises or inspecting his men.32 The following words, uttered by Nicholas in his admiration of the Prussian army – and often repeated by scholars – reflect the enduring image of Nicholas as a man of the parade ground: No one [in the Prussian army] gives orders until he has learned to obey … all are subordinated to a single defined purpose, all have their assignments. That is why I feel so well among those people and why I will always hold in respect the profession of a soldier. I look upon all human life in the same way as I look upon service, for each person serves.33 Nicholas’s contemporaries confirm this portrait of the Tsar. The head of the Third Section, Alexander Benkendorf, wrote that ‘the sovereign’s relaxation with his troops is his only real pleasure.’34 The drillmaster, however, was only one side of the persona that Nicholas projected to his subjects. The public presentation of Nicholas and his family – what Wortman has called the ‘dynastic scenario’ – was premised on the image of the domestic bliss of the royal family. His ideology of rule was replete with images of European domesticity; the Tsar was presented as the paterfamilias, both within his family and before all Russian subjects. 35 Observers noted how Nicholas softened in the presence of his family. The Marquis de Custine, for example, observed that a great deal of Nicholas’s parade ground harshness disappeared in the company of his wife and children: ‘in the heart of the husband and father’ there was affability and a glimmer ‘of softness [which] temper[ed] the imperious looks of this monarch.’36 The example set by the Tsar, of course, was far from the only means at the disposal of the Russian state for shaping the manners and morals of young men. The government-controlled press offered another powerful tool. Until about 1848, when revolution swept across Europe, there was a relative flowering of journalistic enterprises in Russia’s capitals, Moscow and St Petersburg. Alongside the high literary culture nurtured in the pages of the new thick journals,37 emerged the official press. The most widely circulated and popular among the array of state-sponsored publications were the journal Biblioteka dlia chteniia – comparable to the American Reader’s Digest38 – and the thrice-weekly (later daily) newspaper Severnaia pchela. These publications were sponsored by the government and run by the infamously conservative and

Introduction 7

sycophantic triumvirate of Nicholas Grech, Faddei V. Bulgarin, and Osip Senkovskii, each of whom had strong ties to the regime.39 The essays, stories, and various columns contained in these widely circulated publications mimicked the government’s ideological emphasis on Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality (narodnost’) in the form of simple, straightforward prescriptive morality tales, often focused on how to cultivate proper social and gender roles. From stories about the trials and tribulations of marriage, romance and professional life, to advice columns on how to eat, dress, and behave, consumers of these publications were inundated with images of official values and respectable etiquette. The daily morals columns, in particular, supplied lessons in proper and improper behavior, from the minutiae of dress to prescriptions for service to the Fatherland. The proper male citizen/subject was instructed to be modest in his tastes and loyal to the Fatherland, God, and his fellow man. According to one such column appearing in 1827 entitled ‘Life,’ a mature man must be ‘a man, a citizen. He must be useful to mankind, useful to the Fatherland. He must work for the general good.’40 Modesty – ’a priceless virtue’ and ‘a tender movement of the soul’ – emerged in many of these columns as an essential quality for men, who were constantly tempted to behave with arrogance and pride.41 The writers regularly instructed men on how to behave respectably and how to be good sons, fathers, and husbands, as well as obedient Russians.42 In many instances, these lessons came in the form of individual role models. In an 1826 cautionary tale entitled ‘Lesson for Braggarts and Empty-headed Men,’ the arrogant, lorgnette-wearing Khariton was taught a harsh lesson by his aging uncle, Arkhipov Faddeevich.43 In order to receive his family inheritance, Khariton had to drastically reform his behavior and transform himself into a patriotic, upstanding Russian, much like his respectable and humble uncle. Unless he heeded the following advice, Khariton would find himself penniless: He must behave well and refrain from the braggardliness of Frenchified dandies. He must prove that he soulfully and passionately loves his Fatherland and that he will serve his sovereign truly and zealously. He must fulfill all of the responsibilities of an honest man of faith. He must not run from obligations. He must respect his studies of science and Russian philosophy so that he can become a useful bureaucrat.


He must change his name on his calling card from the French spelling back to the Russian.44 He had, in essence, to shed his superficial European ways and become a modest, Russian man. The regrettable Khariton was not alone. Readers could also delight in the stories of more positive – more masculine – role models. Ivan Stepanovich was one such man. During his fictitious lifetime, he had undergone military training, traveled to France to fight, and after the war returned home to the provinces, where his parents gladly welcomed him. Soon after his return, he married well (his wife was in possession of a substantial dowry) and ultimately fathered a number of children. The story depicted how, during his name day celebration, he and his family enjoyed simple provincial hospitality and customs; they ate Russian food and sat around the table for hours relaxing.45 Back in his native Russia he felt at home and achieved the status of provider and head of household, all the while fulfilling his duty to the state. Loyalty, simplicity, and modesty all constituted expressions of manliness in the official press. Another way in which Nicholas and his officials attempted to implement autocratic priorities and create ideal servitors was by expanding the institutional base of the Empire’s military schools, and overseeing the moral development of the regime’s future military leaders. Of all of Russia’s military training institutions, the Cadet Corps was the largest and increasingly the most desirable among members of the elite to train the Empire’s future officers.46 Ranging in age from ten to 18, cadets generally studied for four years and received a broad Enlightenment education combined with intensive military training. Nicholas himself, in 1838, helped to rewrite the military statutes that would regulate the minds, morals, and bodies of the Empire’s future elite military servitors.47 The codes articulated the detailed procedures governing the everyday lives of Russia’s cadets, from the wearing of mustaches – no small order – to the temperature in their bedrooms. Official values – such as mental and physical strength and moral and religious discipline – were fostered in the classroom, on the training field, and in the dormitory. Nicholas was especially involved with the young men in the Corps. The cadets were, as one memoirist put it, ‘the favorite offspring of Tsar Nicholas.’48 Not only did the Tsar guarantee the Corps skilled teachers of military affairs and humanistic fields by offering excellent salaries and other advantages, but he also frequently visited the cadets themselves. He appointed his brother, Grand Duke Mikhail

Introduction 9

Pavlovich, to lead the Corps and the Tsar served as father and inspector to these officers in training. At the graduation ceremony of one of the Empire’s most prestigious military schools, Tsar Nicholas gathered a select group and congratulated them on becoming officers in the Imperial army. One of the young men was named Romanov, like the Tsar himself. Nicholas lightheartedly inquired of the young graduate: ‘Are you my relation?’ The cadet replied ‘Yes, exactly, your Greatness … you are the Father of Russia and I am her son.’ Pleased, Nicholas smiled and kissed the cadet Romanov: ‘Here you are – a kiss from your grandpa.’49 The cadets were encouraged by Nicholas, his wife, brother, and sons to see themselves ‘as members of the imperial family.’50 Nicholas served – as he had for university students – as a role model, inspector, and father figure for these officers in training. Just as the Cadet Corps was central to the shaping of Russia’s military elite, so was the university important for the shaping of Russia’s civilian elite. In Nicholaevan society educational institutions of both varieties were meant to arm young men with the proper morals and manners to carry with them after graduation. Whether training to command an army or teach in a gymnasium, cadets and university students, imbued with official values, were required to spread autocratic ideology into the many corners of the Empire. At a time when the Russian state bureaucracy had a growing need for educated civil servants, Nicholas I presided over a significant expansion in the number of university students. At the same time, the Tsar integrated the universities into the structures of the autocratic state, curbing the relative autonomy that they had enjoyed under his predecessor. The Nicholaevan university, in this way, became an instrument of government policy, the key function of which was to train future government administrators. This training would consist not only of formal education, but also of imbuing students with the personal qualities that would make them model servants of the Tsar. To ensure that students learned these qualities, universities published disciplinary codes that dictated to students the details of their everyday lives and hired inspectors charged with enforcing the codes and punishing violators. Through these mechanisms, the universities attempted to turn unruly boys into orderly, obedient men.

State and society in Nicholaevan Russia For many years, historians of Russia tended to see the Nicholaevan period in stark terms, dominated by a dialectic of repression and rebellion. The


tendency to view the nineteenth century through the lens of 1917 focused attention on the antagonism between a reactionary state and an increasingly alienated educated society, particularly when it came to the decades of Nicholas’s reign. Historians have described how state censorship and surveillance under Nicholas quashed the development of a healthy public sphere, just at the moment when other European nations were decreasing their intervention in the daily activities of their subjectcitizens. Deprived of opportunities to associate and express themselves freely, these narratives suggest, members of Russian educated society rejected the idea of collaboration with the state’s project and instead found meaning in the hidden spaces of an oppositional social life. In these radical ‘circles’ (kruzhki), they created a sense of social cohesion ‘normally’ found in public life. It is in these dark shadows that we find Russia’s ‘roots of rebellion.’51 But beginning in the 1980s, historians began to rethink both sides of the state–society divide. The autocratic state, as it appears in these accounts, was not a unitary actor, working with single-minded purpose to subjugate society. Instead, it was a collection of individuals and institutions, with diverse loyalties and pursuing their own goals. Richard Wortman, in his monograph on the development of a legal profession in imperial Russia, presents portraits of individuals who were central figures in the creation of Russia’s modern judicial system but who also had changing allegiances and ties within a broader educated public life. Likewise, W. Bruce Lincoln’s book on enlightened bureaucrats in the pre-reform era highlights the degree to which key officials balanced their own diverse loyalties.52 Likewise, educated ‘society’ was not a singular, cohesive category. Jane Burbank and David Ransel, editors of a collection of essays on Imperial Russia, call for a ‘reconceptualization of agency’ in any study of state and society, arguing that subjects of the Tsar acted ‘on their own behalf and not necessarily working for or against the interests of the state.’53 Many of the authors in this collection argue for a shift in focus from ‘society’ to ‘the public’ and ‘the family’ as key organizing principles of Russian life. These alternative categories, which reflect a more nuanced understanding of social life, allow historians to get out from under the highly politicized singular category of ‘society.’ These scholars explore how the family, along with a newly emergent public – the professions, salons, Masonic lodges, and so forth – provided individuals meaningful frameworks within which to define themselves and understand others.54 This book contributes to this new look at imperial Russia by investigating an institution at the nexus of state and society, the university.

Introduction 11

A focus on the workings of the university’s disciplinary system shows that there was frequently a gap between the published codes of conduct and the actions of those who were supposed to enforce these rules. University administrators applied the codes selectively and in a way that implied tolerance of certain behaviors that ran counter to the letter and the spirit of the codes. The ‘state’ that students encountered at the university, although a powerful and intrusive force in their lives, did not speak with a single voice. This study also uncovers a complex world of student sociability. My point is not that Russia under Nicholas I enjoyed a ‘civil society’ comparable to the institutions of Europe’s more liberal states. But it would be a mistake to assume that Nicholaevan repression left no room for any manifestation of autonomous social cohesion among the Empire’s educated subjects, beyond the underground circles where alienated youth met to debate ideas and hatch conspiracies. University students frequented taverns, joined student corporations, and formed passionate friendships. They also, of course, continued to participate in the lives of their families, even when they studied away from home. And in all of these contexts, they taught one another and acted out gender ideals that contradicted official prescriptions. While officials and disciplinary codes created a model of masculine behavior emphasizing orderliness, submissiveness, and piety, students themselves made virility, physical courage, and passionate attachment central to what it meant to be a man. If these values seem to be at odds with one another, they were; and these contradictory notions of manhood occasioned moments of conflict, both within the consciences of individual students and between students and officials. That does not mean, however, that students had to choose between one or another model of masculine behavior. The respectable young man by day could turn into a drunken carouser after dark. Russian students lived in a world where the expectations and interventions of the state were one factor to be weighed – sometimes adopted, sometimes rejected – rather than a dominating force, which they must either bow before or defy with all their strength.

Outline of the chapters Chapter 1 describes the changing relationship between the university and the autocracy. During the reign of Nicholas I, Russian universities lost much of the autonomy granted to them by Nicholas’s brother, Alexander I. The central autocratic authorities incrementally usurped


the universities’ decision-making powers, from the hiring and firing of professors to the shaping of the curriculum, as well as the governing of day-to-day operations. As this chapter shows, the state administration took responsibility not only for shaping the formal education of students, but also for their socialization, for training them in the manners and morals they would be expected to bring into the state service after they graduated. University inspectors and their helpers attempted to enforce strict disciplinary codes by monitoring their protégés’ daily lives – where they lived, what they ate and drank, with whom they spent time, how they dressed, when and where they vacationed, and, above all, whether they displayed a sense of honor and morality. Under the threat of punishments, ranging from formal reprimands or three days in the student prison-room, to expulsion or low-ranking military service, students were taught to be modest, clean in mind and body, orderly, obedient, proper, moral, and controlled men. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on students’ formal and informal rituals of sociability. Chapter 2, on tavern sociability, describes how drinking and fighting were key components in students’ own definitions of masculinity. Based on memoirs, official correspondence, and police reports of student disturbances, this chapter explores the world of the tavern and the street, where students openly defied the norms of the ‘administrative ideal’ of masculinity; and suggests that university officials were, at the very least, somewhat tolerant of their transgressions. Chapter 3 examines more formal, although still unofficial, institutions of social life, and especially fraternities. In St Petersburg, in particular, German-influenced fraternal societies played an important role in student social life, regulating the values and behavior of members through a formal honor code and disciplinary system, including courts and the sanctioning of duels. Student sociability also occurred in more private spaces of daily life. Relying primarily on memoirs, diaries, and personal and official correspondence, chapters 4 and 5 explore friendship, romance, and domestic life among these young men. Chapter 4 shows how students, influenced by Romantic ideas, participated in a culture of friendship where expressions of love and affection were commonplace. The language of passionate male friendship, sometimes identified by historians as a symptom of Russia’s political dysfunction and a breeding-ground of radical opposition to the regime, was, in fact, part of the shared cultural property of the Russian elite. Students’ emotional worlds extended beyond the confines of the university. Chapter 5 highlights how individual students maintained

Introduction 13

practical and emotional ties to their families and often participated in the family lives of their friends. In turn, university and central authorities – inspectors to university rectors to the Minister of Education – recognized the continued role of parental authority and familial obligations in the lives of students. What emerges is an integrated picture of family and university life where young men remained active participants in affective filial relations, while at the same time studying to be future state servitors. For the majority of students, an ideology of domesticity, with its celebration of sentimental attachments and filial obligations, was part of the world of the university. The Epilogue sketches the changes on the horizon within the university in the years after Nicholas’s death in 1855. Overall, becoming a man in nineteenth-century Russia required, as it did elsewhere, choosing among multiple representations and expectations. This book is organized around the masculine types that each student encountered and helped to create on his journey into adulthood: the respectable servitor, the drunken comrade, the honorable fraternity member, the romantic friend, and the loyal son.

1 Respectable Servitors, Obedient Men, and the Autocracy’s Administrative Ideal1

The meaning of a university upbringing must be huge in the life of the entire country.2 Konstantin Aksakov In the 1835 ‘Instructions to the University Student Inspector,’ the Russian university administration defined its educational priorities: A good moral sense for student youth is the most loyal and singular pledge [necessary] not only for success in studies, but also for the achievement of the Government’s goals in education: to be true sons of the Church, faithful servants of the Throne, and useful citizens of the Fatherland.3 In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the Russian university’s educational goals reached far beyond academic learning to emphasize the cultivation of students’ ‘good moral sense.’ Through the implementation of strict disciplinary codes, the university administration attempted to mold the morality and manners of the young men who came there to study. The Nicholaevan university’s elaborate rules and regulations were not only a means of repressing students’ disruptive potential as historians have claimed,4 but were also, and more significantly, a way of integrating students into the larger service culture, by teaching them the qualities associated with an ‘administrative ideal.’

The state and the university system Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Russian autocracy struggled to rationalize its bureaucracy and modernize its 14

The Autocracy’s Administrative Ideal 15

administrative structures of government. Russian tsars, from Peter I to Catherine II to Nicholas I, believed that education was an essential means of achieving these ambitious goals.5 By the nineteenth century, universities had become the pinnacle of Russia’s educational system and key institutions for staffing the growing state administration with professionally trained personnel. It was Nicholas I’s predecessor and older brother, Alexander I, who presided over the creation of Russia’s university system, part of a much broader expansion of educational institutions at all levels and throughout the Empire. Alexander and his group of young, reform-minded friends (the Unofficial Committee) established a Ministry of Education in 1802 and promulgated the All-School Statute of 1804. The statute created six educational districts, each with its own university at the administrative and curricular helm. The five new universities – in Kazan’, Kharkov, Vilna, Dorpat, and, in 1819, St Petersburg – joined Moscow University (which had been founded in 1755) to make up the six bases of educational authority in the Empire. Within each district, the university was in charge of overseeing other schools, including teacher training and curricular development at all levels.6 From the early years of Alexander’s university system, it was clear that the state considered the training of future civil servants to be a paramount goal of the universities. The Moscow University Statute of November 5, 1804, for instance, stated that the purpose of a university education was to ‘prepare youth for entrance into various branches of service.’7 A university diploma – whether held by a nobleman or a raznochinets (person of various ranks) – guaranteed entrance into the service at a reasonable level and soon became in effect a requirement for advancing to the higher ranks.8 Along these lines, the Education Act of 1809 promulgated by Mikhail Speranskii, himself someone who had worked his way up through the ranks, created a system where rank was closely tied to educational achievement, whether measured by years spent in an institution of higher education or by a pupil’s score on an examination. Speranskii’s 1809 Education Act stipulated, for instance, that after three years of study, a pupil would receive a diploma conferring a kandidat degree, which guaranteed the twelfth rank (an officer’s rank) in the Table of Ranks.9 Those who did not complete the three-year course were granted an attestat, but no formal rank. The Education Act stated that for an official to be promoted to the eighth rank of Collegiate Assessor or the higher fifth rank of State Councilor, he had to perform a number of tasks, including either presenting ‘a certificate from a


university testifying to the successful study of subjects appropriate to his branch of service’ or passing an examination ‘in the requisite area of knowledge.’10 The university itself administered the examinations. Alexander I’s educational reforms, like much else that he undertook in the early years of his reign, were strongly influenced by the Enlightenment. On his accession in 1801, Alexander immediately gathered members of his Unofficial Committee and other enlightened thinkers – many of whom had been Freemasons – to work on the project of reforming education in Russia.11 These reforms, influenced by the French and Polish models, among others were ‘manifestations of an egalitarian and utilitarian educational philosophy.’12 The result of their discussions, the All-School Statute of 1804, expressed a spirit of secularism and rationalism and, just as significantly, granted the new universities a strong degree of autonomy from the central state administration. Under the 1804 statute, the powerful superintendent or curator (popechitel’) of each university district, who was appointed by the Tsar, was required to reside in St Petersburg, so as not to interfere with the internal, autonomous workings of his university district and intimidate his underlings on site. Instead, he inspected the university every two years and implemented imperial policy in his educational district from his position in the capital.13 The university rector, according to the 1804 statute, served at the apex of local university authority. He resided locally and oversaw day-to-day affairs. The central administration granted the rector fifth rank and members of the faculty seventh rank according to the Table of Ranks.14 Both rector and faculty members, who together made up the University Council, lived relatively autonomous professional lives. Professors were nominated by other faculty members and the faculty as a whole elected the rector. The University Council decided all important university matters, including the election of rectors, deans, and other personnel. In addition, the faculty, through the Council, not only oversaw its independent court system, but also had the power to censor what students read. Each instructor chose the textbooks and other reading assignments for his class.15 The young university system, however, did not survive long in its original form. The Napoleonic invasion of 1812 and the subsequent formation of the conservative Holy Alliance of Austria, Prussia, and Russia brought a renewed aversion toward European enlightenment traditions, at least in some official circles. In particular, official attitudes toward religion and education shifted, and the reforms of the first decade of the century proved to be too secular and rational to be


sustained. One aspect of the new emphasis on religion as the basis for education was the more central role given to the obscurantist Bible Society, which emerged in the Napoleonic era in order to cope with the non-Orthodox population in the Russian Empire. The Bible Society trumpeted the superiority of the Russian language and Russian culture and attempted to infuse state institutions with piety and moral spiritualism.16 Announcing a new era of conservative, religiously oriented educational policy, on October 24, 1817 the autocracy issued a decree that combined the Ministry of Spiritual Affairs with the Ministry of Public Education. This act put the Holy Synod (the governing body of the Orthodox Church) in charge of all state education and guaranteed that religion would be the state’s weapon in its fight with native revolutionary influences as well as foreign ideas. At the end of his reign, however, Alexander I returned briefly to some of his original ideas and the two separate ministries were restored. The history of Kazan’ University during the second half of Alexander’s reign, as described by the historian James Flynn, gives a more concrete picture of the Alexandrine university system. Slow to attract faculty members and students, Kazan’ administrators did not open the university in earnest until 1814, despite the fact that it was included in the 1804 statute. Even after it opened, low student enrollments (42 in 1815, 169 in 1818), an incompetent administration, a shortage of professors, and severe student disciplinary troubles plagued the university.17 In 1819, M. L. Magnitskii, a special inspector appointed by the new Minister of Education, A. N. Golytsin, issued a report on the situation in Kazan’, which concluded that the university should be closed indefinitely. Magnitskii – whether himself a philosophical conservative or a shrewd opportunist – complained that Kazan’ University was infected by ‘free thought.’18 In his exposé of the liberal ideals being entertained in Kazan’ by students and faculty alike, Magnitskii wrote, ‘the mores of the fifteen easternmost provinces of the Empire were not likely to offer support to a university, nor soon produce a competent, well-motivated student body.’19 Tsar Alexander refused to close the university. Instead, he made Magnitskii superintendent of Kazan’ Educational District and charged him with redressing the problems he had disclosed. Magnitskii ordered that the bible be placed in each student’s room (an indication of the influence of the Bible Society) and that foreign professors be dismissed, due to their inability to provide adequate moral leadership. Magnitskii’s conservative plans culminated


in the issuing of his 1820 ‘Instructions to the Director of Kazan’ University.’ The most important mission of the university, as articulated in these instructions, was to ensure that the ‘evil spirit of the times, the spirit of free thought’ be stopped.20 The university was to emphasize Russian Orthodoxy, include more courses on religion, and release non-Russian faculty.21 The example of Kazan’ University highlights a tension that was embedded in the university system that Alexander I created. In his first years in power, the young Tsar was content to afford university professors and administrators a relatively wide degree of latitude to regulate themselves and the other educational institutions that they oversaw. But when his own convictions shifted away from his earlier enlightenment views and the new universities seemed unworthy of the autonomy he had granted them, he reacted by trying to tighten the reins. Still, Alexander did not make fundamental changes to the institutional relationships he had established. Such changes would wait until his younger brother assumed power. In May 1826, just a few months after he became Tsar, Nicholas I created an ad hoc ‘Committee on the Organization of Schools.’22 The composition of the committee reflected the variety of opinions at the upper levels of power, from support for rationalism and the Enlightenment to the obscurantist views of the Bible Society. The head of the Committee, Admiral Alexander Shishkov, who both emphasized Russia’s place in Europe and feared the revolutionary tendencies embedded in the Enlightenment, argued that the Russian autocracy needed to do everything in its power to minimize foreign influences. 23 At the same time, another Committee member, Sergei Uvarov, the future Minister of Education, wanted to send Russian boys abroad to study.24 These contradictory impulses were just below the surface for much of Nicholas’s rule. Nicholas and his officials, however, were clear from the start that the universities had gained too much autonomy, with regard to both the upbringing of university students and the running of primary and secondary schools in each of the six educational districts. The issuing of the All-University Statute in 1835, under the leadership of the new Minister of Education, Sergei Uvarov, brought substantial change to Russia’s educational system. Its impact was twofold. First, the statute realigned the educational bureaucracy by tightening the relationship between autocracy and university. Second, Uvarov championed the slogan for which he became famous – ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Narodnost’25 – by insisting that instructors and inspectors alike


increasingly emphasize religious commitment, loyalty to the state, and pride in all things Russian.26 Although from the moment of Nicholas’s accession in 1825 the university served as a key institution for the spread of official values and priorities, after 1835 the autocracy asserted its control over the process more directly. The new law extended the superintendent’s responsibilities, while curtailing the duties of the once autonomous and powerful University Council. Article 80 of the 1835 statute impinged directly on the university’s autonomy by taking away the University Council’s exclusive right to appoint professors and abolishing the university court.27 Another marker of increased centralization was the changing position of the university lawyer (syndic) in relation to the state: after 1835 he was no longer a law faculty member appointed by the rector, but became a civil servant appointed by the superintendent. There was also a shuffling of responsibilities among key university administrators. The superintendent gained greater control over the purse strings of the state educational hierarchy; he chaired a board composed of civil servants, deans, and the rector that was responsible for all budgetary decisions. The rector of each university, although still elected by the University Council, now had to seek confirmation of his appointment from the Minister of Education and the Tsar. The Tsar became the ‘supreme inspector,’ and would drop by unannounced to survey the universities.28 Finally, and most importantly from the point of view of the students themselves, the student inspector was no longer chosen from among the faculty but from among the ranks of civil servants. The inspector went from being a professor chosen by fellow professors, to a civil servant in the state bureaucracy.29 He and his sometimes twelve assistants monitored the daily activities of the students according to the values set out by Nicholas and his close associates.30 The university statute also directed changes in the nature of the curriculum itself, reflecting the growing trend of dynastic nationalism, which implied an embracing of the multi-ethnic nature of the Empire while affirming loyalty to the Tsar and Fatherland. This new national emphasis included the formation of several academic departments, such as those in Russian History, Russian Language and Literature, and Comparative History and Literature of the Slavic Peoples.31 By 1837, students needed a thorough knowledge of Russian grammar, literature, and history to be admitted to the university. This meant that each student was required to earn at least a mark of three or higher (on a five-grade scale, five being the highest mark) in Theology, the History of the Russian Church and Saints, or Russian History to be considered


for admission.32 In contrast to the 1804 statute, which set no special requirements in the study of religion, the 1835 statute provided for new chairs in Theology, Church History, and Law. It also made courses in these subjects mandatory for all Orthodox students.33 NonOrthodox students did not have to abide by the same rules as their Orthodox counterparts; the statute stated that Roman Catholics, Evangelicals, and people of other faiths were exempt from being examined in Theology and in Saint and Church History.34 Although Russianness was not defined by bloodline or ethnicity – that would come later in the century – each individual had to show his commitment to Russia through his knowledge of its culture, language, and for many, religious rituals. A further significant shift occurred in the years around 1848.35 Nicholas considered the events of 1848 – the revolutionary unrest across Europe – a major threat to the stability of the Russian state and moved immediately to usurp much of the remaining autonomy held by the university. The Minister of Education declared that he would directly appoint the rector and faculty deans, that philosophy – thought to be too dangerous – would be dropped from the formal curriculum, and that there would be an increased emphasis on Orthodoxy and Russian subjects (at least for Orthodox students). In addition, in 1850 Nicholas insisted that the number of students enrolled in the universities be decreased as a means of curtailing students’ revolutionary impulses. The death of Nicholas I brought an easing of many of these restrictions and a period of relative freedom for students and professors alike. This period of eight years, between the death of ‘Nicholas the stick’ and the issuing of the 1863 All-University Statute, was a somewhat anomalous period in the relationship between the university and the autocracy. Although the status of the university vis-à-vis the bureaucracy did not change formally and its autonomy remained curtailed, the death of the Tsar brought a relaxation of censorship and surveillance within the university. These new freedoms inspired an increasingly bold student population, who relied more and more on aggressive tactics to protest the dishonesty and immorality of their superiors. In addition, as part of the easing of control over the student population, these years saw an end of the student prison system, the return of philosophy departments, increasing enrollments, and an era of overall student autonomy. Ultimately, however, the combination of visible student protests and the relaxing of restrictions on student autonomy culminated in the autocracy’s issuing the so-called ‘May Rules of 1861.’ These ad hoc laws


forbade unauthorized student gatherings and petitions and required students to carry the infamous ‘matrikul,’ or passport, in order to track their place of residence and daily habits. The issuing of these new regulations inspired only increased agitation on the part of the students, leading to a two-year hiatus in operations at St Petersburg University, from 1861 to 1863. It was not until the issuing of the new All University Statute of 1863 that protests were at least temporarily curtailed.36 Yet, even though the statute of 1863 codified increasing restrictions on student autonomy in the aftermath of these waves of student protests in 1861, it also loosened the bond between the university and the state.37 The 1863 statute not only granted much more freedom to the professoriate, but also placed much less emphasis on the role of the university in creating respectable servitors. The language of the 1835 statute – which stated that the main goal of education must be to create ‘true sons of the Church, faithful servants of the Throne, and useful citizens of the Fatherland’ – was nowhere to be found in 1863.38

The students One of the critical questions surrounding the early Russian university system was, who could attend? From the early years of the nineteenth century, education administrators debated whether or not young boys from ‘obligated classes’39 should be given the opportunity to attend the university. When the university system expanded under Alexander’s reign, persons from all social classes, in addition to native Russians and foreigners, were eligible to apply for admission and take the entrance exams. Admission – in theory at least – was to be based solely on academic merit. There was no mention of class or soslovie (social estate) in the original statutes. In reality, from the very beginning, young men from peasant backgrounds had to secure more documents. In particular, peasants were required to provide written evidence from their ‘legal authority’ certifying that they were released from their class in order to be eligible for university admission.40 If they were lucky enough to be admitted, they could not receive an attestat and were not called students, but rather ‘free listeners,’ or auditors.41 Over the next few decades, the situation became worse for young men of peasant origin. By 1815, in order to enter the university, former serfs had to provide written evidence of their release from their social positions.42 Nicholas, in contrast to his brother, sought to actively discourage such people from attending the university, lest they inspire the more democratic elements. ‘Knowledge,’


Nicholas wrote, ‘is only useful when … it corresponds to a person’s status.’43 In August 1827, Nicholas decreed that a university education was ‘not suitable’ to the lifestyle of serfs and thus only the emancipated would be admitted.44 The introduction of moderate tuition fees in 1839 further indicated the autocracy’s intention of discouraging peasant boys. However, it is worth noting that for the majority of students the state helped to defray the costs. Ironically, even as state administrators were closing the university’s doors to peasants, they found that members of the social elite were not flocking to gain admission. Russia’s gentry resisted involvement in state institutions of higher learning, especially the universities, from their very inception. When Empress Elizabeth established Moscow University in 1755, she originally meant it to attract the gentry.45 To this end, it was decreed that after the completion of a university course, a student would receive general officer rank (ober-ofitserskii chin). Despite such enticements, wealthier nobles refused. Such nonparticipation by Russia’s social elite continued throughout the reign of Alexander I, when ‘society only passively interacted with the Russian university.’46 This pattern did not shift dramatically under Nicholas I, although there were signs of slow change. Despite Nicholas’s efforts to increase the enrollments of the Empire’s most privileged sons, when he reviewed a list of St Petersburg students as late as 1842, he noted: ‘How few well-known names!’47 During the 1830s and 1840s, however, members of the gentry did begin to attend in greater numbers, though by how much depended on the university:48 in Moscow gentry enrollment was between 45 and 50 percent of the student body, while in Kazan’ it was between 25 and 30 percent. The highest percentage of gentry students was found in Kiev, where it was never less than 75 percent.49 The low enrollments that were so characteristic of the early years fluctuated but, by and large, did not increase substantially until the 1830s and 1840s. Total student enrollment figures were never very high and varied from university to university. The exact numbers change slightly depending on the source, but the total enrollment figures for university pupils throughout the Empire were approximately as follows: 1836: 1,500 1844: 2,500 1848: 3,40050


Kazan’ had the fewest students, especially in the early years. Until 1814, when it began to operate according to the 1804 statute, Kazan’’s student population numbered fewer than 50. By 1818 the number had more than tripled, but even by the 1840s enrollment had not reached more than 235 and by 1850 not much more than 300.51 St Petersburg also took a while to gain a substantial student population. In 1830, the number of pupils remained around 130. By 1835, though, it had jumped to 300, when young men from impoverished gentry families began to attend. Moscow, the oldest university in the Empire, established in 1755, boasted the highest enrollment figures throughout these decades. Even as early as 1811, Moscow University had well over 200 students and, until the cholera epidemic of the early 1830s, the number of students was over 700. After dropping to the 200 level immediately after cholera struck, numbers began rising toward the end of the decade, reaching about 860 by 1840.52 Those young men, however few in number, who did successfully seek a university education were divided into two categories as soon as they arrived at the university – state-supported and self-supporting. State students received room and board in a dormitory, along with a monthly stipend from the government. When they finished their studies, state students were required to serve the state for a period of five years, whether in a military post or as a schoolteacher. Student dormitories, located in the same building as the lecture halls, provided students with cramped living and eating quarters, which fostered constant social interaction. The Moscow University dormitories in the 1830s housed approximately 150 students. These students shared ten blocks of rooms, each with several sleeping rooms and a common living area. Students crammed a number of beds into the tiny bedrooms – often as many as eight bunk beds (sleeping 16) into a single room. Students’ reminiscences of dormitory life highlight the lack of space. One recalled how cleverly he and his comrade arranged the furniture so that they could simultaneously lie on the couch, without ‘their feet touching.’53 The dormitories were an all-male environment. The presence of a woman was a notable exception. When a pupil’s mother did find her way into the inner sanctum of dormitory life, students stared and thought – as one memoirist recalled – how ‘the appearance of ladies inside the walls of our dormitory was so unusual’ that this might have been ‘the one exception.’54 In this atmosphere of all-male sociability, the more experienced students guided their younger counterparts not only in academic life, but also in the ways of the adult world. The


washrooms in particular were places where the younger students watched in awe as their older mentors shaved and washed. One student remembered looking on in amazement: ‘We would watch them [the older students] with respect, and especially when the one being shaven would cry out as the barber gave him a slap in the face.’55 The more experienced students mentored the uninitiated on various other subjects relevant to student life. While visiting the dormitory of his tutor and friends, for example, the future Moscow University student Pirogov was ‘schooled’ by his elders on the subjects of sex and marriage. When Pirogov expressed disapproval of pre-marital sex, the others scoffed. ‘Marriage! … Who told you that you can’t just sleep with a woman?’56 Life in the dormitory, albeit in very close quarters, provided state students with shelter, safety, and social opportunities. These could be real advantages, especially compared with the lot of those self-supporting students who were poor. After a year of looking for an inexpensive apartment with his friends, A. N. Afanas’ev was admitted as a state student during his second year at Moscow University. He wrote of the great relief he felt when he was granted a state stipend and of the contrast between his prior lodgings and the dormitory, where ‘we lived in dry, clean, bright, and well-ventilated quarters.’57 Self-supporting students – including members of the aristocracy or gentry with vast economic resources and raznochintsy living on the brink of poverty – had to make their own way when they arrived (or remained) in the city where the university was located. Those with scarce resources had the option of living in a city boarding house (at least in Moscow) or sharing a tiny apartment with other students. Generally, they found rooms in boarding houses or small apartments (kvartirniki), through newspapers or home connections.58 Populated by both students and non-students, boarding houses offered a small number of self-supporting students inexpensive lodgings with one another, and provided connections with a world outside of the university. Located in the center of the city in a fourstory building that operated primarily as a hotel, the popular Moscow student boarding house nicknamed Irlandiia was one such place. The fourth floor of this hotel, consisting of about 30 rooms, served as a residence primarily for university students. The relaxed atmosphere, as well as the presence of female residents and visitors, was a clear contrast to dormitory life and contributed to the popularity of Irlandiia for the poorer self-supporting students. Women not only routinely visited Irlandiia, but also occasionally took up residence


there. Memoirist Dmitriev recalled hearing women’s voices from time to time coming from the rooms of certain students.59 Students in Irlandiia had the opportunity to make connections with students from various faculties of all ages, as well as with non-students, from musicians to civil servants.60 Another possibility for the poorer self-supporting students was to rent an apartment or room in inexpensive quarters. Immediately upon arrival, students often sought one another out as future roommates in such arrangements. F. I. Buslaev, like many new arrivals to Moscow from provincial cities and towns, had few ready-made connections and joined with several young students from his home town of Penza to rent an apartment near the university.61 Similarly, when student Ia. Kostenetskii arrived in Moscow from Chernigov, he gravitated toward two students from his own town, and together they shared an apartment on the Arbat, a 15-minute walk from the university. The three students lived in a smallish second-floor, two-room apartment. Kostenetskii shared a room with a student named Ivanovskii, while the third roommate, Timovskii – who had come to town with his cook and tailor – slept in the big, living area. They often had meals in their tiny apartment, prepared by their cook, and attended by a group of student acquaintances.62 Unlike the poorer self-supporting students, young men from wellconnected and/or wealthier families frequently lived in the homes of relatives, whether distant or close, or of family friends.63 In another possible scenario, although less common, young students lived in their family town residences with or without their families, during the academic year. Such was the case with Alexander Herzen and Boris Chicherin.64

Student inspectors Despite the administration’s attempts at creating a uniform university experience and subjecting each student to a strict regime of surveillance and control in and out of the classroom, living arrangements had a profound impact on each young man’s proximity to officialdom in the person of the student inspector. One of the chief drawbacks of dormitory life for state-supported students was the proximity of the dormitories to the inspectors. In St Petersburg, for example, the main university building served not only as a place to eat, sleep, and study, but also as the residence for the assistant inspectors. The chief inspector himself resided with members of the censor committee in an


adjacent, connecting building.65 This set-up, where administrators and students met in the halls and courtyards at all times of the day and night, exposed state students to relatively intense administrative supervision. Self-supporting students who found their own quarters in private apartments or boarding houses were subject to less scrutiny. In his autobiography, Kazan’ student Ianeshevskii unhappily commented on ‘the insufficient number of freedoms afforded’ to state students compared to his self-supporting friends.66 This discrepancy in the state’s vigilance did not go unnoticed. A weekly report from the inspector to the curator in Kazan’ in 1851 stated that ‘the surveillance is of course weak [for self-supporting students].’ Although the inspector attempted to appear surreptitiously in their homes each week, he often failed. New measures were put in place periodically to be certain that ‘the goals and expectations of the Imperial Emperor are attained.’67 This could have meant the addition of sub-inspectors or simply the reprimanding of those already employed. Despite the uneven surveillance, inspectors played a pivotal role in the daily lives of all Russian university students, state and self-supporting alike. The chief inspector was the first in command of the system of surveillance, and he delegated responsibilities to his assistants.68 Like the chief inspector, the assistants were chosen from among the ranks of civil or military servants, and were expected to be loyal to the university and state alike. To reward the loyalty of the inspector and his assistants, the administration granted the inspector a rank of seven and his assistants a rank of nine in the Table of Ranks.69 Since he supervised the ‘morals of youth at higher educational institutions amidst the temptations of the [city],’ the inspector – like his protégés – was required to be ‘trustworthy and worthy of the government’s trust.’70 His area of responsibility included monitoring students’ academic successes and ‘perfecting their modesty, decency, [and] civility.’71 His moral sensibility was expected to be subtle; he was routinely asked to distinguish between right and wrong, and to judge the severity of the wrongdoing, whether ‘a minor delinquency’ or ‘a real offense.’72 The inspector had to be mindful that students socialized, studied, and appeared in ways that reflected the university administration’s ideal of decency. He was the ‘civil servant whom the highest government immediately entrusted with the moral administration of all pupils at the university.’73 The inspector was ‘to get to know each pupil individually, to know not just each student’s name and personality, but also his ability and character.’74


The university administration granted the inspector two formal mechanisms for doing his job: surveillance and punishment. The inspector was ‘to control students’ morals’ and ‘to watch that youthful and inexperienced’ students did not ‘lapse into debauchery and [make] evil acquaintances.’75 To save students from themselves, the inspector inserted himself into all aspects of their lives – social, academic, and personal – and reported back to the higher authorities. The inspector was a ubiquitous presence in students’ lives; he imposed police supervision in both the classroom and students’ living quarters. As the curator of Kazan’ University in the 1820s, Musin-Pushkin, described the inspector’s duties: From nine in the morning to midday, the inspector is always found in the lecture halls; then he visits the rooms of either the sick students or those absent from class or those with poor behavior; in the evenings he attends dances, the theater, balls and gatherings so that he rarely returns home before midnight; earlier in the morning the inspector listens to the explanations, complaints, and requests of the students.76 The inspector, at least in theory, kept meticulous track in his logbook of where all state-supported and self-supporting students resided. Students who lived away from the dormitories and independent of their families and relatives, for instance, were forbidden to live in buildings with taverns, billiard halls, restaurants, houses of illrepute, or coaching inns.77 The threat of the inspector’s intrusion was constant, since he randomly called at students’ homes to ensure that they were not keeping dubious company. If the inspector discovered that a student was living with ‘people with suspicious behavior,’ he could force the student to relocate.78 It was also his job to grant or refuse permission for state students to leave the university premises and for all students to visit their families or go on holiday.79 The watchful eyes of the inspector followed these young men, in many cases, even after their official affiliation with the university ended. The inspector kept tabs on all former students, regardless of whether or not they had been expelled. If a former student was believed to be exerting a negative influence over current students, he was forced by the authorities to leave the city. In 1835, for instance, the authorities punished and expelled a former Kazan’ student with three years of close, strict surveillance because he had been caught fraternizing with current students. In Moscow in 1849 – a time of heightened censorship


and surveillance – the Minister of the Interior ordered that troublemaking ex-students return to their home towns, or go to military service. Those who remained in Moscow would be subjected to the constant supervision of the authorities.80 In addition to the power of supervision, the inspector had the authority to administer punishments and grant rewards. He had a range of punishments at his disposal, including expulsion, dismissal, transfer to another university, military and civil service, covert or overt surveillance, as well as detention in the university’s own prison-room (kartser), the last of which was the most common. Students were subject to two types of university detention: those with lighter sentences were put under arrest in a communal room, where each individual had his own bed and ate ordinary food from the state students’ cafeteria. They were allowed to have their books with them at all times and to continue with their studies.81 Those under stricter surveillance did not have their own beds, were served only bread and water, and were forbidden the possession of books.82 Students were haunted in their daily lives by the possibility of imprisonment in the kartser. University classrooms in Moscow, for instance, were located just one flight below the kartser. One afternoon in 1834, students saw a fellow student, who had been imprisoned for drunkenness, plunge past their window to his death. In response to this suicide, the administration installed steel bars in the prison-room window.83 The student prison occupied a central role in relations between the authorities and students, until it was abolished following Nicholas’s death.84 The inspector also had the authority to reward students for good behavior. The rewards included the right to carry a sword, medals for good behavior and grades, an attestat, a student’s designation in the Table of Ranks upon his graduation, and finally permission to pursue a master’s or doctoral degree.85 The inspector’s powers, though, were limited. In certain circumstances, he was required to consult with and ultimately follow the orders of the rector, university council, and superintendent.86 Together, these authorities, from assistant inspector to the Minister of Education, watched over the student population and instilled in their charges the administrative ideal of masculinity.

The administrative ideal of masculinity In 1837, N. Auget de Rancour finished his service with the Semenovskii Regiment and entered the Law Department of St Petersburg University.87


Due to his continual display of ‘indecency,’ Auget de Rancour remained at the university for only two years.88 At the start of his third year, he was forcibly transferred out of the capital to Kharkov University, which was considered a significant demotion. This student’s memoir account of his confrontations with university authorities suggests the contents of the administrative ideal. On several occasions during his first years of study in St Petersburg, Auget de Rancour found himself in trouble with university authorities. During the May holiday of his first year, Auget de Rancour was caught peering into a lady’s balcony. The student claimed that he had made an innocent mistake: while strolling in the woods one day, he took out his lorgnette, looked up into the balcony, and mistook a beautiful woman for his own guardian (the man in charge of his well-being). The student assured his readers that once he noticed that she was not the old man he was looking for, he put down his lorgnette and promptly left the scene. Two days later, having forgotten – or so he said – the whole affair, Auget de Rancour received a note from the university student inspector summoning him to St Petersburg immediately. Upon his return, he was called into the inspector’s office, questioned, and reprimanded for his offense. By rudely staring at a woman – the wife of a certain Professor N. – Auget de Rancour had committed a serious breach of decency. The Inspector elaborated: A young man is naturally infatuated with women; but agree with me that to climb on to the balcony of an unknown woman at night, and what’s more, the home of a professor, and glance into his wife’s window is willful impudence and [a show of] extreme indecency. For his improper behavior, the student received three days in the prison-room and given only bread and water.89 Just months after this incident, the student again was called to the authority’s chambers. This time he had crossed the line of decency by refusing to shave his mustache. His disobedience and uncleanliness were exacerbated by his insolence; he claimed he ‘hadn’t a mustache [at all], only a bit of a shadow.’90 The inspector retorted that he would soon find himself in the prison-room for such a refusal.91 The third and most serious offense committed by Auget de Rancour occurred during the spring holiday of his second year: he defied a superior. One evening, having just successfully secured a boat for a joy ride with some female companions, Auget de Rancour stumbled into one of


his professors, Nicholas Ustrialov.92 Ustrialov insisted that his pupil turn the boat over to him for use by his guests. Auget de Rancour refused. Ustrialov resounded with anger: ‘Don’t you know who I am? My guests very much need it!’ Auget de Rancour remembered again refusing his professor, ‘I’ll show you that your guests won’t get it,’ and pushed away from the shore with his paddle, leaving the furious professor behind. Offended, Ustrialov exclaimed, ‘You impudent little boy …You’ll pay for this insolence!’93 And indeed he did. Auget de Rancour was punished with two weeks in the prison-room on bread and water, expelled from St Petersburg University, and transferred to Kharkov University to recommence his studies the following year. This student paid a high price for his disrespect of order and rank. Auget de Rancour’s disciplinary record, filtered through his own memory, suggests the behaviors required by the university authorities, including obedience as well as respectable manners and morals. Through its disciplinary regime and system of regulations, the university created an administrative ideal of masculinity for each student to emulate.94 The transformation of Russian boys into proper state servitors required students to rid themselves of their passionate impulses and replace willfulness with obedience and propriety. The language of the university’s regulations and the inspectors’ reports reflect an assumption that the 15- and 16-year-old boys – like Auget de Rancour – who came to the university to study, arrived depraved and infected with ‘vicious inclinations and harmful habits.’95 This lack of morals, administrators assumed, was due to both the usual ‘vices of childhood’ and ‘insufficient surveillance’ at home. An 1834 letter from the Minister of Education, Sergei Uvarov, to the Assistant Superintendent of the Moscow Educational District reflected the assumption that all young boys are, by nature, undisciplined and dangerous. Uvarov wrote that when a young boy first arrived at the university he desperately needed supervision. If he were left unsupervised, Uvarov asserted, he would be influenced by his peers to act in an undisciplined way by skipping lectures and feigning illness.96 In general, correspondence among central and university authorities highlighted the official preoccupation with students’ depravity and untamed passion. Young boys – the officials assumed – were victims of their own ‘violent gushes of passion,’ ‘stubborn vice,’ ‘childish behaviors,’ ‘impatience,’ and ‘tendency to think too much of themselves.’97 It was the task of the university inspectors and rectors alike to tame the ‘imagination, passions, and … the very physical strength’ of the young boys.98 Under the guidance of the


autocracy, young men would bid farewell to their ‘lewd[ness]’ and to ‘the world of barbarous, strangeness, and awkwardness.’99 A central component of the university’s civilizing mission was to transform these passionate boys into respectable servitors.100 The university’s rigid disciplinary regime and system of regulations was designed to ensure that students internalized official values. The process of molding uncontrolled boys into obedient men required the constant supervision of autocratic officials over the external lives of students.101 Students were compelled, under the threat of punishment or promise of reward, to change their outward behavior, which was believed to reflect their inner selves. In fact, the Russian word nravy encompasses both English manners and morals. Officials imagined that external qualities such as a neatly darned uniform, a freshly shaved face, and a clean body reflected inner moral qualities.102 The content of the administrative ideal of masculinity thus equally reflected an emphasis on external manners and internal morals. In order to achieve the required manners and morals, the administrative ideal of masculinity emphasized three qualities: sexual restraint, obedience, and decency. The ever-present fear of boys’ uncontrolled nature meant that the administration had to tame students’ erotic impulses. Reflecting this priority, in 1835, the same year that the new university statute appeared, Tsar Nicholas attempted to control male sexuality and passions in new ways by expanding the legal restriction on sodomy.103 University administrators also directed students’ sexual development under the threat of severe punishment. Officials watched that students avoided ‘the temptations of … debauchery’ and rid themselves of all erotic impulses, such as ‘licentiousness,’ ‘shamelessness,’ ‘lechery,’ ‘treachery,’ and a tendency toward ‘evil company.’104 The administration created various barriers to prevent students from pursuing their erotic – and even romantic – impulses. The seduction of a girl and the ‘injuring the female sex,’ for instance, were considered ‘serious offenses of order and decency’ and met severe punishment – from long periods of detention in the prison-room to military service.105 In October 1836 in St Petersburg, the head of the Third Section, General A. Benkendorf, went on a general campaign to rid the area around the university of prostitutes (‘public women’). Benkendorf voiced his fear that ‘public women’ would ‘infect’ and ‘harm … the young men studying at the university.’106 The punishment for sexual transgressions of any kind was serious (especially after the 1848 general crackdown). In 1850 the city authorities apprehended Moscow University law student Aleksei Shumilik returning home from a brothel, carrying women’s


clothing and 18 rubles. As punishment for his alleged crimes of visiting a brothel and stealing clothes from a prostitute, Shumilik was expelled from the university and banned from living in Moscow altogether.107 Students were not only discouraged from acting on their sexual impulses, but also were expected to be, and remain, bachelors. Married men were not admitted to the university, and getting married constituted grounds for expulsion. Although legally a student needed no permission from the university authorities to marry, once he was married, the university administration released him.108 In 1850, for instance, a Moscow University student secretly married. When the authorities discovered his new status, they insisted that he was ‘obligated to abandon his studies.’ The reason, the authorities agreed, was that ‘spousal obligations and civil obligations cannot be satisfied simultaneously.’109 Students, at least in theory, were supposed to be asexual and single. Sexual restraint was to be accompanied by an insistence on obedience and orderliness. One of the key qualities aspired to by students, at least in principle, was pokornost’ – a combination of humility, obedience, and submissiveness. Pokornost’, the ‘Instructions to the Inspector’ stated, was ‘the soul of education and the first virtue of a citizen.’110 Each student was expected to ‘exercise submissiveness’ in order to acquire a ‘softness [miakost’] which last[ed] [his] whole life.’111 The administration required ‘absolute obedience from all of its pupils in regards to the following of general state laws, university laws, and regulations written by the administration.’112 Obedience before God and university was considered ‘the most important virtue of youth.’ Through disciplined religious worship, a student could achieve the ‘submission [pokornost’] of passion [and] restrain the stubbornness of self-love.’113 Pokornost’ was possible not only through humble religious worship, but also through admission of wrongdoing and remorse. In many cases, students committed a crime, humbled themselves before the authorities by writing a sincere apology, and were consequently rewarded with a lesser punishment.114 Students too were to adhere to a strict hierarchy of orderliness in their daily lives. Order, or poriadok, had several meanings: respect for generational and service order on the one hand, and orderliness in one’s daily routine on the other. The student disciplinary codes threatened that for ‘disobedience and failure to observe the necessary politeness in the company of elders’ students would be seriously punished.115 Students were also expected to perform certain rituals in the company of their superiors, whether saluting a general or bowing in the presence of the Tsar.116 Failure to pay superiors the proper respect


incurred some form of punishment, including a day in the prisonroom or bad marks for morals in the end of the year report.117 Poriadok also implied a handling of day-to-day affairs with ‘the strictest precision.’118 Each day students were required to ‘gather [in the cafeteria] at the bell,’ ‘exit in one line in order,’ and ‘occupy their assigned places’ in the dining halls.119 The qualities of submissiveness and orderliness were to be complemented by a young man’s respectability. Even though a student’s sense of propriety could be judged only by its external manifestations – whether in politeness, cleanliness, or neatness of dress – it was understood to be intimately connected with one’s internal character. In other words, the ‘cleanliness and neatness of [a student’s] body’ reflected, or so officials believed, the internal cleanliness of his morals.120 Living a respectable life – in body, spirit, and mind – was considered essential. Respectable comportment, therefore, was central to the cultivation of the official ideal. Decency was directly connected with posture and how a student moved – his ‘gait and gesture.’121 In order to achieve the university’s goal of molding well-mannered decent men, the disciplinary codes suggested that ‘moral education should be cultivated … [not only through] students’ conscience … [but also through] their manners, and outward appearances.’122 The university required participation in classes that were designed to perfect students’ external appearance and self-presentation in polite society. These included fencing as well as dance classes.123 The administration, through its codes, explained that dance was necessary in order for students to learn how to ‘enter a room, bow, and to hold oneself among well-bred people.’124 The administration had a cautious attitude toward fencing. On the one hand, it was considered useful for proper breeding, while on the other, it was a potential source of student disruption and, if unmonitored, dueling. Fencing, therefore, was admitted – and even encouraged – under strict supervision.125 The autocracy also paid a substantial amount of attention to deportment, dress, and hairstyle. In this atmosphere, a student’s hairstyle and uniform were not simply matters of superficial concern, but were ‘the key to maintaining honor and modesty’ and expressing devotion to the autocracy.126 This was part of the autocracy’s civilizing mission, which began with Peter the Great.127 Failing to wear one’s hair cropped ‘according to military length’ was considered a serious offense in the era of Nicholas I. If a student insisted upon maintaining long hair or any facial hair at all he was assured substantial punishment.128 Among


members of the Tsar’s court, military, and civilian bureaucracies, dress too was considered a mark of one’s loyalty to the Tsar, state, and Russia. Indeed, properly darning one’s uniform indicated, at least in principle, one’s strong ‘identification with Nicholas’s rule.’129 The rules for student dress, like those for future officers, were complex. The basic uniform included a three-cornered hat with silver tassels, a student frock coat, and a black silk tie tied in a knot in the back.130 Certain aspects of the student uniform changed according to the season: students were required to wear a black sword-belt in the fall and winter, and a white suede sword-belt in the summer months.131 Currently enrolled students were ‘obligated to show the proper respect for their station … and observe the honor of wearing their student uniform in public places.’132 Obeying this rule was considered ‘the most external sign of good breeding.’133 There was one type of hat for public use, and another for private: students wore their three-cornered hats when they were in society, at the theater, and strolling in town, and the student cap (furazhka) at home.134 Whether in public or private, the failure to wear the prescribed clothing – be it student uniform or civilian dress – was punishable not simply for breaking a university regulation, but for committing a sin against the Fatherland.135 Regulations for students’ deportment echoed Nicholas’s general preoccupations and therefore were similar to requirements in other branches of the civil and militaries bureaucracies. In 1837, for instance, the Minister of War decreed that hair was to be cut on the forehead and the side no longer than ‘one-and-three-quarters inches, from left to right.’136 One institution within the state educational bureaucracy where dress, hairstyle, and the perfecting of one’s appearance was emphasized even more than within the university was the Cadet Corps. By briefly exploring the parallel rules and regulations that applied to the Cadet Corps – notably, ‘the favorite offspring of Tsar Nicholas’ – what emerges is an autocratic regime preoccupied with the creation of servitors, civilian, and military alike, who dressed properly and had strong and healthy physiques. The Cadets, many of whom would become the regime’s military officers after graduation, received a lot of personal attention from the autocrat. 137 Reflecting the regime’s overall emphasis on the connection between external appearance and internal morals – between body and soul – discussed above, the autocracy embarked on the project of perfecting the male body, which would serve as a symbol of an orderly and moral society. Each


cadet, according to the codes for military conduct, was expected to endure a rigid program of physical training, a strict diet, and weekly bathing rituals meant to keep the body fresh and clean. Through a daily routine of physical training, each cadet worked toward ‘the development and perfecting of bodily strength and ability.’138 Gymnastics was central to the cadets’ rigorous regime. Cadet Ushakov recalled the intensity of the gymnastics and dance training that he received while at the Moscow Cadet Corps. The weekly routine included running, ‘jumping over a stiff rope,’ exercises on parallel bars, rope climbing, and regular dance and fencing instruction. In the dance sessions cadets learned a variety of dances, including the quadrille, the waltz, the gallop, and the mazurka. 139 There is no question that a cadet’s masculinity was always at stake; failure translated into emasculation. When Cadet Ebergaurd of Moscow’s First Cadet Corps did not perform the mazurka correctly, he was mocked by his teacher and peers alike for his lack of manly skill. The teacher called him a ‘bandy-legged dandy’ and used a condescending diminutive ‘Mishenka.’ The cadets echoed these insults. In order to save face, Eberguard replied in a particularly masculine voice, declaring in the deepest possible baritone: ‘Yes, I dare say I am not naturally inclined to learn this accursed step!’140 Healthy cadet bodies were also maintained through the strict adherence to certain dietary principles and weekly bathing rituals. They were even more closely monitored than students at the universities. In the cafeteria cadets were required to consume certain types and quantities of food. In their bedrooms they were exposed to extreme temperatures to bolster their tolerance. Inspectors opened the windows each day – regardless of season – to allow fresh air in, exposing cadets to severe cold. According to the military statutes, as officers in training, ‘they must experience drastic changes in the weather from a young age.’141 Like students, but even more so, cadets’ bodies were monitored by teams of inspectors and instructors employed to create generations of fitting servitors to the Tsar. The content of the administrative ideal of masculinity, with its emphasis on orderliness, respectability, and humility resembled – at least in part – middle-class ideologies emerging in western European states around the same time.142 Modes of implementation of these masculine ideals, however, diverged. As monarchical control receded in Europe’s more democratic states, rulers increasingly relied on citizens within burgeoning civil societies to regulate one another. The Russian autocracy, by contrast, refused to yield control and instead reasserted


itself over the lives of its future servitors. The moral regulation of students, especially after the issuing of the 1835 statute, formally fell within the control of the tsarist administrative state. The state attempted to maintain its standards of decency through administrative means by insisting upon students’ subservience, humility, orderliness, cleanliness, and proper appearance.143 Students, for their part, imbibed these values and demanded that their superiors treat them with honor and decency and show obedience to tsarist principles.144

The ideal in action In October 1848 in the Russian city of Kazan’ a series of duplicated letters signed ‘one of yours’ appeared on lampposts throughout the city. This letter issued a complaint against the chief student inspector of Kazan’ University, whose job it was to enforce the disciplinary codes and watch over the bodies, minds, and souls of Russia’s future servitors. The public letter was addressed to the Kazan’ superintendent and decried his choice of the much-despised Chief Inspector Lange as a serious betrayal of trust. The authors recalled a time long ago when ‘students served with respect and had reason to be obedient to the Tsar and to the Fatherland.’ They declared that they too were now prepared ‘to be obedient to the Tsar, to the Fatherland … [and] you gave us Lange.’145 They blamed the superintendent for failing to do his job: ‘The Tsar and the laws put you in this position, but you refuse to be a true father to young people. Instead, your affections are for this person Lange, who alienates all who wish to love their superiors and who want to love you.’146 In 1848, while students across Europe were engaged in protests for democracy and socialism, Russian university students in Kazan’ used the language of autocratic political culture to judge – and condemn – their superiors. This display of autocratic values by university students – although perhaps a particularly detailed and colorful example – was not an isolated incident. Students routinely used the language of the administrative ideal – decency, respect, loyalty – to appeal to the authorities on an individual basis as well.147 Whether students sincerely internalized or strategically spouted official values is difficult to gage. What is clear is that when trying to persuade members of officialdom, university students expressed themselves in language that reflected official values and was likely to appeal to their audiences. Ivan Koboliakov, while a student in Moscow, wrote to the superintendent requesting funds to visit his impoverished family members, who desperately needed their


son’s help. In his plea, this student celebrated his commitment to the autocracy and its values: ‘For every one of us who bears the title student … there is no sacrifice that we would not make for our country … [for] truth, autocracy and the Fatherland.’ Whether or not there were strategic considerations in his use of official ideology, he apparently had a firm grasp of the autocracy’s priorities and mobilized official rhetoric at a crucial juncture in his student career.148 This is precisely what impoverished Aleksandrov did when he found himself homeless after failing to pay the rent. He begged the inspector to change his status from self-supporting to state student. Aleksandrov asked the inspector in particular for the necessary funds to serve his Fatherland truly, morally, and with dignity: ‘Feeling in full measure that every true son of the Fatherland should be … steadfast in his loyalty … and devotion toward the highest thrown in his government … To be useful to the Fatherland … and to treat others with respect and honor.’149 Many students, hoping to save themselves from punishment declared, ‘I love my Fatherland and I want to serve as [one of its] son[s].’150 This type of patriotic declaration, even in the case of disloyal Polish students, apparently could convince officials. Such was the experience of Alexander Veishtort. The authorities banished him to Kazan’ from Vilna for ‘laugh[ing] at the Russian gentry.’ In his communications with the authorities, Veishtort claimed he had experienced a change of heart. During this (however orchestrated) transformation, the student issued a formal apology to the rector in Kazan’. ‘Imagine how unnecessary it was that people in our position as Polish youth would fight with Russian! What kind of usefulness for the Fatherland would that entail?’ In the end, the student succeeded in convincing the authorities of his devoted loyalty and the Kazan’ rector deemed him ‘a good Russian.’151 Articulating the administrative ideal could shield even a formerly disloyal Pole from the wrath of autocratic punishment. After the death of Nicholas I, despite the loosening of surveillance and censorship, students continued to rally around the values embedded within the administrative ideal. In Kazan’ – where in 1848 anonymous letter writers cried out in rage about their ‘scoundrel’ of an inspector – students persisted in their opposition to officials who failed to live up to autocratic ideals.152 The relaxing of restrictions only meant that their dissatisfaction grew louder and was less likely to be heard by the authorities. Becoming a Russian man, though, meant more than following official prescriptions. It involved – for inspectors, professors, and students alike


– emulating the administrative ideal, while simultaneously participating in arenas of unofficial sociability, whether drinking vodka or challenging an opponent to a duel. While wearing their three-cornered hats, young men had to successfully negotiate through this maze of often seemingly contradictory expectations. In university corridors and cavernous taverns, students were often guided by one another.

2 Tavern Sociability1

Remembering his student years in Moscow, Ia. I. Kostenetskii wrote that ‘the university should turn a youth not just into a simple chinovnik [bureaucrat], but into a man and a citizen … For that he needs … not only lectures and books … but also comradely society.’2 This juxtaposition of the figure of a ‘simple chinovnik’ with a ‘man and citizen’ highlights the degree to which the values of the administrative ideal did not offer a complete, fully satisfying definition of manhood for Russian university students. While students were educated by the university administration in an official ideology of masculinity based on order and decency, they also encountered competing models of what constituted acceptable behavior. One of the most powerful of these was the drunken comrade who spent his after-class hours in taverns, carousing with his fellows. Drinking, of course, has been a principal way of asserting masculinity in many historical and social contexts, not least among students. The willingness and ability to drink heavily has often been a way for young men to assert their status in a peer group, perhaps especially when an official prohibition is involved. Writing on students in antebellum colleges in the American South, for example, historian L. Ray Drinkwater explains how for many young men drinking ‘was an accepted (and even required) mode of masculine self-expression.’ Students who refused to participate would ‘jeopardize their self-worth and position among their peers.’3 Among Russian students, like the American students mentioned above, refusal to participate in drunken sociability meant risking emasculation.4 The historian Boris Chicherin recorded in his memoirs an incident from the 1840s that shows just how vital drinking was to students’ sense of masculine identity. Chicherin recalled that during a 39


break from classes, he and a number of other Moscow University students headed off to the dacha (country house) of one of their classmates, named Blagov, for a weekend of hunting and merry-making. When they reached the dacha, they took out several bottles of wine and began a long night of drinking – all except Blagov, that is, who had promised his mother that he and his friends would remain sober. When Blagov saw his guests drinking, he became sullen and withdrew to his room. Later, several of the students peeked inside Blagov’s room and found a different world: ‘wearing a nightcap with pink ribbons,’ Blagov was kneeling in front of an icon reciting his evening prayers. Chicherin found the contrast between the two scenes – the pious, submissive, and solitary Blagov, and his rowdy guests, drinking and laughing together – ‘staggering.’5 For the remainder of their trip, Chicherin explained, the students attempted to teach Blagov their ways of ‘debauchery’ and guide him on how to stand up to his mother. But the obstacles to re-emasculating Blagov were too great. His friends believed that he was overwhelmed by feminine influences. ‘Besides a strict mother, there was also a virtuous grandmother, and against their combined strength, Blagov felt himself completely feeble.’ From Chicherin we learn that Blagov never overcame his enfeeblement. Even though he married, he was unable to satisfy his wife. After she left him, Blagov had a mental breakdown and eventually became a monk.6 For those students who, unlike the unfortunate Blagov, participated in the rituals of manly drinking, the tavern and the city street were important locations for coming of age. In these informal, semi-public and public places, students educated one another in an unofficial school of masculinity based on impulsiveness and virility. Russian students’ drinking rituals were, in part, informal testing grounds. Those who did not wish to drink were perceived as outsiders, less virile, and, by extension less masculine. And those who did were celebrated among their peers. This alcohol-steeped, all-male world of tavern sociability was clearly at odds with the official prescriptions for restraint and decency found in official university codes of conduct and enforced by student inspectors. But, even as they tried to instill in their protégés the state’s values of orderly conduct, university administrators sometimes turned a blind eye or allowed second chances when students defied these values. If, as described in the previous chapter, officials assumed that the boys who entered universities were by nature prone to passionate and unruly behavior, they showed some

Tavern Sociability 41

leniency when these natural inclinations surfaced. Perhaps, as well, their sense of who they were and who they should be permitted the drunken comrade to rear his head on occasion.

The tavern and the street In his article on freemasonry and the public in the second half of the eighteenth century, Douglas Smith discusses the rise of a ‘physical public sphere’ in Russian urban life. Membership in these elite eighteenth-century venues of ‘social interaction’ hinged, as Smith points out, on norms of behavior – the way one spoke, dressed, and expressed oneself.7 Tavern sociability, whether inside the pub or outside on the street, was arguably an extension of this growing public arena. Participation in tavern culture meant that students socialized in public venues and behaved in ways that defied the rules of polite society. The places where students drank and socialized varied, including local bars, private apartments, and the streets.8 Students structured their daily routines around taverns, located near the university. There was never any need to wear a watch while sitting in the tavern because students came and went on the hour, with the timetable of classes.9 Before and after lectures, they spent hours in cavernous taverns where they drank spirits, beer, and wine and smoked ‘to their hearts’ content.’10 The tavern has a central place in memoir accounts of university days. Memoirs are replete with fond reminiscences of days spent in comradely society in the pub, which was ‘filled with a cloud of smoke and always had a crowd of students.’11 Although memoir accounts inevitably are tinged with nostalgia and shaped by memory and epistolary conventions, the centrality of the tavern in the lives of university students is not in doubt. Both the archival record and the sheer volume of reminiscences suggest that Russia’s future servitors spent an important part of their student lives in taverns. The two most popular Moscow student pubs – Zheleznyi and Britaniia – were located close to the university itself. As one memoirist remarked, Britaniia was ‘a simple tavern, standing directly across [the street] from the university.’12 In fact, it was so very close that Moscow University Chief Student Inspector Stephen Platonovich Nakhimov would look through his window and see them ‘swim the waters of Mokhovaia street’ – the street that the university was located on – to reach the pub and then watch as they sat and drank on the pub’s porch.13 Zheleznyi was near the university; it was so named because it was located under a store that sold iron goods, run by merchant Pechkin.14


Although open to a wider clientele than students alone, taverns located near the university gave students the opportunity to create niches of exclusive sociability within the broader public arena. Students – with the help of clientele and proprietors – transformed rooms in their favorite cafés and bars into their own spaces, from which outsiders were excluded. In the early 1850s, students in St Petersburg gathered at the ‘Café Vasilii’ as well as at the ‘Konditerskaia Kinshe’ located on the corner of Bolshoi Prospect on Vasilevskii Island, near the university. At the ‘Konditerskaia Kinshe,’ a whole crowd of students formed a ‘club’ and invaded the lower room, talked, and played billiards.15 The Moscow tavern Zheleznyi had a special room set aside for students and their antics. Here they ‘felt absolutely at home’ and passed their time in their own ‘student dormitory’ (as they called it) into which no one else would come. A frequenter of Zheleznyi, F. I. Buslaev, recalled that for students ‘there was a special room, cut off from other rooms, with an exit into a big hall with an organ, or a music machine.’16 In a sentimentalized portrait of tavern life, Ivan Dmitriev emphasized how in his favorite haunt, Britaniia, there was everything needed to create a ‘university spirit: there were the brothers, the speech, and the feelings of friendship.’17 Dmitriev described a scene in the studentcentered tavern on an average day during the academic year: students sat around Britaniia’s tables discussing their lectures, reading articles to one another, laughing, and drinking wine. On a typical day, students devoured pirogi (stuffed pastries) at one table, while at another a medical student regaled his comrades with a tale about knocking over cadavers in the university’s anatomical theater. In another corner of the pub, a student ravenously ate his meal, having just returned from three days in the university prison-room where he had been given only bread and water. In the evenings, Dmitriev and his friends feasted, and toasted one another for hours. They drank to each other – ‘to their brothers’ – and to ‘beautiful women! beautiful women!’ and drunkenly sang of the ‘green pockets’ of their beloved billiards. Even when they were short of money, Dmitriev recalled, students pooled their resources and joined in drunken revelry.18 Tavern proprietors were known to accommodate these celebrations of youthful comradeship among students. At seven in the evening, the owners of Britaniia closed the doors to all but the students. At the tavern Eliseeva in St Petersburg, student drunkenness was so common that the proprietor had to concoct a policy to contain their antics. After several occasions when students had been very rowdy, they


agreed to a limit on their behavior: whenever they had the urge to throw bottles out of the window (which evidently they frequently did), they would throw them out on the courtyard side, rather than onto the street. That way, at least, the tavern owner protected himself from unwelcome visits by the police.19 From the semi-public realm of their cozy taverns, drunken students ventured out into the public world of the streets. Once on the streets, students often turned to mischief and targeted the codes and institutions of polite society. In his memoirs, Moscow University student F. I. Buslaev described how, after evenings drinking at Britaniia or Zheleznyi, he and his friends went looking for trouble. Buslaev recounted one winter evening when, after many hours in the bar, he and several friends harassed a carriage driver who was cruising the streets near to the university looking for business. Even though the carriage was meant only for a pair of passengers at a time, the students stopped the driver and demanded that they be permitted to drive and ride in the carriage all at once. Eventually they convinced the beleaguered driver–partly through intimidation–to hand over the reins and sit below while a student sat on top of the horse and guided the drozhki around the garden and back to the university. The humiliation of the driver was part of the students’ adventure. ‘And so we rode,’ Buslaev wrote, ‘under the light of the moon, through the Alexandrovskii Gardens, laughing all the way.’20 Many such misadventures involving Buslaev and his classmates took place in the Moscow Alexandrovskii Gardens, which were between the tavern and the university. On St Nicholas Day in 1834, for instance, the same group of Moscow University students took part in the most ‘curious specimen of their drinking bouts.’ That evening, students met at the tavern Zheleznyi, in their usual ‘dormitory’ room, and began to drink all that they could afford. After several hours of celebration, they left the warmth of the tavern, made their way outdoors, and challenged one another to a test of bravery. Each student was dared to walk arm-in-arm with a partner across a snow-covered frozen pond in the near-by gardens. Accepting the challenge, the students trudged across the snow and ice sliding and falling, while they ‘shouted and laughed and sang songs.’ When they arrived at the university, they were too drunk to climb the flights of stairs leading to their dormitory quarters. Buslaev, the eldest, felt responsible for the group and called for assistance; soldiers soon arrived and helped them to their rooms.21 Their public display of intoxicated rowdiness earned them punishment from the student inspector the next day.22


Aggressive behavior Drinking fueled not only the high-spirited mischief that Buslaev described, but also aggressive and destructive behavior, from bar-room brawls to harassment of and attacks on government officials. Examples of student violence and aggression are abundant. By fighting each other and assaulting bystanders and authority figures, students asserted their courage and virility, acting out a masculine ideal that was at odds with the model of the obedient and orderly servitor. After slipping off campus to the tavern for a few drinks, students engaged one another in scuffles, sometimes playful and other times not. A Kazan’ University student, Ivan Klobukov, left the university one morning without permission from the authorities. He returned later that evening hopelessly drunk, marched directly up to his room in the student dormitory, and – in front of a group of classmates – struck his fellow student and roommate, Nicholas Kudash.23 Although it is unclear from the disciplinary report why he punched Kudash, no doubt his actions gained him a certain amount of respect in the eyes of his peers. Like Klobukov, Kazan’ University students Alexander Bobin and Alexander Levingof repeatedly left campus without the inspector’s permission and returned drunk on spirits. Often, these evenings ended with a fight between the two. On one occasion, they rammed and broke their dormitory door.24 Drunken students often turned their violent impulses not only on each other, but on representatives of polite society. Police and university authorities frequently caught students walking the streets and initiating fights with passers-by. In 1832, for example, a pair of drunken Moscow students were spotted stumbling into a restaurant looking for a fight. Noticing they were inebriated, as the police report stated, the restaurant proprietor asked them to leave. One of the students, reportedly offended, retaliated by hitting a patron with a wooden walking stick. Meanwhile, the other student smashed several windows with his bare fist, causing his blood to splatter everywhere.25 Moscow University disciplinary records show that one morning in 1839 Edward Ian and Mikhail Kropotov, notorious troublemakers, approached the private home of a wealthy Moscow merchant and began to pound on the windows. Hearing the noise, the groundsman came to the door to speak with the prowlers. Forcing his way into the house, Kropotov hit the groundsman who began to shout for help at the top of his lungs. The students ran off.26 The presence of women was sometimes a catalyst for violence. Peter Kupdosov, a Kazan’ University student, found himself dancing with an


attractive woman near the end of a public masquerade ball in January 1845. An officer approached the couple on the dance floor and began to flirt with the woman. Rudely staring at Kupdosov, he suggested to the woman that ‘she [was] not in the proper company’ and ought to leave her partner and dance with him. Upon hearing those words, Kupdosov defended his manliness by punching his rival in the face.27 In October 1837, a Moscow University student named Vasilev, his girlfriend, and several student friends were walking around town when they came upon a certain Jewish merchant, Rosenberg, with his wife and baby. One of the students carelessly shoved Rosenberg’s wife as he walked past her, forcing her to her knees with the baby cradled in her arms. Rosenberg shouted that the students had no right to push his wife. Vasilev defended his friend’s honor by punching Rosenberg three times in the face, even as his friends tried to restrain him. In the presence of his girlfriend, he could not allow himself to be humiliated by such a public rebuke – perhaps especially from a Jew.28 Women themselves were not immune from students’ aggressiveness. An onlooker reported an incident in Moscow in 1837, when the student Alexander Ivanov eyed a woman suggestively while walking across Lubianka Square. He approached her seductively, and she pushed him away. His dignity wounded, Ivanov slapped her with his hand and she fell to the ground.29 In some cases, students deliberately targeted the authorities and their institutions. One evening after a university celebration in Moscow, a group of students, decked out in their special university celebratory uniforms, retreated to a tavern close by. Leaving the tavern drunk, they proceeded to a nearby train station. Taking advantage of their ceremonial garb, they tricked a railway officer into believing that they were conducting an official inspection: they knocked on his booth, and insisted that he step out and salute them in their uniforms. They required a series of salutes and – to mock and humiliate him further – insisted on giving him ten kopecks each time that he saluted.30 The Church, too, was not immune from attack. During the final week of the Easter fast in 1839, Petr Aristov, a Kazan’ University student, invited his fellow students to meet at his apartment to celebrate his birthday and feast on wine and food he had received from his father. One student, P. F. Vistengof, who initially refused to join in the drinking, recalled in his memoir that he ultimately succumbed to pressure from his host and drank himself into oblivion. Although Vistengof himself had no memory of what happened next, university disciplinary records report that the group left Aristov’s apartment and


went roaming through the streets of Kazan’. Stopping at a church near the university, they began to break windows with their bare hands and with stones. Although accounts vary, they may have broken as many as eight, and only scattered when a priest called for the police.31 On a spring evening in 1846, a group of students gathered in Kazan’ to celebrate the graduation of one of their comrades, named Kirilov. Already tipsy, they congregated in the garden of the building where the graduating student lived. One of the residents summoned the police due to the disturbances caused by the raucous students. The first officer to arrive, Nicholas Fadeev, himself visibly drunk, immediately tried to force the young men out of the garden. When the perpetrators held their ground, Fadeev went after Kirilov. In retaliation, two students pushed the policeman to the ground, punched him in the eye, the head, the ears, and chest, then fled from the scene of the crime. (Fadeev spent three weeks in the hospital recovering from the incident.) But while these two students were placed under arrest and detained in the student prison-room, the other students took to the streets that evening and continued their merrymaking.32 Such clashes could put the university administration in a difficult spot. This was the case in 1854, when eight drunken Kazan’ University students allegedly approached a police booth in the old quarter of the city and attacked a police officer, who was standing inside. The officer who came to the aid of his colleague received a beating from the student crowd as well. After the attack, the students dispersed and hid under cover of night. After the fact, university officials claimed that the aggressors were not students. City police investigators, although failing to prove that students had been the perpetrators, assured the Minister of Education and the Third Section that they were. While this discrepancy caused consternation among those involved, the superintendent of the Kazan’ Educational District was forced to admit that, in general, surveillance of students had weakened, and for that reason it was impossible to say with certainty who the culprits were. He promised that for the sake of ‘the achievement of the goals and expectations of the Imperial Emperor’ measures would be taken to improve control over student behavior.33

The university and the bottle Drinking and brawling violated the norms of respectable, decent manliness expressed by university codes of conduct and, as the above examples demonstrate, could lead to open defiance of state authority.


But, while assaults on police officers unsurprisingly provoked investigations and arrests, more routine incidents of drunkenness and rowdiness generally stayed within the universities’ disciplinary systems. And the pattern of actions by university officials suggests an ambivalent attitude toward students’ lapses from the administrative ideal. To be sure, the universities monitored students’ drunken escapades and attempted to impose discipline for the most egregious misbehavior. Student inspectors, for example, were charged with preventing their protégés from living in buildings with bars or ‘suspicious restaurants’ and with following them into taverns, which were at times strictly forbidden to students.34 The 1833 version of the ‘Instructions to Moscow Students,’ for instance, stated that ‘All pupils at the university are strictly forbidden entrance to taverns, coffee houses, and all places where strong spirits are served and billiards are played.’35 Nonetheless, officials tended, at times, to have a high degree of understanding – and at least a mild acceptance – of these transgressions. Perhaps among the more blatant endorsements of students’ transgressions was expressed a year after the Tsar’s death: ‘Inevitably it occurs that students will be wild, it is not possible to avoid completely with such a tremendous number of young men.’36 The men charged with overseeing the university’s civilizing mission seemed at times ready to accept that the orderly, obedient men they were training would keep at least a streak of youthful abandon. Officials acted under the premise that some degree of raucous behavior was unavoidable and that young men required some amount of leeway in this regard. This somewhat lenient attitude toward student drunkenness and displays of disorderly virility, even debauchery, is reflected in the authorities’ willingness to offer these young men the opportunity to repent their crimes and gain the right to a second chance.37 Perpetrators of disobedient, violent, and drunken acts were most often given the opportunity to improve themselves before severe punishments were levied. 38 This was certainly the case when a group of Kazan’ students in 1854 appeared visibly intoxicated while praying before church icons. After insisting that they return immediately to the university, the inspector let them go. Without evidence of previous disobedience, the inspector was not compelled to punish them.39 Next time, though, the students might not be so lucky. In all cases, previous behavior played a key role in the punishments imposed on students; the fewer the infractions, the lighter the sentence and vice versa. When, in 1848, a group of Kazan’ students disrupted the wedding ceremony of the sister of a classmate at a local


church, only ‘those with previous records of inappropriate behavior’ were harshly punished.40 The clean record of one of the ring leaders, Vinogradov, brought him a significantly reduced punishment: one week in the kartser on bread and water rather than the lifetime of military service imposed under other circumstances. Another of the instigators was let go by the superintendent ‘because of his good morals and praiseworthy past behavior.’ Prior infractions meant harsher punishments. Belginovich, unlike his co-instigator Vinogradov, had a long history of drunkenness and rowdiness. As a consequence, after this incident, he was sent to military service. In general, those with a record of uncivil and disrespectful behavior were given ‘the full punishment’ for the same crimes.41 Those who refused to reform and persisted in their defiance of the rules ultimately received the harshest punishment. This was the case with Nicholas Mitinskii in St Petersburg and Georgii Stadler in Kazan’, each of whom repeatedly – and falsely – claimed to have sobered up. In 1832 Nicholas Mitinskii left the university without permission on several occasions, stayed out overnight, and returned drunk. Although initially threatened with military service, Mitinskii was allowed to remain and complete his studies, so that he might cure his ‘weakness’ and pursue his professional ambition to become a teacher. Although he did graduate, Mitinskii ended up a soldier nonetheless. Unable to overcome his alcohol habit, Mitinskii continued to drink even in his post as a schoolteacher. On more than one occasion, he appeared intoxicated before his students. Given his history, the authorities could show no further leniency and sent him to serve as a low-ranking soldier .42 The saga of the unreformable Georgii Stadler also resulted in military service. The son of a French nobleman, Stadler repeatedly displayed ‘insolence’ toward the authorities. He routinely left the university premises without authorization, arrived in the classroom drunk, and showed no remorse when questioned by the inspector. After his initial impudence in February 1830, the superintendent wanted him expelled; however, the rector intervened and successfully pleaded on Stadler’s behalf. By August of the same year, Stadler had been caught several times for the same crime and when he encouraged his classmates to accompany him on one of his binges, the authorities were less sympathetic; instead of his usual stint in the student prison-room, he was sent to serve in the military.43 The mixed messages that students received from the authorities when they misbehaved sometimes went beyond mere tolerance on the part of authorities for drinking and fighting.44 Not surprisingly, there were


some in the university hierarchy who themselves were known drunks.45 There were others who encouraged, even mentored, students in drunken and rowdy behavior. Moreover, police reports began to surface in the years immediately following Nicholas’s death, which documented faculty members carousing with students.46 In at least one case, a student inspector – the individual most directly charged with overseeing and improving students’ behavior – turned out to be schooling the students in the customs of tavern sociability and drunken manhood. The notorious Platon Stepanovich Nakhimov, Chief Inspector of Moscow University in the 1830s and 1840s, provides a poignant and well-documented example of a university administrator functioning as both a disciplinarian and a participant in student drinking culture. In students’ reminiscences, part of Nakhimov’s appeal centered on his weakness for the bottle. Students proudly circulated the rumor that he had worked out a system to secure alcohol for his walk home each day. As he reached a corner near the university, Nakhimov would wave his scarf to signal to his assistant to pour him rum out of a window of an adjoining window into his glass.47 Nakhimov was lenient toward his protégés’ drinking habits and mentored them in exactly how to consume alcohol. One evening in the popular Moscow student tavern Britaniia, Nakhimov spotted a group of students gulping glasses of dark liquid and asked them what they were drinking. Fearing a severe reprimand from the university authority figure, they nervously answered ‘tea’! The inspector inquired with disappointment whether it was truly just tea and went on to taste each of their drinks. After taking numerous healthy gulps, he left the tavern without punishing or admonishing the young men. The next morning, however, one of the student ‘tea’ drinkers was summoned to the inspector’s office, where he was sternly asked, ‘what kind of rubbish were you drinking?’ After the student claimed that it was spiked punch, Nakhimov began scolding: I know it was punch. You all had punch. But you, what exactly did you have? The devil knows. You must have poured two spoons of rum in a glass with tea and then you had some kind of dishwater. Is that what you call punch? Go to the prison-room! … They drank punch and you drank dishwater!48 Using his resources as a representative of the university disciplinary system, Nakhimov sent the student to the prison-room to contemplate how to make his drink stronger next time.


Nakhimov favored students who were able to hold their liquor and dared to take risks. He had a particularly jocular relationship with one Novak, a notorious student drunk. When Nakhimov caught Novak stumbling around campus in a drunken state, he asked the student to breathe on him to establish whether he had been drinking. Novak insisted that his jaw was stuck and, as a result, he was unable to open his mouth very wide. Accepting Novak’s medical excuse, Nakhimov would let him go. The two conspired together and went through the official motions, but ultimately circumvented the rules. In this instance, this bond between generations – mentor and pupil – was stronger than Nakhimov’s sense of official disciplinary duty.49 Nakhimov also helped students hide their smoking habits from the authorities. While making his usual rounds of the student dormitory halls, he noticed that in one of the closets all of the students’ coats reeked of tobacco. The next day, he called two students to his office and offered them tips on how to rid their coats of the smell and so avoid being reprimanded by the rector or other junior inspectors. ‘Walk around the university building three times and then return home … this will rid the coats of the odor,’ he explained.50 By teaching students the arts of drinking and smoking, Nakhimov acted as an intermediary between the authorities and the students and as a role model, ‘a defender, and a friend,’ for the young men.51 He looked out for their interests vis-à-vis their professors, the administration, and the Church. Students turned to Nakhimov in moments of personal or academic crisis. Upon receiving a low mark in one of his lecture courses, an outraged student approached his beloved mentor and bitterly complained and not so subtly asked for help. ‘Look at my mark!’ he shouted. Nakhimov knew that the student was begging him to intervene on his behalf and talk with the professor. His initial response was gruff: ‘I know you are mocking me,’ said the inspector, ‘now get out of here!’ Several hours later, however, he approached the student and reported with some triumph: ‘You have a four!’ The student, now humbled by the news, replied in a quiet affectionate voice: ‘Thank you P. S.’52 Nakhimov’s duties included not only strictly guarding ‘order, discipline, and … propriety’ but also defending students in their clashes with the police. Students knew that if they were in trouble with the city authorities, they should ‘first seek out the help of their beloved inspector.’53 Moscow student Ivan Dmitriev remarked that Nakhimov had a well-known, ‘word-of-mouth’ contract with the students, which included interceding with the university priest.54 Students, for example,


approached Nakhimov for help when the priest forbade a pair of rowdy students from taking communion during the Easter fast. When the priest refused Nakhimov’s plea for leniency, saying, ‘No, Jesus Christ won’t let me,’ the inspector went over the priest’s head and consulted with the necessary church authorities. Eventually, the students were allowed to take communion.55 To protect his protégés from the city and university authorities, Nakhimov habitually snatched drunken students from the streets. On holidays in particular he roamed around the most popular student spots to ensure that ‘students would not loaf about drunken without their uniforms and three-cornered hats and swords.’56 During a holiday celebration, Nakhimov spotted a medical student hopelessly drunk and sitting on the street hunched up wearing neither uniform nor sword. The student begged to be left alone. The inspector refused to let him remain there and hauled him back to the university prison-room. The student’s punishment was not for breaking the university’s rules of conduct, but rather for his stupidity in appearing in public in such an intoxicated state, ‘especially on a holiday.’57 Nakhimov was the most popular and trusted inspector among the students. As one student remembered, ‘each student stored in his heart grateful memories’ of him after graduation.58 Commentaries on Nakhimov’s positive qualities abound in students’ diaries and memoirs. Ivan Dmitriev remembered how ‘his personality was loving and extremely original. He was soft, warm, sympathetic.’59 During his tenure as inspector, Nakhimov ‘comfortably lived among the student youth’ and they were so fond of him that ‘to be reprimanded by him and in general to look into his eyes after an embarrassing scandal … was difficult.’60 Nakhimov’s authority stemmed in part from his personal relationship with the students. These feelings of affection between inspector and pupils helped to foster attachments across generations and ‘official lines.’ He was, in one student’s account, like a father figure. In their reminiscences, students use familial language to describe their feelings for him. ‘Nakhimov,’ A. N. Afanas’ev recalled, ‘was loved from the soul and he loved the students, like his own children.’61 Despite the formal distance between inspector and students, Nakhimov treated his protégés as if they ‘were his native family … he honestly and ardently loved the students.’62 Nakhimov emerges from the historical record as a representative of the state’s administrative ideal on the one hand, and a mentor in the rules of tavern sociability on the other. He embodied the state in the


eyes of his protégés while simultaneously encouraging them to break the rules established by the autocracy. The resurrection of liminal figures like Nakhimov allows us to see how the autocratic state, even at the pinnacle of its autocratic control, was never a monolithic abstract entity, but rather a collection of individuals with contradictory impulses and loyalties. How does a man like Platon Stapanovich Nakhimov – father figure, drunken friend, and university inspector – fit into well-worn historical categories of state and society? He does not; indeed, he inhabited both. The world of the university – for inspectors and students alike – required a balancing act. A student had to behave respectably in one moment and hurl a stone at church windows in the next. He had to show humility before his superiors and God, while asserting his authority vis-à-vis those beneath him on the social scale, whether in professional status (city officials) or in gender status (mother/grandmother). How could he know when to act the obedient servitor, the civilized gentleman, or the drunken comrade? He had only to look to his mentors, who would guide him through this maze. The lack of appropriate mentoring – as in the case of the poor Blagov who chose his mother and grandmother for guidance – could lead to ostracism by one’s peers, or worse, to emasculation. If, however, a student was able to show loyalty to the autocracy while consuming vodka and punching his rival in the face, he likely would have been celebrated by his peers and tolerated (if not congratulated) by the authorities.

3 Fraternities, Dueling, and Student Honor

Korporatsiia taught turbulent youth … the limits of prudence and respectability. A. A. Chumikov1 Soon after 19-year-old Ivan Belov arrived at St Petersburg University in the 1840s to begin his studies, he found himself in a student apartment, crowded with young men wearing orange, white, and black uniforms. At the sound of the command ‘Silentium!’ the chatter and laughter stopped abruptly, and the young men listened in silence as they were reminded of their collective responsibility to preserve their honor, ‘without blemish or reproach.’2 The scene Belov described was a meeting of members of a student corporation (korporatsiia). Belov’s memoir offers a glimpse into the little-known world of the Russian student corporation, which was a significant factor in the lives of some of St Petersburg’s students. The corporations, which were based on the model of German student brotherhoods, were propagated in Russian universities by former students from the University of Dorpat, a primarily German city on the Baltic coast, which was annexed by the Russian Empire in 1721.3 In student corporations, as in taverns, young men acted according to definitions of masculinity that they forged from the broader culture, rather than following prescriptions handed down from the university administration. But while tavern life was governed by informal notions of manly behavior, the corporation relied on a code of honor as explicit as the universities’ own disciplinary codes. Historians of Europe have highlighted the connection between honor and masculinity in the modern age.4 Writing on post-revolutionary French society, Robert Nye stresses the ways in which ‘honor is 53


a masculine concept’ that has ‘regulated relations among men, summed up the prevailing ideals of manliness, and marked the boundaries of masculine comportment.’5 In the aftermath of the French revolutionary era, manly virtue – especially for members of the emergent middles classes – was increasingly linked not only to willpower and courage, but also to honor. Maintaining honor required a man to adhere to the rules in a variety of contexts, including – and perhaps most especially – all-male associations.6 This was certainly true of student associations within the European university. Ute Frevert, writing on German student societies, explains that student associations ‘inculcated masculinity through honor codes;’ by following the rules of their fraternal associations, men ‘were made out of boys.’7 Notions of honor have strong roots in Russian society, as well. Nancy Kollmann, Irina Reyfman, and Ia. A. Gordin have all detailed how the concept of personal honor helped regulate social relations in both Muscovy and post-Petrine Russia, even as the idea shifted to give greater emphasis to an individual’s actions and attitudes, and less to one’s place in a fixed social hierarchy. By the late eighteenth century, and into the early years of the nineteenth, Russian understandings of honor, influenced by an influx of translations of Western European literature on behavior and morals, came to encompass both internal and external qualities, both inner morality and outward manners.8 However it was defined in a particular cultural context, honor, as Kollmann writes, was ‘an independent discourse that individuals could manipulate, recreate, modify.’9 It was something emanating from the broader society that gave individuals, outside the state, the agency to judge their peers. By exploring the nature of student corporate life in St Petersburg, this chapter demonstrates that honor was a discourse that was available to university students in Nicholaevan Russia.

Student self-organization in the Russian Empire Formal student societies had been part of Russian university life since the founding of Moscow University in 1755. Two years after Empress Elizabeth (1741-62) decreed the opening of the university, Moscow students organized themselves into a formal debating club, which met one Saturday each month. During Catherine the Great’s rule (1762-96), scholarly societies proliferated. Against the backdrop of the Enlightenment and the spread of salon culture among members of educated Russian society, students formed their own literary circles in Moscow. One such society established in 1787 developed a set of

Fraternities, Dueling, and Student Honor 55

formal regulations and published a volume of students’ scholarly endeavors. In 1789, at the moment of revolutionary upheaval in France, students in Moscow formed their own literary society, whose goals echoed those of the autocracy. The society’s statutes ‘instructed its members to perfect [one another’s] manners and morals’ while ‘correct[ing] the heart, purify[ing] the mind and inspiring the general cultivation of taste.’10 The quarter-century of Alexander’s rule also witnessed the birth and death of numerous student societies, many of which were created under the auspices of the university and given the official approval of the Tsar himself. On the whole, these groups stayed within the spirit of the 1804 All-University Statute, by supporting the autocracy’s agenda and demanding that their members utter ‘nothing against religion, morals or the government.’11 But, although students complied with the mandate to reinforce official values in their organizations, many also attempted to stake out some degree of autonomy. The Kazan’ Society for the Perfection of Oratory and Written Works, for example, held both inclusive, public meetings as well as exclusive, private ones.12 Even before Alexander’s death, the government was turning away from a relatively permissive attitude toward student organizations.13 Under Nicholas I, the fear of the ‘hidden contagion’14 of revolutionary conspiracy led to the creation of the Third Section of His Majesty’s Chancellery, which was charged with ferreting out subversive plots of any kind. The Third Section and other arms of the state apparatus not only cracked down on oppositional groups (such as the ‘Petrashevtsy’ in 1848–9), but also established surveillance over apparently more benign forms of social self-organization.15 During the late 1840s, for example, the Moscow city police monitored a group of university students whose literary evenings were suspected of masking a conspiracy.16 Similarly, in 1831 in Moscow, once the university authorities discovered the student-run club ‘Literary Society,’ which held its meetings at a university lecturer’s quarters and included a half-dozen students, they rounded up the participants, confiscated their books, and expelled several of the students.17 The possibility of expulsion by the authorities for participation in a literary society – especially after 1848 – loomed on the horizon.18 Such official concern, however, did not go as far as preventing students from meeting for literary and theatrical gatherings, which continued to play an important role in student life through much of the 1830s and 1840s. For some, these meetings would provide alternative lessons and became, as one student recalled, ‘a kind of school for me.’19


In their memoirs, students highlighted the long hours they spent together in these sometimes small, sometimes informal literary and theatre societies. In Moscow in the early 1830s, a group of Moscow students – including N. A. Argillaner, P. I. Prozorov, and future literary critique Vissaron Belinskii – formed a theatrical and literary society centered in their dormitory room no. 11, named accordingly ‘Literary Society of Number Eleven.’ In their room the students held weekly meetings and read their original works as well as the dramas of Schiller and Shakespeare. Moreover, these students performed plays – complete with costumes – sometimes in front of an audience of peers, professors, and at least on one occasion, the inspector.20 This society also created its own, however loosely defined, structure. Prozorov recalled: ‘In our society we had no president, only a secretary who had to compile the essays.’21 Such autonomous interactions often occurred in students’ living quarters. ‘Here,’ in the dormitory, a Moscow student in the 1840s, A. N. Afanas’ev remembered, ‘we had evening gatherings, concerts; we even organized dances, of course only among ourselves …. What a huge difference in the real life of a student stipender.’22 This type of semi-formal society had counterparts outside the dormitories, whether in a Moscow boarding house or in the private residences of self-supporting students.23 By far the most famous form of student self-organization under Nicholas I was the informal circle (kruzhok) (discussed in chapter 4) in which friends gathered at regular intervals in private quarters for both convivial and intellectual pursuits.24 Memoirists and circle members like Pavel Annenkov, in The Remarkable Decade, and Alexander Herzen, in his autobiography My Past and Thoughts, described the kruzhok as a key institution in the birth of the radical intelligentsia – a place where young men in educational institutions could form intense bonds of friendship, discuss ideas, and nurture each other’s antagonism to the regime. Besides their political significance, as one of the birthplaces of the radical intelligentsia, kruzhki were a site of philosophical exchange, lively conviviality, and – for many – the cultivation of individual intimate friendships. For its participants, the kruzhok was a sphere of autonomous social activity, away from the classroom and the watchful eye of the student inspector. Semi-public literary gatherings and the more private kruzhki were two arenas in which groups of students managed to organize themselves informally and pursue shared interests within the interstices of the Nicholaevan regime.25 For a group of St Petersburg University


students, another kind of institution, the fraternal corporation, provided a more formal context for association.

Student corporations in the Russian Empire Whether due to the scattered evidence or the perception that it was a mere ‘imitation’ of German student corporate life, the Russian student corporation in the nineteenth-century university has been largely ignored by historians.26 Yet, traces of student corporate culture exist from universities across the Empire, beginning in the 1820s. By the mid-1830s, it was estimated that one fifth of the St Petersburg University student population, approximately 50 young men, belonged to one corporate association or another.27 Although it is difficult to guess with precision the extent of the influence of corporate culture in St Petersburg beyond its 50 members, memoir literature and official sources suggest that it played a central role in the lives of its members.28 The evidence for Moscow is scarcer, and it seems safe to say that corporations operated to a lesser extent there than in the capital. The hub of student corporate life in the Russian Empire was neither St Petersburg nor Moscow, but Dorpat. Dating to 1632, the University of Dorpat operated intermittently until 1710 and opened its doors again in 1802, as part of Tsar Alexander I’s sweeping educational reforms. In the nineteenth century, the majority of the Dorpat students were of Baltic German descent, and German was the primary language of both the tavern and the classroom (most professors were German as well). Despite Minister of Education Sergei Uvarov’s attempts in the 1830s and 1840s to require the use of the Russian language and the hiring of Russian faculty – as part of the Official Nationality policy – few changes occurred. Throughout the Nicholaevan period, a small minority of students and professors spoke Russian.29 Almost as soon as Dorpat University re-opened in 1802, student corporations began to appear. The Dorpat corporations reflected broader patterns of corporate life at German universities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Until the early nineteenth century, German student culture was dominated by dueling and drinking associations organized along the lines of regional affiliation (Landsmanschaft). The Landsmanschaften had roots in ancient regional student fraternities. They were often very selective with regard to the social origins of their members, and they were explicitly apolitical in their goals. In approximately 1815, another organizational structure, the Burschenschaft association, emerged on the German student scene. Less socially elitist


than the Landsmanschaften, the Burschenschaft societies boasted that they admitted members from all social strata and regional affiliations, with the exception of Jews. Under the slogan ‘honor, freedom, and Fatherland,’ Burschenschaft members wanted to lift ‘the student from schoolboy to citizen.’30 In Dorpat, the first corporate associations (1803–4) divided students according to their academic department, but over the next decade these groupings metamorphosed into regional associations, based on students’ place of origin, echoing the elitist German Landsmanschaft structure. The two most prominent groupings were the Ruteniia (Russians) and the Baltiki (Baltic Germans).31 Landsmanschaft associations, though, did not remain Dorpat students’ only option for long. By the late 1820s, Burschenschaft societies were in full swing at the university. By the start of the next decade, many students had abandoned the more elitist Landsmanschaften in favor of the Burschenschaft unions based on the ‘complete equality of relations among students.’32 In 1833, for instance, the Third Section issued a report that confirmed that since 1827 there had been so-called ‘secret societies’ with the name Burschenschaft in operation. These societies, the Third Section reported, had memberships of approximately 150 students and were heavily influenced by German student customs. The language used in the Dorpat korporatsiia hierarchy was German – from the naming of members to the toasting to brotherhood (bruderschaft). 33 Although the Dorpat corporations clearly sprang from German culture, it is noteworthy that Russian students at the university also participated. Pavel Tveritinov recalled in his memoir that Russian students at Dorpat, after congregating on Sundays at the Orthodox Church in the city, formed their own corporations. 34 What seems to have exposed Russian students at other universities to the German corporate model was, ironically enough, an official campaign against the Dorpat corporations. In 1833, the Dorpat University administration, together with the Third Section, discovered the existence of the Burschenschaft associations. The Burschenschaften, as unregistered groups, were considered ‘secret’ and were therefore unlawful. The corporations were formally disbanded, and Third Section Head Benkendorf and Minister of Education Uvarov ordered that 17 of the ringleaders be expelled and forbidden to continue their studies at other universities. This punishment was necessary to satisfy the Tsar, ‘who found the very word Burschenschaft offensive.’35 In early 1835, however, the expelled students were allowed to resume their studies at any Russian university except Dorpat.


Memoirs and official correspondences suggest that the arrival of these German and Russian students from Dorpat was the main stimulus for the formation of corporations in St Petersburg and Moscow.36 In 1836, Dorpat students had been admitted to St Petersburg University, and had in all likelihood brought their Burschenschaft statutes, written in German and translated into Russian, with them.37 A. A. Chumikov, recalling his days as a St Petersburg University student, wrote that the appearance of corporations at the university dated from the arrival of the former Dorpat students.38 E. A. Matisen, also a korporant in St Petersburg, highlighted this linkage between Dorpat and St Petersburg in 1837: Youthful life … demanded its own laws, and it began to develop them from the example of German universities, especially Dorpat, where many students came from … and brought with them Dorpat’s customs and independence, acquiring various factions with their own meetings [skhodki], gatherings [komershi], and duels …. They brought German comment, in other words, student customary rights.39 Moreover, when the Minister of Education discovered the network of corporations in St Petersburg in 1844, one of the most important members’ of the societies in St Petersburg had come from Dorpat.40 German-influenced corporate culture seems to have arrived in Moscow even earlier. In 1833, while investigating rumors of a so-called secret student society in Moscow, the Ministry of Education found that one of the prominent members of a Moscow corporation, Joseph Kol’reif, had just arrived from Dorpat.41 Although descriptions of Russian corporate life are scarce, there are fragments of memoirs, police records, university disciplinary reports, and corporate statutes to help piece together the structures and values of student corporations. The majority of St Petersburg korporanty in the 1830s organized themselves into three main groups, Ruteniia (Russians), Baltiki (Baltic Germans), and ‘Aristocrats,’ although there is only brief mention of the last group in the official or memoir sources.42 Ruteniia wore orange, white, and black uniforms, while Baltiki wore blue, white, and gold. In addition, the Ruteniia members wore a cap with a high military crown, while the Baltiki wore a cap with a lower crown in the Dorpat style.43 Beyond these two groups, the aristocratic population of St Petersburg University was on the rise in the 1830s and early 1840s and, at least according to one observer, these students


banded together in a society of their own (the only name that appears in the archival records for this society is ‘the Aristocrats’).44 The rules (comment) for the Burshenschaft organization – originating in Dorpat and brought to St Petersburg – defined the overall structure, membership, positions of leadership, and the day-to-day operations of the corporate associations. There were general meetings twice during the academic year. At one of these meetings the goals for the year were decided collectively and the leaders were appointed. The larger organization was broken down into smaller sections of 20 or fewer students at various stages in their academic careers; these smaller units met monthly. Within each section, there were ‘elders’ who held positions of leadership and were responsible for disseminating laws and introducing new members to the group.45 All corporation members voted upon the leadership, including the positions of the head, the secretary, the spokesman, the treasurer, the observer of the fencing halls, and the superintendent. Each elected member had his own set of responsibilities spelled out in the corporate statutes. Korporanty elected a new head twice a year, but could – and usually did – re-elect him a number of times. He held executive powers, and was required ‘to observe that all members fulfill the goals and follow the rules of the society.’ The secretary ‘maintained the order of the Society’s papers,’ while the spokesman was in charge of ensuring that everything at the annual meeting ran smoothly, from members speaking in turn to addressing one another respectfully. The student in charge of observing the fencing halls both instructed members and made sure the hall was kept in good order. On the first of each month, the treasurer took care of corporate funds, while the superintendent maintained a list of students’ residences. An elected council had the ‘power of observation and approval’ over the actions of the head.46 The corporation rules established a hierarchy among members, marking students as either fuks (newly minted member) or bursch (full member). The fuksy were obligated to attend all of the formal drinking bouts of the more senior members and wait on them by pouring their wine and lighting their pipes. At the end of one year, a fuks was eligible to become a full bursch, at which time he would have his wine poured for him.47 The statutes that were brought from Dorpat to St Petersburg provided detailed instructions for the conduct of the twice yearly meetings of all corporation members. The rules specified, for example, that at each meeting a convener was to stand up, announce the time and date, recite the names of those in attendance, and turn the meeting over to


the head. Members were to wear the appropriate corporation colors to the meeting. Any member arriving more than 15 minutes late would be denied entrance; those who arrived on time were required to remain until the end.48 The existence of the corporate statutes, of course, does not mean that they were followed to the letter. Ivan Belov, who wrote about his experience in the St Petersburg Ruteniia corporation, suggested that Russian korporanty followed the rules less strictly than their German counterparts, the Baltiki. When the two groups decided to jointly sponsor their bi-annual meeting, the differences in practices between members of Ruteniia and Baltiki became clear. The meeting began with the customary strict punctuality and, for a time, proceeded systematically in accordance with the rules. Yet, about half way through the meeting, the Ruteniia members began to belt out Russian folk songs that were not on the official corporation list. As time passed, the Ruteniia members discarded the corporation’s rules and ‘German discipline’ altogether, took off their student frocks, climbed on the table, and pronounced drunken speeches that were ‘directed at no one and about nothing in particular.’ The Baltiki were stunned.49 Belov described another incident of misunderstanding at the same joint meeting, which led to the realization that the Ruteniians were much less likely to follow the corporate rules to the letter than were their German counterparts. Two friends, both members of the Ruteniia corporation, greeted one another in a manner not sanctioned by the codes, by hugging and kissing, and then exchanged some playful insults: ‘You are such a swine Pavlushka! You are such a little fool (durachina)!’ A Germanspeaking member of the Baltiki corporation overheard their conversation, mistook the affectionate banter for serious insults, and declared that only a duel could resolve the offense. Days later, the Ruteniia corporation held a meeting to discuss the incident. In the end, the two Russians apologized with a smile, shook hands, and, as Belov recalled, both groups had a good laugh.50 Although this crisis was averted, clearly members of the Ruteniia corporation – unlike their Baltiki compatriots – were accustomed to informality and bending the rules. As Belov’s anecdotes illustrate, students took liberties with the formal rules of the corporations some of the time. This is hardly surprising. The scarcity of depictions of corporate life makes it impossible to say with any confidence just how typical such transgressions were and just how much the corporation rules actually governed the behavior of members. Still, the evidence scattered in several memoir accounts suggests that the corporation and its rules had real meaning in the lives of student


members. And the very fact of the organized corporate structure and its elaborate code of behavior indicates that students, at least in St Petersburg as well as Dorpat, had available to them a model of manly conduct backed by a source of authority, the corporation, that was not a creature of the university administration or the larger state. Central to this model of masculinity was the notion of honor.

The honorable korporant A year after the law student Ivan Belov first attended a meeting of the St Petersburg Ruteniia corporation, he earned his initiation into the brotherhood. Participating in this formal transition into manhood, Belov took his sword in one hand and his corporate hat in the other, and, in the company of senior members, sang the following words: This sword shines in front of me With an immutable cry. I pierce the hat for you I swear the sacred oath To be a worthy [member].51 During the words, ‘I pierce this hat for you,’ Belov ran his sword through his colorful corporation hat, symbolizing his oath of absolute loyalty. His new brothers marked the occasion by singing him the ritual song of welcome: Long live our brother! Be cursed he who does you harm. Be a brother in our circle! Long live our brother Belov!52 The young Belov responded by pledging his loyalty to his corporate brothers and promising to uphold the honor of the society. At the conclusion of the ceremony, the head recited a solo verse, which cautioned the new recruit that his honor was no longer his own, and that if he misbehaved he would bring embarrassment to all and, consequently, suffer the wrath of the head himself. The words of the leader included: May damnation thunder on Any one of us who humiliates himself.


May he not be embraced And may deafness befall his brothers When they hear his call. With these words of caution and threat, Belov was expected to prove himself by drinking a full glass of wine in a single gulp – poured by one of the senior members.53 Finally his corporate brothers toasted one another and the honor of their korporatsiia, and ‘they drank to bruderschaft.’54 Belov was now a full member of the brotherly collective and his honor was intertwined with that of his peers. From that moment forward, he felt himself transformed – in his own words – into ‘an honest, decent man.’55 The corporation, as Belov’s initiation suggests, aimed to do something beyond giving students an ‘opportunity to socialize.’ The initiation ritual emphasized collectivity and exclusivity. The symbols and language of the formal process of initiation suggest that this rite of passage signified an exchange of individual autonomy for group identification. All students who were interested in joining this ‘indissoluble union’ formally had to take on a new identity, by choosing a pseudonym and signing the Group Book with that name, marking this as a transitional moment in their lives. (Belov took the name ‘Sibirnik.’)56 Becoming the member of a corporation required the destruction of all ‘allegiances to other associations,’ whether domestic, social, or official. Being ‘worthy of membership’ required singular loyalty.57 And the ultimate expression of that loyalty was adherence to the collective notion of masculine honor. Honor, as it was defined by the statutes of the Russian student corporation, had both internal (vnutrennaia) and external (vneshnaia) dimensions. In this regard, the concept resonated with so-called ‘modern masculinity,’ as it developed in western Europe.58 That resonance is hardly surprising. Russian-educated society by the early nineteenth century was heavily influenced by western European ideas about honor. And, of course, the corporate comment used by St Petersburg students was itself a translation of the statute in use in the heavily German milieu of Dorpat. The individual member’s honor was a matter of both his ‘inner sense of dignity’ and his outward ‘respectability’ in his ‘public and social life.’ An honorable korporant had to cultivate ‘moral strength and noble consciousness,’ and also master gestures and conversation appropriate to certain social situations. ‘Brotherly courtesy’ had to be accompanied by dignity, humility, and internal ‘goodness.’ Achieving this standard of


behavior required putting an end to the ‘ruinous passion of youth’ and helping each member rid himself of the ‘blinding passion of individual will.’ A goal of the corporation was that ‘each member aspire to orderliness [poriadok] … and [thus] must subordinate his way of thinking to conform to the prescribed laws of the society.’59 Although corporate honor was defined and regulated by young men, women also had a role. Indeed, since manly self-respect depended partly upon a student’s ability to impress the women around him, young women had the potential to be judges of the honor of their male peers. One evening at a Dorpat University student ball, a drunken corporation member asked a lady to dance. Upon hearing her refusal, another member of the corporation approached her and declared that she insulted the entire corporation. He dragged her over to the drunken student and insisted that they dance not in the dance hall, but in the street. The student explained that if he did not succeed in dancing with this young woman he would jeopardize the honor of himself and his peers.60

Enforcing student honor It was up to the members of the student corporation to enforce the rules and punish those who transgressed. One way in which members passed judgement on the honor of their peers was through the process of electing officers. The statutes – or comment – stated, for example, that among the criteria for choosing the head of the corporation were ‘honor, respectability, and the ability to handle the economic dealings of the members.’ His honor was of the utmost importance, since it reflected on the honor of the corporation as a whole.61 Korporanty were to observe one another’s actions and report to the head of the corporation any ‘violations of the rules,’ such as talking during a meeting or exchanging blows.62 If a violation was discovered and the two parties could not reach an amicable resolution on their own, corporation members set up a formal honor court to punish the offenders. In this student-run shadow disciplinary system, each member was a potential judge and jury to his peers. The court consisted of three judges, one chosen by each of the participants, while the elected head of the corporation served as the third. The honor court upheld the ‘rights, truth, and justice’ of the entire corporation.63 The fates of individual opponents in an honor dispute were sacrificed to the principles of the society as a whole; the guilty had to pay for their crimes in order to redeem the reputation of their corporation.


The honor courts had a number of punishments at their disposal, ranging from a mild reprimand, a reprimand in front of the corporate council, disfavor, or expulsion from the corporation. The severity of the punishment depended on the court’s judgment of the degree to which one member blemished the honor of another, thereby jeopardizing the honor of the entire group.64 When a student committed a crime considered ‘harmful to the internal or external honor of the society,’ he was either expelled or fell into disfavor, in some cases considered more severe, since he continued to be actively shunned by his fraternity brothers.65 In the 1830s, such a fate befell a St Petersburg Ruteniia corporation member, who had betrayed one of his corporate brothers by giving him up during a police raid in exchange for his own safety. Once the other members discovered his offense, the fate of this traitor was in the hands of his fraternal brothers. The members gathered to pass judgment on him and his crime. The honor court ultimately gave him the punishment of ‘disfavor,’ and the corporation formally shunned him. His comrades were forbidden from treating him with even the mildest amount of respect and courtesy – ‘they were not to bow to him or to speak to him for any length of time.’ Ivan Belov recalled in his memoir that, even though the judgment was harsh, all the members complied. ‘[T]hey were not just youth,’ and ‘as mature men’ they could no longer treat someone who had risked the honor of the corporation with any degree of respect.66 As a body that existed without any sort of official status, the corporation’s disciplinary powers had real limits. If a young man chose to ignore the verdict of the student court, his fraternity brothers had no recourse. And there was little corporate members could do when they demanded satisfaction from non-members. When, for example, a certain student ‘K’ (a non-korporant) slapped student ‘N’’s (a korporant’s) face, ‘N’ demanded that his assailant appear before the corporate honor court. ‘K’ simply refused to appear before an honor court that had little relevance for him. He also had no interest in meeting his opponent on the dueling field. ‘N’ was stymied, the offense went unanswered, and honor could not be restored.67 When an altercation occurred between two members of the same corporation and the honor court could not reach a satisfactory solution, the corporate statutes sanctioned a duel between the adversaries. Physical combat was the option of last resort for an injured party to restore his honor.68 Dueling rites and rituals – like the honor ideal – were not the exclusive property of students. Members of the broader Russian gentry used


the duel to settle scores throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Nicholas I had strong feelings about the practice. His oftenquoted words on the subject include: ‘I hate dueling; it is barbaric. In my opinion, there is nothing knightly in it.’69 Nicholas’s personal aversion to dueling aside, gentry society continued to use it as a means of recovering a man’s honor and restoring his good name in the eyes of his peers. Dueling practices did not decrease during Nicholas’s reign; they continued to be fought at about the same rate as under Tsar Alexander I.70 Scholarly discussions of the duel in Russia have been primarily framed around two long-accepted arguments central to many histories of the tsarist period: the opposition between the state and society on the one hand, and the omnipresence of the autocracy on the other. In particular, scholars of dueling practices in tsarist Russia argue that the gentry perceived the duel as a way of defending their collective, as well as individual, honor against the state’s encroachment. In her study of the history of the duel in imperial Russian society and literature, Irina Reyfman has suggested that the gentry viewed its right to duel as a defense of its corporate status on the one hand, and as a statement of opposition to the regime on the other.71 Reyfman argues that the ‘more blatantly the government ignored the nobility’s rights (especially their right to physical inviolability) the more stubbornly nobles turned to dueling.’72 Historian Ia. Gordin concurs and describes the duel as a much-needed weapon in the hands of the gentry against the Nicholaevan state. Gordin argues that because Minister of Education Sergei Uvarov and Tsar Nicholas I together created a stifling atmosphere and demanded absolute devotion from their subjects, gentry members retaliated by turning to the duel to express their independence and register their opposition to the state. The duel in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, this line of argument contends, was at the center of the clash between the gentry and the autocracy.73 If dueling was, at least implicitly, an act of defiance, it was also a means of regulating behavior among members of the Russian elite. Student duels seem to have been fought primarily to restore a student’s honor and prove his masculinity in front of an audience of peers. The student duel was therefore ‘inseparably linked to the history of honor and manhood.’74 It was potentially an outlet for individual aggression as well as a means of saving face before classmates and outside observers, especially women. The honor recovered on the nineteenth-century dueling field was the exclusive property of men. In his discussion of eighteenth- and


nineteenth-century German university student dueling clubs, historian Peter Gay emphasizes the masculine character of the German student duel, the mensur. He argues that dueling provided ceremonies for establishing manliness, such as tests for ‘sexual prowess, and, with its obsessively prescribed rules of procedure, a dependable framework within which youths could master aggressive feelings that swamped them.’75 The active participants in the dueling ritual, from the swordsmen to the seconds and doctors, were all men; their very definition of manhood rested on their ability and willingness to display courage and defend themselves on the dueling field. This masculine world included women only as passive outsiders, whether as objects of insult or praise, impetus or inspiration. Formal dueling codes marked the boundaries of masculine honor by defining the circumstances in which a man’s honor could be lost and regained.76 Once an offense was committed – including a wrong look, a disagreement over cards, an argument over official business, an exchange of verbal insults, profanities, or a sexual rivalry77 – men looked to the duel as a ‘means of defending [their] human dignity’ and proving their courage in the company of their peers.78 A refusal to duel could indicate a lack of courage and virility – important masculine traits. This was the case with Silvio, the hero of Alexander Pushkin’s short story ‘The Shot,’ who declined a challenge. In the words of the narrator: ‘Silvio did not fight … this lowered him very much in the opinion of all our young fellows. Want of courage is the last thing to be pardoned by young men who usually look upon bravery as the chief of all human virtues, and the excuse for every possible fault.’79 Russian dueling practices – although certainly influenced by French and German culture – were not replicas of their European counterparts. 80 Historians and literary scholars have commented on the fact that duels waged in the Russian Empire were, on the whole, crueler and more dangerous than in the rest of Europe. One measure of the harshness and danger involved in the Russian duel was the number of paces allowed between opponents in a pistol duel. Although exact figures vary, there seems to be some consensus among scholars of the Russian duel that, in Europe, pistol duels were fought at no fewer than 15 paces, often with as many as 25–35 paces between men. In contrast, in Russia no one would think of fighting with pistols at the great distance of 25–35 paces: 8–10 paces was considered an average, with three paces the very minimum and six not uncommon.81 Similarly, although it was common among seconds in European duels to ensure


that a battle was not fought ‘for life or death,’ in Russia seconds did not consider that one of their duties.82 Russian student duels, based on the German mensur, afforded young men, like their elders within educated society, the opportunity to prove themselves honorable and courageous in front of their fraternal brotherhood. But the rules and customs of student duels, unlike the battles waged outside of university grounds, did not encourage bloodshed. Russian student duelists fought with swords, not pistols, and wore clothing that was designed to ensure their safety, making a fatal wound extremely unlikely. ‘On the head they wore a leather helmet, on the neck a scarf with a horsehair tie, and on their hands gauntlets which went part way up the arms, and finally a protective band around their abdomens.’ A good fight would consist of only ‘lawful blows’ and last approximately five minutes or until the first blood was drawn. Afterwards the two opponents were expected ‘to embrace and kiss as a sign of reconciliation.’83 The primary purpose of a student duel was not to risk one’s life, but to ‘erase an insult.’ In both Russia and Germany, student duels were far less dangerous than those outside the context of university life; these contests were primarily a means of putting on a show of controlled aggression, to ‘be seen as virile’ and to assert one’s manliness. 84 The corporate comment stated that student duels must follow a strict protocol, called ‘the order of battle.’ The duel was supposed to take place within 14 days of the original offense, although this could be extended if the honor court took a long time before reaching an impasse.85 Each combatant was required to wear the colors of the corporation, and seconds had to be present. Some of the rules seemed designed to protect the opponents from inflicting real harm on each other. A combatant guilty of an ‘unlawful blow’ immediately forfeited the match. Two doctors – one for each side – were supposed to be present and halt the action if it turned life-threatening and to patch up the mostly superficial wounds.86 While the extent to which students dueled is unclear, what seems certain is that the student duel, with all of it safety precautions and strict monitoring, functioned primarily as means of providing students with the opportunity to display their virility, while harming few.87 The few student duels recorded in the existing records seem to have been triggered by an insult.88 When Dmitrii Bibikov challenged Petr Verderevskii to a duel in 1851, the pretext was less than trivial. On a January evening at a restaurant in St Petersburg, Verderevskii and Bibikov sat drinking, as they often did, with their friends. On this


evening, though, Verderevskii became agitated by comments Bibikov made about a friend of his and began hurling insults at his comrade. In retaliation for being humiliated and insulted in the presence of his peers, Bibikov cursed at Verderevskii and then threw a wine glass to the floor shattering it. Convinced that the glass was meant for his face, Verderevskii pushed his opponent to the ground with great force. Such an offense could not go answered: Bibikov challenged Verderevskii to meet him on the dueling field in the early hours of the following morning. The authorities, however, heard of the duel before it began and the two young men were never able to prove their honor. 89 Similarly, the challenge between students Belov and his friend Nefedov, both members of the St Petersburg Ruteniia corporation, occurred for trivial reasons. Sitting in a popular university tavern, the two roommates and friends found themselves in a heated argument – one witnessed by a number of peers – over a third party. During the course of the discussion, they exchanged the following words: Belov: You stand there like you want to be punched. Nefedov: I am standing here, like you said, to receive a punch. I’m going to send that punch right back to you. Now eat that to your health! The two then cursed at each other.90 After this exchange of crude and insulting words, a challenge was unavoidable: Nefedov’s words tainted Belov’s honor and words alone could not restore Belov’s good name.91 Without further ado or taking the matter to an honor court – as they were required to do – each student chose a second from among his friends at the bar table. Belov’s second, in customary fashion, delivered the challenge to Nefedov’s second, and Nefedov accepted. On the day of the duel, the two roommates – who slept in the same room and ate all their meals together – left the apartment at the same moment. Once they stepped on to the dueling field, however, they entered another world. Dressed meticulously according to the regulations, Belov described how he and his opponent ‘stood there as enemies for a time’ and waited in the proper place for the command from the impartial middleman: ‘Stand still! Touch swords! Fall out!’ Upon hearing these words, Nefedov delivered the first blow and the duelists began their battle. Belov nearly shamed himself during the battle, by stepping back over the middle line, something that was considered a profound act of cowardice. This shame, Belov wrote, inspired him to charge ahead toward the middle, give a fake blow, and stab his


sword in the direction of Nefedov’s stomach. Without causing too much damage, Belov regained the advantage and won the duel. Despite his misstep, Belov emerged with his honor intact and without severely harming his opponent. Belov explained in his memoir that his ‘warm’ and ‘pure’ feelings of love for a young lady, Olinka, inspired his bravery on the dueling field. Belov’s corporate brothers attributed his victory to his love for her. Sitting together in a pub after the duel, the students sang to the victor: For lasses we keep our hearts young. And sing to their health. Long live the bold happiness Of young students. The students continued to sing and emphasize the role that love played in motivating Belov to emerge victorious on the dueling field. They celebrated the inspirational power of Olinka’s femininity in the otherwise masculine world of the duel. Pouring our goblets all full We stand all around you To honor your beautiful girl We burst forth: ‘Long live Olinka’ … Long live Olya Long may she live!92 Notwithstanding the university administration’s prohibition against dueling, the university trained students in the skills they would use on the dueling field. In the mid-1840s, at a time when the university was providing students with supplemental instruction, including drawing, dancing, and art, fencing classes were made available.93 Fencing, from the administration’s perspective, was considered part of an essential program of extracurricular instruction. The authorities intended to control students’ use of the skill. According to the 1843 ‘Laws for the Students of the Imperial St Petersburg University,’ those students who lived with relatives could perfect their skills at home while those living on their own could not. Everyone, however, was strictly ‘forbidden from practicing with peers at gatherings.’ Unlawful fencing practice was considered a serious offense, punishable by expulsion.94


’Secret societies’ and official Russia On two occasions – first in Dorpat in 1833, then in St Petersburg in the 1844 – university and state officials discovered the existence of corporate life among students. These ‘secret societies,’ as officials referred to them in their correspondence,95 were in clear violation of government rules, such as the 1835 Instruction to the St Petersburg University Inspector, which forbade the ‘setting up under any name or for any purpose secret societies and gatherings.’96 University authorities as well as representatives of Nicholas’s Third Section spent time stamping out any signs of suspicious socializing or elements of conspiracy, from confiscating students’ books to subjecting them to long, arduous interviews.97 In a letter written at the end of 1844 to the Head of the Third Section, the Head of the Gendarmes explained that he wanted all student societies to come to an end because of their potential political leanings. He issued a warning to all universities that ‘secret societies must disband and if discovered they will suffer very strong measures of punishment.’98 In practice, however, administrators showed some ambivalence in dealing with student corporations. The state did, as described above, expel the leaders of the Dorpat University Burschenschaft associations upon their discovery in 1833, but later allowed the expelled students to attend other Russian universities. The Minister of Education’s show of leniency suggests a level of acceptance, bordering on tacit support, among the high authorities in the state educational bureaucracy for student corporations. The state also showed some leniency toward members of the Ruteniia and Baltiki corporations in St Petersburg in the 1840s. In a letter to the superintendent of the Moscow Educational District, Minister of Education Uvarov admitted, ‘the existence of meetings between students has always been known by the Ministry.’ Uvarov stated in an official memorandum that in St Petersburg in 1844 corporations were illegal: The government knows that there exist student societies – or more accurately – assemblages/mobs. These gatherings are not violating the spirit of the university, but are against two sets of laws: state laws and the regulations of the university. But, once again, as with the Dorpat students, the lack of any overt political purpose among the korporanty led the Minister to take a relatively


benign view of the organizations. He reported that ‘there was no intention of anything political’ in the networks that were exposed, and therefore he could not condemn them. It appears, from his report, that the absence of Polish students among the korporanty was particularly reassuring.99 Despite the official mandate to declare secret societies illegal, Uvarov justified their existence. He wrote in his correspondence with other officials that when ‘separated from parents [and] outside the home’ it seemed perfectly natural for young men to form close-knit social circles.100 Here, Uvarov went one step further and sympathized with the need for students to socialize with one another. In an 1844 speech to the St Petersburg student body, Uvarov explained that he had two possible paths for remedying the situation of students’ secret socializing. The first would be to punish students in the usual strict manner for breaking the rules, without regard for ‘the futures or hopes’ of the students and their families. The second – his preferred path – was to put his trust in the students and inspire them to admit and condemn their ‘childish ways.’ Uvarov chose the latter: ‘I will believe them, and in their honor, and in the honor of the university.’ In return for his trust, he expected that each student would give his word in writing that ‘his actions were not harmful’ to the integrity of the government or the university.101 Failure to do so, however, would result in severe punishment. Uvarov warned students that he would not hesitate to exercise his full ministerial powers if the student societies took on a secretive, conspiratorial, anti-government political bent. As long as they were benign and open, however, student corporate associations remained in operation. There was clearly, then, a contradiction between the official policy of forbidding student societies and the tolerant attitude displayed by Uvarov and other state and university administrators, especially towards the St Petersburg corporations. The officials recognized that banning all forms of student self-organization might be more dangerous than permitting some, as long as they remained plainly apolitical – and there is no evidence that the corporations in St Petersburg were ever anything but that. In addition, it is quite possible that the very officials charged with enforcing the ban on student organizations themselves had been members of corporations while at a university or some other Russian or foreign institution. It is noteworthy that the explicit values of the corporations, as expressed in the comment, strongly echoed official prescriptions for proper behavior. The corporations’ codes, like the university’s own


guidelines, emphasized honor, order, and discipline. Membership in a corporation – like membership in the student body – required that each young man cultivate his proper manners (external) and good morals (internal). Like the prototypical respectable servitor, the korporant cultivated his respectability, ‘ridiculed arrogance, despised pride, and respected courage (muzhestvo).’102 And in order to achieve this combination of external respectability and internal morality, students were expected – by the administration and corporation – to suppress their individual willfulness and their disorderly and passionate impulses. The corporation, much like the state, relied on a hierarchical and orderly system of day-to-day operations. Officials like Uvarov may have accepted the existence of the corporations precisely because these extra-state institutions reinforced, rather then undermined, the state administration’s goals in training the Empire’s youth. Although Uvarov and other officials may have been sympathetic toward corporate organizations, they did not consider all student socializing to be benign. Certain student activities caused consternation among university officials. This was certainly the case with Polish student sociability, especially after the Polish rebellions against Russian rule in 1830 and 1831. In the aftermath of those events, Nicholas closed the universities of Vilna and Warsaw in order to control what he perceived as subversive elements within these institutions. Many students from Warsaw and Vilna, who were suspected of harboring democratic ideas, were encouraged to transfer to other Russian universities closer to the center, where they would be watched and transformed. The administration imagined it could more closely monitor the potential threat with the students in view.103 Polish group solidarity, as it reconstituted itself in Moscow, Kazan’, and St Petersburg, was closely monitored. After their arrival at the Russian universities, some of these newly transferred students were soon charged with inappropriate social activities. They were accused of reading banned books and harboring anti-state, pro-Polish sentiments in their ‘literary circles’ or secret societies.104 What is most remarkable, however, is not that Nicholas’s mistrust of the Poles translated into closer scrutiny of the Polish student population, but rather that despite the suspicious attitudes towards Poles in the 1830s, Polish students succeeded in creating exclusive social networks. In St Petersburg, where in the 1830s about one-fifth of the student population was Polish, the Polish student community managed to become socially self-sufficient. Its members ‘supervise[d] the morals of its members’ with the ‘tacit consent’ of the student


inspectors.105 The administration tolerated autonomous Polish social practices as long as they did not challenge autocratic principles. Like their Russian counterparts, Polish students could discipline one another through formal corporate institutions and informal socializing. Officials preferred to remain ‘passive’ unless there was a pressing political threat.106 Even among those viewed as the most politically subversive, the Russian autocracy proved flexible and willing to allow students back into the more prestigious universities in the center, in order to keep an eye on them and make sure they stayed within the limits of acceptable sociability. The Russian autocracy, despite an official ideology and corresponding laws that prohibited ‘secret societies,’ winked at the discovery of a network of student corporations on university campuses. While officials within the university, the police, and the Third Section monitored the social lives of Russia’s university students, students themselves erected an autonomous network of corporate societies, primarily in the capital. Here, in these spaces, students gathered and – guided by German statutes from Dorpat – created their own notions of masculinity and honor. Like the Moscow inspector Nakhimov, who permitted – and taught – his pupils to drink alcohol, government officials in St Petersburg, including Minister of Education Uvarov, permitted corporations to operate, as long as they remained within certain parameters. After Nicholas’s death in 1855, organized student social life had the opportunity to emerge from the shadows. Shortly after, universities were filled with students organizing themselves into a variety of social groups, including fraternal corporations, which were made legal in Dorpat in late 1855.107 Soon after the Tsar’s death, officials in Dorpat announced that ‘for fifty years in Dorpat student societies have existed under the name of korporatsiia.’ In Dorpat in the same year, the superintendent told the rector that the Ministry of Education now ‘permitted the strengthening of student corporations themselves.’108 By 1862, korporanty in Dorpat were free to parade on campus and on the streets in their corporate colors.109 While Nicholas was still in charge, though, students not only drank with their comrades and dueled with their fraternity brothers, but also celebrated intimate attachments to their friends. Friendship, like korporatsiia, encouraged students to form horizontal bonds of loyalty with one another in the autonomous spaces of social life, even as officials attempted to instill singular loyalty to the Tsar. Student friendships, though, emerged within a broader culture of affective relations where expressions of emotional attachment were commonplace.

4 Friendship, Romance, and Romantic Friendship1

Life without a friend is not sweet, but rather dull.2 When Moscow University was struck by a cholera epidemic in 1830, it closed its doors for much of the academic year. Students were forbidden from seeing one another, some were quarantined, and others were sent away. Ia. I. Kostenetskii described in his memoir how this isolation caused him great distress; he longed to see his friend Aleksei Topornin. Once the cholera restrictions were relaxed, Kostenetskii recalled running to the home of Professor Pogodin – where Topornin resided – just to get a glimpse of his friend at the door. When he did, the two young men, ‘not putting down each other’s hands,’ talked for a few minutes and then were forced to part ‘with tears in their eyes.’3 Kostenetskii’s description of this reunion illustrates the vocabulary of friendship among men in these decades – the tears, the pain at separation, and the affection expressed in holding each other’s hands. Friendship among Russian university students, as this example illustrates, played a central role in their social and emotional lives.4 A reading of student memoirs, diaries, and correspondence suggests that close male friendship, nurtured within a broader culture of European Romanticism, marked the coming of age experiences of many students in these decades. During their three to four years of study, students spent leisure hours in one another’s company and, in some cases, formed intimate relationships that resembled and even surpassed ties of romantic love. This world of the romantic friend offered students a notion of masculinity, which included passionate expression and emotional connection that was at odds with Nicholas’s call for obedience and singular loyalty. Nonetheless, even as officials attempted to implement the administrative ideal of masculinity and 75


create respectable and obedient servitors, students – in their writings and social lives – participated in this culture of manly love.

The culture of manly love Friendship in general is not a new subject for historians of nineteenthcentury Russia. For many decades, owing primarily to the scholarship on the radical intelligentsia, friendship in Nicholas’s Russia has been understood in its political context, with an eye to 1917. Scholars have highlighted how the intimate attachments among members of the emergent radical intelligentsia flourished in the nineteenth-century university due to the backward and oppressive nature of the autocracy.5 Friendships among radical youth, in this paradigm, resulted from Russia’s top-heavy, dysfunctional, and outmoded social and political system. Without the ‘normal’ diversions of a thriving civil society – including a free press, social clubs, and civic organizations – individual men were forced into affectionate embraces. For this small group of young men, intimate friendship served as a bulwark against the encroachment of the state.6 Martin Malia, in his intellectual biography of Alexander Herzen – perhaps the most famous among this generation of radically-minded youth – suggests that ‘the hyperbole of expression’ common among university students ‘was a reflection of the fact that there was nothing else in the boys’ dream-filled experiences that was so unmistakably real.’ Therefore, Malia adds, ‘where there was nothing else, friendship became all.’7 In his masterful autobiography, My Past and Thoughts, Herzen highlighted the relationship between friendship and politics.8 In the following portrait of his boyhood friendship with Nicholas Ogarev, Herzen emphasized friendship’s transformative power, both politically and emotionally: Flushed and breathless we stood there [on Sparrow Hills] … the sun was setting, the cupolas glittered … a fresh breeze blew on our faces, we stood leaning against each other and, suddenly embracing, vowed in sight of all Moscow to sacrifice our lives to the struggle we had chosen.9 In this passage, Herzen described how, in that moment, he and his childhood friend – soon to be university students – consecrated their friendship and devoted their lives to fighting the injustices imposed by the autocracy. Herzen’s dramatic depiction of the inseparable link

Friendship, Romance, and Romantic Friendship 77

between intimate friendship (symbolized by the spontaneous embrace of Herzen and Ogarev) and political commitment (seen in their vow to ‘sacrifice their lives’) has long informed the scholarly discussion of the relationship among the institution of friendship, the emergence of radical ideas, and Russia’s political development. Regardless of the truth in Herzen’s always eloquent and sometimes aggrandizing autobiography, the centrality of friendship among educated Russians extended well beyond the radical few. During summer vacations, winters breaks, and long after graduation, students – regardless of their political commitments – structured their lives around their devotion to one another. Russian university students, like their contemporaries studying in universities across Europe, came of age within an environment – touched by Romanticism’s expressiveness and celebration of sentiment – where young men articulated their heartfelt, sometimes passionate, feelings for one another. It is important to note that the phenomenon of close male friendship was unique neither to Russia nor to the nineteenth century. Long before Nicholas I’s accession to the throne, intimacy between men had become an accepted part of European culture with roots in Ancient Greece and Rome. Men had long declared their attachments to one another as part of their normal patterns of everyday life. Whether in medieval Europe or seventeenth-century England, friendships between men were public affairs accompanied by a whole series of intimate rituals, whether sharing a bed or an embrace.10 This tradition of close friendship, many agree, survived through much of the nineteenth century. 11 During the early Victorian period educated Englishmen lived in a culture of manly love, which was based on notions of spiritual brotherhood, service to one another, as well as the elevation of homosocial bonds over relations with women – sexual or otherwise12. In this Victorian context, intimacy between men, whether expressed through affectionate embraces or in the exchange of Romantic sentiments, did not threaten the social order. On the contrary, friends were ‘allowed’ within the confines of normative behavior prescriptions to express their devotion and affection toward one another and did not fear accusations of degeneracy or immorality. From the intimate bond between Byron and Shelley to the characters in Schiller’s dramas and essays, many young men found emotional and sometimes erotic fulfillment in one another.13 The famous friendship between Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Arthur Hallam, commemorated in Tennyson’s In Memoriam, exemplifies this idea of passionate friendship in a Victorian context. Written on the


occasion of Hallam’s early death, the poem reflects the ways in which, for Tennyson, their friendship paralleled the narrative of a love affair. After the death of his friend, Tennyson considered himself a ‘widower.’14 Tennyson found himself, he explained to the reader, very much alone: ‘So I find every pleasant spot / In which we two were wont to meet / The field, the chamber and the street / For all is dark where though art not.’15 Such intimate bonds between men in the nineteenth century were, for some, a product of youth, and found particularly fertile ground within all-male school environments. Whether in France, Germany, England, or even America, such ties were imagined to be integral to a young man’s ‘sentimental and sexual education.’16 Writing on the making of modern American manhood, E. Anthony Rotundo describes how intimate friendships among men of the nineteenth century were ‘largely a product of a distinct phase of the life cycle – youth.’17 In particular, the intimacy of male friendship for most was limited to ‘the years between boyhood and manhood,’ largely a time when elite young men attended colleagues and universities.18 Such student friendships were imagined as dress rehearsals, which ended once schooling was completed or matrimony beckoned.19 Like other young men across Europe, Russian university students – touched by the power of Romantic ideals – devoted themselves to one another as they attended classes and grew into men. Yet, in the Russian case, there is evidence that intimate male friendships were sustained beyond the years of youth.

Romanticism in Russia Romanticism – with its embrace of aesthetics, national spirit, all-powerful friendships, and the power of love – impacted Nicholaevan politics and culture at the highest levels. 20 Many of the proponents of Nicholas’s ideological framework – Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Narodnost’21 – were themselves influenced by ‘romantic currents.’22 The writings of German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder contributed to Nicholas’s own understanding of autocracy and its integral connection to Russian national identity. Within the context of the growing spirit of Romantic nationalism across Europe, there existed the conviction that each nation had its own national destiny, its own ‘national spirit,’ its own ‘national identity.’23 As is well known, the post-Napoleonic period of Russian history marked a new era in Russian national consciousness among a broad spectrum of members of


educated society. As soldiers returned home, they struggled to embrace their Russianness.24 For Nicholas, Russia’s national spirit ‘expressed itself only in the autocratic state’ and in the person of the autocrat. As Richard Wortman describes, ‘the emperor was imminent in the nation, and the nation was imminent in the autocracy and the emperor.’25 As an extension of this idea, individual subjects were to devote themselves to Russia, to the autocracy and to the Tsar. Vertical ties of loyalty between subject and monarch were the glue that would hold Russia together, allowing the national spirit to emerge. Beginning in the 1820s and lasting until the official crackdown on philosophy departments after the European revolutions of 1848, members of the university community were increasingly fascinated by German philosophy.26 Romantic ideas were circulated not only among the gatherings of political radicals, but also in the lecture halls and professors’ parlors. Despite the fact that the classroom curriculum was being somewhat Russified in these years, stressing Russian subjects as well as more technical learning, philosophy continued to be taught in Moscow University’s lecture halls. It was, in fact, ‘all the rage’ at Russia’s universities in these decades of Nicholas’s rule.27 From proponents to skeptics of the autocracy, professors embraced Romanticism.28 Professors in Moscow and St Petersburg – including Timofei Granovskii, M. G. Pavlov, Petr Redkin, and Nikita Krylov – introduced their students to European, especially German, theories of philosophy and history.29 The impact of Romanticism filtered down to students themselves. In the classrooms, hallways, and student circles, students imbibed these Romantic notions. Although Nicholas himself was notoriously disdainful of Schiller, Schiller’s ideas played a prominent role in the lives of Russian university students, both inside and outside of the university walls.30 As one scholar noted, Russians ‘took Schiller to their hearts’ in these years.31 Describing his student years in Moscow in the mid-1830s, Konstantin Aksakov explained how he and his fellow students read Schiller in the classroom. Part of Aksakov’s story involved how on one occasion, Professor Gering – who held his classes in his office in the evening – called upon Aksakov to read one of Schiller’s ballads in front of the class. Aksakov recalled reciting the Russian translation of Schiller’s ballad from memory.32 Student memoirs suggest that Gering was not alone: many professors inspired an admiration for the German Romantics among impressionable adolescent boys.33 Schiller’s writings endorsed a cult of passionate expression and singular devotion. Through friendship, Schiller elaborated, man could


aspire to ‘the realization of his deepest potentials.’ In these connections he was free to strive for beauty and a ‘beautiful soul.’34 Schiller’s young heroes in Don Carlos (Carlos and Posa) and The Philosophical Letters (Rafael and Julius) provided straightforward models of male friendship with particularly adolescent appeal.35 Within this Schillerian universe, friendship triumphed over all other affections and loyalties, whether filial or romantic.36 In Don Carlos, the tie between Carlos and Posa not only ennobled death and inspired rebellion against the king’s tyranny, but also inextricably linked the two young souls together for eternity.37 Although certainly not all students communicated in such a lofty language, many did articulate their feelings for one another within an expressive, intimate framework. Some among the budding intellectuals within the walls of Moscow University in the 1830s and 1840s fashioned their own friendships on Schiller’s ideal. Alexander Herzen, for one, wrote: ‘Friendship awakened under the blessing of Schiller, flowered under his blessing. We assimilated to ourselves the characteristics of all his heroes.’38 He and his university friends ‘self-consciously assimilated … the characteristics of all [Schiller’s] heroes.’39 According to Herzen’s autobiographical description in Zapiski odnogo molodogo cheloveka, it was Schiller that first awakened the feeling of intimacy between the teenage Herzen and his boyhood friend and fellow student Nicholas Ogarev: ‘like inexperienced lovers [we] marked out for each other passages in [Schiller’s Philosophical Letters] … indeed we were à la lettre in love and our love grew with each new day.’40 Herzen and Ogarev, although the most famous example, were not alone in their imitation of the Schillerian aesthetic of friendship.41 Vissarion Belinksii – perhaps Russia’s most famous literary critics – described in a letter to a friend, the profound influence that Schiller had on his life: ‘I have recognized at last my kinship with Schiller; I am bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh … for he is my highest and noblest ideal of man.’42 Memoirist Pavel Annenkov, in his stylized memoir of the period, highlighted the ‘spell of friendship’ that entranced many who read Schiller, including Belinskii and Mikhail Bakunin, philosopher and anarchist, as well as Konstantin Aksakov and the distinguished professor Timofei Granovskii.43 Annenkov highlighted one particular passionate moment when Aksakov, at a moment of philosophical crisis, came to the great Moscow professor Granovskii in the middle of the night and ‘threw his arms about his neck, and, pressing tightly in his embrace, announced [that he must] break off relations with him … despite the deep respect and love he


felt.’44 Ideological differences in this case forced Aksakov – or so Annenkov remembered – to bid farewell to his ‘lost friend.’ 45 The Schillerian friendship aesthetic reverberated throughout the circles of students and non-students alike. For one student, Schiller’s ideal of love and friendship impacted his own romantic failures. In a letter to fellow student and leader of one of Moscow’s student circles Nicholas Stankevich, Belinksii illustrated his formative experiences of reading Schiller: To what lengths did Schiller lead me! Do you remember Nicholas [Stankevich] how we decided it was base and dishonest to enter into a relationship con amore with a girl, since if the maid is really innocent, we deprive her of innocence – an evil deed; and if she is not innocent, then she might have a child (again an evil deed!); or maybe she will bore us and we will have to throw her over (still another evil deed!) … You see what the ideal Schiller led us to!46 Romantic ideas, especially for those like Belinkskii and Stankevich, who embraced the philosophical debates of the era, impacted their social lives and tied them together in friendship and, at least in this poignant example, disrupted their pursuit of romance with women.47

The language of love Belinksii’s claim, even if somewhat exaggerated, begs the question of whether or not Russian students pursued romance – or even interacted – with women within this broader environment of manly love. Although it is difficult to be certain given the scarcity of sources, the relative silence on the subject of romance with women suggests that the power of male friendship may have interrupted the blossoming of love with women. It is important to note the all-male nature of the university environment, especially the university halls and the dormitories. Overall, sources provide scant indication of students’ interactions with young women at all; there are few mentions of brothels and little discussion of romance.48 The rare examples of students’ depictions of their affections for young women almost inevitably ended in heartbreak or disinterest on the part of the student. Future poet A. A. Fet, for one, highlighted the doomed nature of his romantic aspirations during his student years. As he himself narrated, his desires for young women were disrupted by the complex emotions of friendship. While living in the home of his classmate and dear friend Apollon Grigor’ev, Fet developed


a romance with Elena, a cousin of his friend. When the couple revealed to their families the true nature their relationship (they had kept it hidden for months), Elena’s notoriously strict guardian was furious and strongly disapproved. The couple wanted to elope, but found no support from his friend or, by extension, his friend’s family. Ultimately, Elena was sent away to school, far from her lover, de facto ending their affair.49 Whether the failure of the couple to marry was due to practical considerations – Fet’s relative poverty or student status – or to Apollon’s own petty jealousies remains unclear. Either way, Fet continued to live with his friend and was forced to bid Elena farewell. When Apollon himself fell in love with a young woman, not only was she married but she was in love with Fet, or so Fet recorded in his narrative.50 Neither friend succeeded in affairs of the heart with women. Ianuarii Neverov, like the students described above, was frustrated in love largely because of his passionate attachment to his friend Vladimir Rzhevskii. The tone of the correspondence between Moscow students Vladimir Rzhevskii and Ianvar M. Neverov over the years suggests the parameters of friendship in general as well as the ways in which male friendships, at least rhetorically, superseded in importance relations with women. The writings of Moscow students Neverov and Rzhevskii suggest that their friendship followed a narrative of uneven, unrequited love. Neverov, from a humble background, arrived in Moscow with neither friends nor contacts from his hometown. By the end of his first year, he had developed a strong attachment to his classmate, Vladimir Rzhevskii. Rzhevskii, unlike Neverov, had family and friends in Moscow and soon lost interest in this exclusive friendship. Despite the growing discrepancy in affection, Neverov continued, as he recorded in his diary, ‘to feel differently about Vladimir than all others.’51 Neverov filled the pages of his university diary and autobiography with expressions of affection and love for his new friend. During this initial stage of his infatuation, he wrote of how his friendship with Rzhevskii replaced his desire to love a woman: I feel our friendship and it is the blessing of my soul. As I have already experienced love [with a woman], I know its movements in my passionate soul. I am happy that the dream of friendship [with Vladimir] replaced the dream of love.52 Neverov’s descriptions of his affections for Rzhevskii are replete with heightened emotion; images of ‘love,’ ‘passion,’ and ‘dreams’ fill the


pages of his letters. ‘The one person,’ Neverov wrote, ‘I love with all of my blazing soul is him [Vladimir].’53 All past attachments to women paled in comparison to this newfound fraternal bond. Looking back on his flirtations with his first love, Eliza Ivanovna, in his pre-university days, Neverov now felt acute embarrassment. His original feelings, he recorded in his diary, must have been the result not only of childish and naïve emotions, but also of the feverish illness that he was suffering at the time. This illness inevitably ‘clouded his judgment of his own real feelings.’54 Male intimacy ranked, for Neverov, above his relations with women. Despite Neverov’s expressions of love, Rzhevskii’s responses became increasingly distant. Neverov lamented the fact that his own ‘feelings of pure and tender friendship’ were greeted with ‘coldness.’55 With the passage of time and the widening chasm in their affections, Neverov became frustrated with his love for Vladimir and ultimately began to resent his feelings. In his diary, Neverov explained, ‘if I did not occupy myself completely with my love for Vladimir … then I would find myself a girl …who could free my soul.’ Neverov longed to find a replacement for Vladimir – a woman to be ‘the object of [his] most flaming passion,’ but friendship with Vladimir left no room for romance with a woman.56 The friendships of F. I. Buslaev also followed a similar pattern of courtship.57 In his descriptions of his friendship with classmate Klassovskii, for example, the future academician Buslaev not only celebrated his love for his friend, but also admired Klassovskii’s physical and emotional qualities. As with the Neverov/Rzhevskii friendship, the bond between these two young students was defined in a language reminiscent of romantic love. Their other acquaintances could not help but notice ‘my friendship with Klasovskii. It was so constant and strong that you had to notice it.’58 The two young men fostered their attachment in the Moscow dormitory where they both lived. They spent their evenings ‘at twilight’ together, ‘strolling back and forth along the corridors of the dorm … discussing various topics.’ Part of the friendship involved Buslaev’s admiration for his friend’s – in Buslaev’s own words – ‘effeminate’ qualities. On numerous occasions, Buslaev mused over his friend’s ‘delicate softness’ or mentioned how he would ‘break into a blush at the slightest emotion.’59 Buslaev’s intimate friendships were characteristically with men, whom he deemed ‘effeminate’ in nature. ‘Effeminate,’ in Buslaev’s vocabulary, included images of ‘softness’ as well as delicacy. In depicting his classmate Voitsekhovskii, Buslaev highlighted his affections for this man who


had ‘a tender heart’ and ‘a profound sense of loyalty usually only found in a woman.’60

Students, professors, mentors The culture of friendship prevalent among university students impacted student-mentor relations as well. The university, for many, was an informal (all-male) world of unceremonious personal relationships, where it was ‘customary for professors to invite students to their homes’ and into their private studies.61 There, in these unofficial spaces, ‘relations between professors and students were the most tender.’62 Students’ retrospective writings are filled with memories of friendly, sometimes bordering on intimate, interactions with their mentors, whether professors, inspectors, or tutors. Prince Dondukov-Korsakov described how professors regularly put on ‘little parties’ or ‘drinking bouts’ in their living quarters either to discuss scientific and philosophical questions or simply to socialize.63 One student reminisced about the gatherings at the home of Moscow professor S. P. Shevyryev, where the host met with his students, ‘found out their needs, leant books, gave lessons, and even handed out money’ to poor students.64 Professors also routinely invited students to their literary evenings, thereby providing a venue outside of the usual confines of official university life for the fostering of friendships across generational lines. In his writings on his university days in St Petersburg, I. S. Turgenev described how in the third year of his studies, 1837, he attended literary evenings at the home of professor P. A. Pletnev, where students debated philosophy and read one another’s poetry and essays.65 During the same year in Moscow, student V. Buraneshov was invited to attend the Thursday evening gatherings at professor N. I. Grech’s home. Buraneshov described how since he frequently visited Grech in his private study, the terrain of his professor’s home was very familiar to him.66 Boris Chicherin, in his memoir, remembered how he and his brother developed a close relationship with Moscow University professor T. S. Granovskii. An intimate friend of their father’s and their benefactor while in Moscow, N. F. Pavlov, introduced them to Granovskii. Before the two Chicherin boys took their university entrance exams, Pavlov arranged an intimate lunch with the professor. Chicherin recalled the event in vivid detail. ‘Here, for the first time, I saw this wonderful man, who had a tremendous influence on me … could it really be he whom I loved with all of my soul and whose memory has remained one of


the best in my life.’67 Chicherin recalled being ‘thoroughly charmed’ by Granovskii’s ‘elegance, grace, and generosity.’ Granovskii, whom Chicherin described as ‘equally captivating in men’s and women’s society,’ was ‘tall, slender, with pleasant and expressive features … a splendid forehead, big dark eyes peering out from under his thick eyebrows, a full intelligence, a softness [to him] and dark curls falling down to his shoulders.’68 After their initial meeting, the Chicherin boys met often with the professor, either at his home or at theirs. They were soon ‘on a friendly footing’ (na druzheskoi noge).69 Despite the strict lines of hierarchy that governed official university life, Granovskii ‘loved to gather students at his place for lunch’ ‘as if they were equals.’70 Long before he met Granovskii, Chicherin recorded in his diary his affectionate attachment to his tutor Vasilii G. Viazovoi (Vasia), himself a student. He wrote how alone together, ‘we slipped off into some dark corner and there my imagination was delighted by fantastic images, which transported me into an enchanted world.’71 The two were often together once Chicherin himself enrolled in the university. ‘After breakfast we set off and stayed out until dusk. We bathed together, rode horses together; in a word, our satisfaction was total.’72 Not only were the two young men wedded together in daily activities, but their emotional lives were also intertwined.73 The story of G. P. Galagan and his tutor F. V. Chizhov, also a student, reflects this pattern of emotional friendship that breached the strict lines of hierarchy and status. Chizhov and Galagan developed a close friendship while living under the same roof in the Galagan home. On one occasion, after Galagan fell ill, he wrote a last will and testament leaving his tutor his favorite gold watch ‘as a token of sincere friendship.’74 If the culture of friendship allowed students and their mentors to reach across official hierarchies and embrace one another, it also inspired groups of young men, touched by Schiller’s ideal of all-encompassing friendship, to come together and celebrate their intimate connection.

Circles of friends ‘I do not know why the memories of first love are given such precedence over the memories of youthful friendships,’ pondered Herzen in his autobiography: Friendship between the young has the ardor of love and all its character, the same delicate fear of touching on its feelings with a word,


the same mistrust of self and absolute devotion, the same agony at separation and the same jealous desire for exclusive affection.75 Herzen’s words suggest the range of emotions – ‘the ardor of love,’ ‘the agony at separation,’ and ‘jealousy’ – which were part of the vocabulary of student friendship. Konstantin Aksakov – student, member of the Moscow Stankevich circle, and later a prominent Slavophile – celebrated his university friendships through poetry. While in his second year of studies in Moscow in 1833, Aksakov dedicated the following poem to his four best friends. Friends, sit in my canoe … We’ll need neither oar nor sail … Friends do not fear! Let’s take each other’s hands! Let’s sit together in the canoe. Together we will be happy without the threat of separation We’ll sail the sea of life!76 In Aksakov’s poetic portrayal – as with Herzen’s autobiographical sketch – friendship brought this small group of young university men comfort, affection, and togetherness as they made their way from boyhood into manhood and sailed through ‘the sea of life.’ In addition to their epistolary revelations, students used the available physical spaces in their personal lives to come together in friendship. Recalling life in his Moscow boarding house, Nicholas Dmitriev described how, surrounded by friends, he experienced ‘the first pangs of love’ and shared his ‘soulful aspirations’ with his classmates. Like Aksakov, Dmitriev wrote that among these young men, he learned ‘the selflessness of friendship, the charm of quiet gatherings through the night … the heat of youthful passion … and the valor of life.’ Despite the lack of heating in the rooms, students clamored to get into this boarding house, which fostered a ‘sort of brotherhood’ among peers.77 In their reminiscences, students highlighted the role that small collectivities played in their emotional awakening. One such collective was the circle (kruzhok).78 As Herzen depicted, students and non-students gathered in small circles (kruzhki) in their domestic quarters – from university dormitories to family parlors – and engaged, as Herzen explained, in an ‘orgy’ of lively conversations. Once toward the end of May 1833 in the lower story of a house on the Nikitski Boulevard, a group of young men was roistering. The


orgy was in full flame, in high brilliance. The wine, like bellows fanned imaginations into a great tongue of flame. Ideas, anecdotes, lyric transports, comic imitations whirled and turned in a rapid waltz, raced on at a mad gallop.79 These young men were connected to one another not only by shared intellectual interests and political ideals, but also in friendship. Feelings of attachment were expressed, in particular, through the intimate language of longing, need, and desire. In an unpublished fragment of his student memoir, Konstantin Aksakov echoed Herzen’s sentiments on the role of the kruzhok in providing its members with social cohesion and a lively exchange of ideas. Comradeship, mutual interests, common attractions connected these ten men with one another. If someone glanced in on them in the evening in the lower story, small room, filled with tobacco smoke, he would see a lively, diverse picture: through the smoke they thundered on the piano, listened to songs, belted out loud voices, youthful, bearded faces, you’d see from all sides. 80 When historians have written about friendships in this era, they have routinely turned to the kruzhok,81 which has been celebrated primarily as a sacred space where young men came in order to escape the harshness of everyday life. Scholars have described how the camaraderie of the circle, out of the reach of the long arm of the autocracy, inspired men to embrace politically subversive ideas.82 Although true, this explanation does not exhaust the significance of the kruzhok in the lives of Russian students. For budding radicals and conservatives alike, this venue allowed not only for the venting of political frustrations, but also for the formation of individual friendships. From the tovarishestvo (comradeship) of the circle, came ties of individual, emotionally charged druzhba (friendship).83 The friendships between Ianuarii Neverov and Nicholas Stankevich and Alexander Herzen and Nicholas Ogarev – although not alone – represent two of the best-documented, longest lasting, and most famous male friendships of this generation. Before delving into an analysis of the writings of these two pairs of friends, we must first address the question of genre, audience, and intention. In his study of the familiar letter in the era of Pushkin, literary scholar William Mills Todd convincingly describes the ways in which many nineteenth-century letter-writers self-consciously used correspondence as a form of literary expression. Writing on the literary


practices among the ‘aristocratic amateurs’ of the Alexandrine period, Todd argues that the familiar letter became a conscious work of art, following strict rules of content and form. Writers assumed that each letter would be circulated among the group, therefore reflecting little in the way of feelings of intimacy for any particular individual. This genre was, Todd suggests, the perfect medium for the expression of the ‘cult of friendship’ so prominent in the age of Pushkin because intimacy was easily communicated not only to the individual recipient, but also to the larger intended audience for the sake of posterity.84 Yet, as Mary Wells Cavender explains in her analysis of gentry domestic correspondence in these years, not all letter-writers were ‘literary lions,’ nor were they likely to have imagined that their letters would be read by future generations.85 Moreover, even if a handful of students were aware of the literary conventions of epistolary forms of expression, it does not negate the fact that these letters reflect the available discourse for communicating one’s feelings of friendship and passion. Regardless of the authors’ intention, the tenor of the letters themselves reveals the discursive understandings of friendship available to young men, whether or not outsiders were likely to read their sentiments of desire and longing. The friendships between Neverov and Stankevich as well as between Herzen and Ogarev offer an opportunity to explore – in detail – the texture and boundaries of male friendship among this Nicholaevan generation.

The Stankevich circle The friendship of Ianuarii Neverov and Nicholas Stankevich emerged out of the well-known Stankevich circle in Moscow the 1830s. The membership of this circle, which gathered at the home of Professor M. G. Pavlov where Moscow student Stankevich resided in the 1830s, fluctuated over the years.86 Participants included such renowned figures in Russian intellectual life as Vissarion Belinskii, the future novelist Ivan Turgenev, and the anarchist-philosopher Mikhail Bakunin. The young men of this circle spent their Friday afternoons together exploring the philosophy of German Romanticism and singing songs. This gathering has been called ‘the most important of the many circles which took form at Moscow University in the 1830s.’87 Stankevich, ‘a young man with excellent looks … [and] with wonderfully lively eyes,’ was the central figure in this small grouping of friends. 88 Born in 1813 in Voronezh province, Stankevich began his university studies in Moscow in 1830. The young Stankevich, who con-


tracted tuberculosis and died at the age of 27 in 1840, was the leading figure of this circle of young intellectuals at the university both during and after his student days. His biographer Edward Brown described how Stankevich became the object of a Romantic myth upon his death. Writer Lev Tolstoy, who was not personally acquainted with Stankevich, wrote, ‘I’ve never loved anyone as I loved that man, whom I’ve never met.’89 Tolstoy was not alone in his assessment. In life, Stankevich chose one man to be his confidant and friend, the rather unglamorous and slightly older man from a meager and unknown background, Ianuarii Neverov the same young man whose love went unrequited by student Vladimir Rzhevskii described above. Stankevich and Neverov wrote letters over an almost ten-year period, from 1831 when they both arrived in Moscow as students, to 1839, near to Stankevich’s death, although primarily Stankevich’s letters have been preserved.90 Their friendship has been the source of some puzzlement. The mystery chiefly revolves around the fact that Neverov was not Stankevich’s intellectual equal. Stankevich’s biographer remarked that their intimacy combined with the discrepancy in intelligence made for a ‘paradoxical’ situation.91 Such an assessment assumes that their attachment was primarily, if not exclusively, based on intellectual exchange. The emotional nature of the Stankevich-Neverov bond is reflected in the pages of Stankevich’s letters to Neverov, the chief source of this discussion. In Neverov’s own autobiography, he made scant reference to the profundity of their connection. Upon their initial meeting, Neverov remarked that they quickly developed a ‘close friendship.’ Writing about their attachment while at the university, Neverov did explain that the two were ‘inseparable.’92 It is interesting to note here that the Russian word for inseparable is the same as the word for ‘love birds’ (nerazluchniki). Although the two students frequently saw one another while Neverov was still in Moscow, whenever they were apart Stankevich wrote his friend short letters filled with unrestrained pleas for Neverov’s company. In a note written on March 18, 1831, for instance, Stankevich declared, ‘My darling Ianvar!93 Come, I beg you to come to me and talk with me … Today is Friday. We always see each other on this day. I so long to see you and to sit and talk a while.’94 Stankevich made frequent demands on Neverov’s time and pined for his friend’s attention: My dearest Ianvar! … It’s already been so much time without talking with you! Sleep less during the afternoons and instead come to me


…. My dear Ianvar! Your important matter that keeps you away is certainly rubbish – here it is more important … come!95 Once Neverov had completed his studies and left Moscow for work in the Ministry of Education in St Petersburg in 1833, Stankevich’s affections and demands continued unabated. Stankevich indulged in his longing and need for Neverov; and when he did receive a letter it gave him strength: ‘My friend Ianvar! A thousand times I thank you for your first letter. It sustains me like all of your letters.’96 Neverov’s letters put Stankevich at ease: ‘Believe me my friend, that reading your letter, I become kind of – I will awkwardly tell you, harmonious.’97 Desperate for a word from his friend, Stankevich begged Neverov to continue to write because ‘your letters comfort me and improve my feelings.’98 This expression of longing was accompanied by frequent references to their interconnectedness. Stankevich’s writings emphasized that he and his friend were connected not only intellectually, but also spiritually and emotionally. He often exclaimed that their lives remained inseparably tied despite the distance: ‘My soul! My friend … Now I know in full measure how you are inside my soul …. Now [that you have gone away,] I feel how you are linked with my inner life.’99 In his letters, Stankevich also repeated phrases such as: ‘you are my conscience,’ ‘you are my poetry,’ or ‘you are able to revive me.’100 In true Romantic fashion, as Stankevich articulated, the two men fulfilled one another and felt part of a single whole. The language of these letters overflowed with heightened emotion, from passion to jealousy. The simple receipt of a letter from his friend elicited a dramatic response. In the following passage Stankevich expressed his feelings to Neverov: ‘If you know how little I cry! Now, with you, my tears and love are returning … Yes, yes, my angel … You, you are my friend – you are poetry of my soul.’101 Unfettered by any rigid sense of masculine constraint, Stankevich reminiscesd about their days together as students, even after his university career ended. These memories were filled with reference to nature. He asked Neverov to remember how he ‘loved to run on that road in this [rainy] weather.’ Since those days are over, Stankevich wrote, ‘Now we fantasize … the thunder would say hello and so would the lightning with a smile. You know, I think, how I passionately love thunder and lightning. And now I haven’t anyone with whom to experience these feelings.’102 Stankevich’s letters also expressed jealousy and anger. His feelings turned to jealousy when Neverov’s attentions were elsewhere and Stankevich felt neglected. When Neverov failed to appear after


numerous pleas, Stankevich wrote: ‘You go to [other] young men for good news, but you fail to come to me.’103 Stankevich, like Aksakov, celebrated his feelings of friendship through poetry. He dedicated the following to his friend Ianuarii [Ianvar] Neverov. They call him January [Ianvar] But he sees with the joy of May. And we sing to him and Honor him with songs and rites. Don’t try to charm him With the young [female] beauties of the sky. He trusts the charms of Moscow And of you, bold students. [He trusts] you who believe in friends, as he does. He calls himself Neverov.104 Here Stankevich not only made explicit his affections, but also described what he perceived as Neverov’s preference for male companionship over female. It is friendship with other men, like the one he developed with the poem’s author, which brought meaning to Neverov’s life as a university student. This friendship, cultivated through letters and visits, began in Stankevich’s quarters in the Moscow home of Professor Pavlov. During the same period of time, Herzen and Ogarev strengthened their bond that began in childhood.

Herzen and Ogarev: lifelong friends Perhaps the most famous friendship in tsarist times was between Alexander Herzen and Nicholas Ogarev. Over the course of their long lives, the two men cultivated an affective bond, which stretched from their first meeting in the fields outside of Herzen’s family estate through their days at Moscow University in the early 1830s and to the end of their lives in European exile. During their years together, they led a university student circle [kruzhok], traveled abroad, and became closely involved in one another’s families, all the while exchanging declarations of admiration and desire in their almost 40 years of correspondence. The bond between Herzen and Ogarev deepened during their years together as students in Moscow. The two young aristocrats became the ‘moral center’ of a larger circle of students in the 1830s.105 Members of


their circle included aristocrats and members of the middling gentry alike, including Nicholas Sazanov, Alexis Savich, Nikolas Satin, Alexis Lakhtin, Vadim Passek – who later married Herzen’s cousin – and Nicholas Ketcher. These students, some of whom continued in their intellectual and political aspirations after graduation, met regularly, primarily to read philosophy and discuss the issues of the day; meetings of the Herzen-Ogarev circle continued for several years after these young men ceased to be students. Even after the circle disbanded in the middle of the decade, the image of this youthful time recurred in the Herzen–Ogarev later letters. In 1840, Ogarev reminisced about their days as students: That was the holy time of our friendship … What a marvelous time, Herzen! Our friendship is a point of movement into the future … our whole life passed before my memory.106 Ogarev celebrated these early years. ‘We cried from love for one another. All was so good for us.’107 Historians have explored this friendship primarily in regard to its place in the narrative of the emergence of the radical intelligentsia. These letters, however, provide insight not only into the political developments of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also into patterns of sociability during Herzen’s own lifetime.108 They suggest, in particular, a great deal about the culture of male friendship and normative definitions of masculinity among members of early nineteenth-century educated society. The correspondences between Herzen and Ogarev, like those discussed above, overflowed with the language of affection, love, and brotherhood. During their university studies and immediately afterwards, Herzen and Ogarev celebrated their closeness and – like Stankevich and Neverov – their enmeshed identities: I have such a marvelous sympathy for you. We are different, very, very different … In you is a hidden, underdeveloped profound poetry – involuta. I have poetry which in some ways is profound, but alive, bright, poetry, expansive – evoluta … we have a profound understanding of one another … a strong friendship … I am active, you are lazy, but your laziness is activity for the soul.109 Herzen signed the letter, ‘your alter ego.’110 Herzen revealed that their friendship not only revived them, but also defined them. ‘A grand event in our lives is our friendship – it is essential, and without it we


would not completely be ourselves.’111 Herzen expressed the degree to which he was joined with Ogarev: ‘You [Ogarev] inhabit a huge place in my psychology.’112 Ogarev too imagined that they shared a singular organic identity. He wrote to his friend: ‘We are so created that it is impossible for us to become detached from one another,’ he wrote to his friend.113 Ogarev emphasized the spiritual nature of their connection – their souls were one. ‘Here I give you my hand, henceforth there will be a connection between us … we have found a peer/support for our entire lives, a soul which loves us and which we love without end.’114 One of the most striking features of their letters is the consistency with which each author conjured up images of passion. Herzen’s sentiment that ‘I had long loved Nick and loved him passionately’ recurred throughout their correspondences.115 Herzen explained that his emotions were too intense to put on paper: ‘I promised to write you a long letter, friend … but I have not yet. My feelings are so fresh, so hot, so vast that I am unable to capture them on paper.’116 Herzen’s desire expressed itself in the form of possessiveness: ‘I want to keep you for myself, and myself for you. But for this you must give me your hand and your counsel and–your unquestioning confidence.’117 Overwhelmed by emotion, Herzen became paralyzed. In his letters, Herzen repeated images of strength and passion to describe his feelings for Ogarev. For example, he admitted that Ogarev had ‘power over me.’118 Herzen depicted their relationship as being held together by an insoluble bond: ‘There is no power, no passion that can part you from me.’119 Herzen depicted the tenacity of his bond with Ogarev by setting it aside from all others. ‘Ogarev, I am horribly happy. I have everything, a friend [drug] and friendship.’120 Herzen’s own emphasis on the word friend – referring to Ogarev – set aside their union from all others. In the pages of his writings to Herzen, Ogarev used the language of desire, desperation, and passionate necessity. He explained that he was compelled to write: ‘It is necessary to disclose to you the entire history of my trip.’121 Ogarev admitted his dependence on his relationship with Herzen for existence: ‘Herzen! … your soul is essential for my existence.’122 Ogarev’s language was filled with desire: If I were now sitting near to you friend–Oh! What bliss there would then be! How I need to speak friend to friend; oh my Herzen! Do not cry that we have been separated. Bite your lip and in your heart absorb the poisonous feelings: La vendetta.123


This passage revealed the mix of vulnerability (the crying), desire (the need), and strength (absorbing poisonous feelings). Ogarev’s closing the passage with ‘la vendetta’ – revenge – again highlighted the intensity of their emotional commitment. He did not hesitate to use powerful language to express his longing for his friend. ‘I love you, and here I see the flaming side of your soul – love.’124 It is worth noting that Herzen and Ogarev’s profound connection did not cease in the years after graduation. On the contrary, the two friends continued their correspondence and frequently met throughout their long lives, often despite great distances between them. Their later letters remained true to their earlier tone and they continued to celebrate their feelings of love. Throughout their later years, Herzen addressed his friend with declarations of love. Writing on one occasion from internal exile in Vladimir on March 21, 1839, Herzen passionately called for his friend: ‘Oh Nicholas, my friend–such a friendship … it is love!’125 Such sentiments continued decades later. Writing, for instance, at the end of 1856, Herzen expressed his desperate need to connect his life with Ogarev’s: ‘It is my desire to end my life with you, and I believe we shall finish it together hand in hand.’126 And, indeed, they did. When Ogarev died in 1877, just seven years after his friend died, his last words were of Herzen.127 In his 1933 portrait of the Herzen domestic circle in European exile, The Romantic Exiles, historian E. H. Carr described how the boyhood friends remained inseparably linked through a bond of familial intimacy. Carr’s fascinating story about the reunion between Herzen and Ogarev in London in the 1850s highlighted how the two men cemented their bonds with one another through three-person, triangular friendships. Herzen and Ogarev reaffirmed their attachment to each other through their mutual affections for Natalie TuchkovaOgarev, the second wife of Ogarev. On Natalie Herzen’s (Herzen’s wife) deathbed in 1851, she ‘bequeathed the care of her children … to her dear Consuelo’ (Natalie Herzen’s pet name for Natalie TuchkovaOgarev, borrowed from a George Sand novel).128 Honoring this request in the memory of Herzen’s deceased wife, Natalie TuchkovaOgarev stepped in and served as mother to Herzen’s children. In the meantime, Herzen and Natalie Tuchkova-Ogarev began a sexual liaison, which resulted in several children of their own. Carr describes how Herzen and Ogarev were connected through their love for Natalie Tuchkova-Ogarev. Ogarev ‘rejoiced that Herzen’s affection for Natalie [Tuchkova-Ogarev] was forging a new link between himself and his life-long comrade.’129 Ogarev, Carr explains, dreamed of the ‘union of


three persons in one love.’130 They had, indeed, translated George Sand’s ideal of love into reality.

Friendship, manly love, and the state Carr’s story about triangular friendship in the later lives of Herzen and Ogarev, along with the passionate language of student correspondence detailed above, raises the question of erotic attachment not only between these two friends – whose own story is no doubt exceptional – but also among young men more generally. Moreover, any exploration of intimate male friendship, whether in adolescence or adulthood, inevitably raises the specter of sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular. What relationship, if any, did Russian students’ passionate language have to their erotic lives? The silence on the part of the writers regarding their erotic lives makes any assessment difficult, if not impossible. What is clear, though, is that definitions of love and its relationship to eroticism change over time and across space. Love between men has not always been, in the words of historian Jonathan Katz, ‘a code word’ for sodomy.131 Moreover, Katz suggests, in the early decades of the century, sodomy had little association with the feelings of ‘pure, true love that named the emotional link’ between men. In other words, for many, ‘love and sodomy lived in separate spheres.’132 Although Katz’s suggestion that men’s romantic relationships with one another were unlikely to be erotically charged seems overstated, what is plausible is that outsiders did not see a necessary connection between love and sex as has become common in our day.133 What is clear – if not the details of students’ sex lives – is that the meaning of same-sex love gradually changed. Recently, there has emerged a scholarly consensus that a fundamental shift in the norms governing same-sex male relationships occurred over the course of the nineteenth century.134 With the birth of middleclass ideas about respectability and self-control – reinforced through conduct manuals and emergent institutions of civil society – many began to take notice of passionate friendships and suspect immorality among its practitioners.135 Writing on eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Germany, George Mosse explains how gestures of affection or declarations of love between men that may have been part of everyday modes of communication in the eighteenth century were, by the middle of the nineteenth century, looked on with increasing suspicion.136 This shift, Mosse claims, was the result of the rise of the


middle-class ideology of respectability that insisted on self-restraint in all matters of existence. By the end of the nineteenth century, as male relationships in general were increasingly scrutinized by participants in Europe’s newly emerging professions, normative patterns of male interactions were more distant still.137 As ‘the sodomite was replaced with the homosexual,’ same-sex intimate friendships became increasingly suspect.138 At that time, across Europe, ‘sexual practices … once considered moral choices became regarded by the bourgeoisie as symptoms of biological and physiological flaws.’139 The homosexual, and his counterpart the heterosexual, were born. Prior, though, to ‘the invention of homosexuality’ by social science professionals in the late nineteenth century – as postulated by Michel Foucault and many historians since – individuals were not assigned a particular social, sexual, or personal identity based on their sexual habits.140 Sodomy was imaged to be the ‘temporary aberrant act of an isolated individual’ and not the basis for a social identity.141 In the early decades of the nineteenth century, then, men across Europe continued to express their feelings and embrace one another without fear of condemnation. Despite this normative understanding of male intimate friendship in mid-nineteenth-century Europe – including Russia – Russia officialdom was not altogether indifferent to male relationships. In these years, the autocracy took an increased interest in monitoring the bodies of its future servitors, from what they wore to where and with whom they shared a bed. Intent on molding obedient, well-mannered, and moral men to project an image of a civilized and European Russia, Nicholas and his officials began to police the behavior and bodies of the Empire’s young men, even as young students were taught the aesthetic of Romantic friendship in the classroom. Just as the university codified its emphasis on manners and morals through the new 1835 All-University Statute, it extended its control over civilian men’s bodies. In the same year the administration enacted new anti-sodomy legislation. The sodomy ban, initiated by Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century in areas of military life, was extended to civilian populations in 1835 and given moral underpinnings ten years later. As Laura Engelstein and Dan Healey indicate in their respective studies, during Nicholas’s reign, sodomy began to be imagined as a crime against contemporary morals and mores rather than an act that threatened ‘the stability of military hierarchies.’142 The 1835 statute stated that for the crime of sodomy the guilty parties


would be punished with ‘lashes and exile.’ The use of force incurred an even harsher punishment: perpetrators would be ‘deprived of all rights, whipped, and then exiled into penal servitude.’ Indeed, speculation has been made as to the relationship between Nicholas’s extending punishments for sodomy to the civilian population and the alleged rise in pederasty in boys’ boarding schools.143 No doubt the timing of these new laws was significant. The autocracy’s insistence on restraining impulses – sexual or otherwise – was central to the successful creation of civilized men in Russia’s expanding bureaucracies under Nicholas’s guidance. The autocracy’s discouraging of physical closeness between the Empire’s men was also reflected in the rules and regulations of the military training institutions. The official statutes that regulated the daily routines of military training institutions stated that beds in the sleeping quarters ‘should not be so close that the beds are touching. Between them there should be room for a little chair or a stool.’ In addition, overnight, all bedrooms were observed and had to be ‘sufficiently lit and surveyed.’144 Young men in bed together or located in close proximity posed a potential threat to the institutional culture and the social order. The same was true for students in Russian universities. If in American and British schools and universities it was common for pupils to share a bed, in Russia it was cause for punishment. Inspectors, both before and after this new 1835 law, were required to discourage young students from forming excessively devoted attachments with one another, especially physical ones. In 1816, while on his usual morning rounds of the student dormitories, Kazan’ University inspector Frants Bronner noted in his diary that while ‘inspecting the bedroom … I found students Bazilev and Ardashev lying together in a bed …[sic] under the eyes of the other students.’ If such behavior continued, the inspector recorded, the instigator Ardashev would be sent far away without the prospect of a good future in service. Inspector Bronner, discouraged by the student’s continued insubordination, noted in his diary: ‘It is a shame that such a talented person will be sacrificed for no reason. But, in order to protect [young men] from the temptation of sacrificing basic moral principles such a sacrifice is necessary, whether in its power to transform or to bury.’145 In Bronner’s diary, this same-sex male intimacy was represented as a physical act devoid of any emotional content. Likewise, the representations of passionate attachments between men in their correspondences and diaries were expressed in a language so lofty as to appear beyond even the possibility of physicality. Studying men’s relationships


with one another – emotional, physical, or both – therefore poses difficulties for the historian of nineteenth-century Russia.146 What does, though, clearly emerge from the historical record is a picture of an official culture that, despite the Tsar’s aversions and fears, neither prevented nor discouraged the forming of close male friendships. On the contrary, affectionate embraces and intimate expressions were central components of ties between men in the Nicholaevan era. Indeed, despite the fact that horizontal friendship bonds had the potential to challenge the hierarchical social order by undermining ‘the authority of fathers, kings, and emperors,’ the atmosphere – and even curriculum – at the university fostered such connections.147 Students’ emotional attachments, however, did not end with their friendships. The romantic friend had a counterpart, who was not a threat to autocratic ideology: the loyal son.

5 Loyal Sons and the Domestic Ideal

Even as Nicholas Petrovich Kirsanov delighted in his son Arcadii’s return to the family estate after a number of years away at the university, he lamented the ever-increasing distance between himself and his son. ‘Oppressed with sad thoughts,’ Nicholas Petrovich ‘for the first time clearly realized the gulf that separated him from his son.’1 Weeks, months, and years spent at the university had widened the emotional and philosophical gap that opened between the generations. Although he had returned home, Arcadii largely rejected the past – personified by his father – in the hope of a more fulfilling future with his friend, the nihilist Bazarov. This familiar story, found in Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, connected Arcadii’s distancing himself from his father with his own coming of age into new, more radical, political ideas. This phenomenon of the rebellion of sons against fathers emerges as central to Russian political and cultural mythology in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Alexander Herzen had provided a similar scenario decades earlier, when he described his transition from his father’s home to Moscow University as a moment of great personal emancipation, a much-anticipated rupture with his father and an embracing of a new family of university student comrades. The university meant freedom from the oppressive atmosphere of his father’s home. He wrote: ‘the insufferable dreariness of our house grew greater every year. If my time at the university had not been approaching … I should have run away or perished.’2 Herzen’s scenario has proven resilient and served as a basis, to some degree, for historians’ understanding of the relationship among students, their families, and the state.3 The connection of age, rejection of native hearth, and participation in anti-tsarist activities permeates scholarly accounts of the nineteenth99


century intelligentsia. Writing on radicalism in the mid-century, Daniel Brower echoes Turgenev and explains how ‘for both men and women, the conflict with parental authority represented a personal confrontation between the old order and the new ideals which could spark an interest in liberation politics.’4 In this depiction, which mirrors Herzen’s own story, becoming a man required a rejection of – and more accurately a rebellion against – his family. The self-conscious rejection of parents led to a sense of rootlessness, only exacerbated by the generally stifling social atmosphere of the university. Logically, then, as contemporary and retrospective accounts inform us, the connections and emotional attachments found in school and university acted as substitutes for familial relationships. Even as ‘strong family bonds permeated Russian life,’ schools that attempted to substitute for family succeeded in doing so.5 Writing on Moscow University in its early years, Marc Raeff describes how university attendance often created a feeling of ‘cliquishness’ that ‘set the students off from their home environment, their elders, and – most significantly – the state.’6 How, though, to reconcile the narrative of Herzen’s compelling coming-of-age story with the experiences of the broader student population, most of whom would not reject the status quo? To answer this, let us turn to another model of family relations, found in the diary of a Moscow student, who himself was a loyal and devoted son. This account resonates with the language of a broad array of official and personal correspondences, at least within the context of university student lives. In his diary, the young Alexander Georgievskii highlighted his attachment to his father. Upon hearing the news of his father’s death, Alexander remembered feeling initially devastated and then profoundly inspired to alter the path of his own life. Describing this incident in precise detail, the student recalled how one of the household serfs rushed to the rooms where Alexander and his brothers slept, and with tears in his eyes stated: ‘Our lord [barin’] has died.’ The serf repeated this phrase until the words sank in. ‘Overwhelmed in significant measure,’ Alexander recalled that his nerves were shaken. ‘The sudden death of my father so struck me that I was unable to sleep at night, and when I dozed off, I had the first nightmare of my life.’7 But, instead of allowing himself to sink into unhappiness, Alexander remembered becoming inspired by his father’s death to recommit himself to his studies, which he did the following year.8 His relationship with his father brought him closer to his studies, the university, and official life.

Loyal Sons and the Domestic Ideal 101

Future nihilists aside, most university students, like the young Alexander Georgievskii, did not distance themselves from their families. On the contrary, they remained emotionally and practically intertwined with their nannies, mothers, fathers, and siblings alike. Memoirs, as well as official and personal correspondence, highlight the degree to which individual students not only expanded their social horizons and participated in a world of affective relationships outside of the university milieu, but also maintained their own family ties, both emotional and practical. In turn, the university and central state authorities – from the inspector to the rector and to the Minister of Education – recognized and ultimately encouraged the order and respect for hierarchy that traditional patriarchal familial relationships fostered. In other words, the emphasis on obedience within the hierarchal and gendered domestic realm – at least in theory – worked to prepare sons for service in the autocracy. What emerges, in contrast to Herzen’s myth of alienated youth, is an integrated picture of family and university life where young men remained active participants in domestic matters, while at the same time studying to be future state servitors. For the majority of students, an ideology of domesticity, with its celebration of sentimental attachments and filial obligations, was part of the world of the university. The loyal son – like the romantic friend – embraced the values of expressiveness and personal attachment embedded in prescriptions of nineteenth-century Russian manhood, while simultaneously fulfilling the needs of the autocratic system.

Nicholas, patriarchy, and autocracy If Nicholas feared bonds fostered in friendship, he welcomed students’ attachments to their families. Nicholas’s paternalistic understanding of autocracy meant that he aimed not only to influence Russia’s sons, but also to encourage the power of patriarchs within individual households, who themselves were dependent upon Nicholas, their ‘tsar-batushka.’9 Patriarchy and domesticity were intimately connected within Nicholas’s Russia. Institutions of both family and state relied on hierarchy, emphasized obedience, and placed the batushka at the apex of power.10 Articulating the official emphasis on autocratic patriarchy, Moscow University professor M. Pogodin wrote that the secret of Russian history, the secret which not a single Western sage is able to comprehend … is that Russian history always depicts


Russia as a single family in which the ruler is the father and the subjects the children. The father retains complete authority over the children … between father and children there can be no suspicion, no treason.11 Nicholas took his fatherly role quite seriously. Within the university, he relied upon his officials, with the help of parents, to cultivate generations of Russian loyal sons. Generally speaking, the family served as a ‘central symbol’ of autocracy. Through their court rituals, as Richard Wortman artfully describes, Nicholas and his wife Alexandra themselves projected an image of their blissful marriage and family life onto all of Russian society.12 Russians were expected to express their devotion to the autocracy by emulating the imperial family and cultivating domestic contentment in their own lives. In this scenario of imperial rule, Nicholas played the role of devoted father and husband, while Alexandra exuded maternal love and wifely tenderness.13 This ‘dynastic scenario,’ in the words of Wortman, had all the benchmarks of Victorian domestic ideology – the pure, angelic wife, the devoted but stern father, and the obedient children.14 The autocracy, in other words, used the language of patriarchy and domesticity to control and assert authority over its subjects, just as individual patriarchs did within their own households. A central component of masculinity, within this patriarchal autocratic culture, therefore, included a man’s privileged status and his ability to control the women around him. This patriarchal emphasis also had a substantial impact on the norms of femininity. Given Tsar Nicholas I’s emphasis on military matters in general, femininity became ‘subordinated to the final masculine and militaristic authority of the tsar himself.’15 Women had first and foremost to sublimate their desires and ambitions in the service of the state, their husbands, and their sons.16 According to the Russian Law Code, the duty of a woman once married was to ‘rear worthy sons of the Fatherland.’17 Yet, this emphasis on obedience and order did not negate the practice of shared filial affections. At the very moment when Herzen was fleeing his father’s home, an ideology of domesticity, which elevated affective ties among family members even as it underpinned the patriarchal order, was influencing educated Russian society. It was against this backdrop of the increased importance of domestic ties that young men in greater numbers began to enter the university and embark on their studies. Nineteenth-century students embraced an ideology of domesticity,


which flourished away from the family parlor in the corridors of students’ dormitory rooms and apartments.

Russian domesticities In his monograph on the relationship between domesticity and masculinity in Victorian England, historian John Tosh argues that gender is ‘constructed through relationships’ and that home life constituted a key location of masculine identity formation among the middle classes in early nineteenth-century English society.18 The home and its accompanying domestic ideology, often thought to be the exclusive domain of female power and location of the formation of femininity, Tosh explains, also served as one key to understanding the emergence of bourgeois masculinity. Being a loving father and husband was part of a man’s self-definition and central to society’s understanding of the expectations of middle-class masculinity. He suggests that one of the main contributions of Victorian culture was the strengthened link between manhood and home life. For the middle classes, home was the place where a man’s ‘deepest needs were met.’19 Domesticity placed a high premium on ‘the quality of the relationship between family members – that is to say, all family members related by blood or in marriage.’20 The ideas of a child-centered home and companionate marriage were at the heart of this definition. Domestic relations thus relied on ‘profound’ emotional relationships among all family members.21 In recent years, historians have begun to comment on how an ideology of domesticity, which emphasized close-knit affective domestic relations, prevalent in western Europe, had made its way into Russian family life by the second quarter of the nineteenth century.22 This scholarship offers a direct challenge to historical arguments that hinge on the notion that there were necessarily contentious relations between generations – whether mothers and daughters or fathers and sons – which tore the family apart and undermined its centrality in the moral upbringing of future generations.23 Writing on gentry correspondence in this era, Mary Wells Cavender stresses the importance of emotional domestic attachments on the estate.24 Cavender, whose subject is the Tver gentry, identifies the emergence of a domestic ideology that emphasized ‘bonds of affection,’ which brought family members together and in turn constituted one of the key bases for gentry identity.25 The cult of domesticity that Cavender describes emerged under the influence of Romanticism, with its intimate expressions of familial affections and embraces. Through letters and


domestic rituals, family members reaffirmed their commitment to one another and to a blissful home life: parents focused on their children’s upbringing and siblings cultivated bonds of intimacy with one another. Jessica Tovrov, an historian of Russian domesticity, also emphasizes the importance of close filial ties, by highlighting a shift that occurred in marital relations in the mid-nineteenth century. As the century reached mid-point, Russian marriages began to resemble the ‘companionate marriages’ prevalent in bourgeois societies.26 What this meant was that husband and wife were now a self-contained emotional unit, answerable to no one but ‘each other, God, and the Tsar.’27 Despite Russia’s differing social and economic circumstances from France or England – including the absence of factors long associated with the rise of a gendered bourgeois self, such as a middle class and an industrial revolution – ideologies of domestic affection appear on the Russian landscape among participants in official life and educated society. One key component of this ideology as it manifested in Russia, along with the emphasis on filial affections, was the cultivation of particular feminine virtues, long associated with the Victorian feminine ideal.28 Even while women were imagined to be inferior and weak as patriarchal culture dictated, domestic ideology bolstered women’s status within the home. The traits that women were supposed to display, at least in the prescriptive literature and children’s journals that members of educated society read, included ‘piety, purity, and submissiveness.’29 Little girls and no doubt their adult equivalents were taught to be ‘modest, simple, and affectionate to everyone’ and to behave much like the ‘little angels’ of England or France. Femininity began to be understood in naturalized language. Women naturally belonged to the domestic sphere, peaceful and calm.30 Russian Orthodoxy had its own impact on the norms of femininity. Among the qualities that adherents of Russian Orthodoxy stressed were ‘humility and the capacity for suffering and selfsacrifice.’31 Overall, the Orthodox Church only intensified notions of women’s inferior status and reinforced the idea that women were ‘physically and morally weaker than men and therefore prone to sin.’ Men, for their part, were obliged to dominate women for their own good.32 With the rise of conservatism and nationalism in the post-Napoleonic era, there was an increased emphasis on women’s moral potential, which became associated with the nation’s well-being. The hearth came to represent the health of the entire nation.33 Femininity derived from a woman’s ability to create a peaceful, cozy home environment for themselves, their children, and their husbands.


A masculine sense of self (as Tosh argues in the case of Victorian England) was also tied up in the domestic. Conservative intellectuals, as well as members of the imperial family, emphasized how the home had become ‘the precious vessel in which the essence of the ideal patriarchy might be reserved.’ Male members of educated society would find themselves engaged in domestic tasks, whether working on the ‘upholstery’ or ‘in the sanitary facilities.’ 34 This did not require, of course, noble men and women to engage in menial household tasks. On the contrary, the assumption for members of the gentry was that household serfs would free them from engaging in demeaning work A tranquil home – run according to the appropriate age, status, and gender hierarchies – was the key to the creation of a proper and obedient household, and by extension an orderly nation.35 University and state officials relied on their pupils coming from respectable and hierarchical homes, where domestic tranquility reigned.

The family circle One aspect of domestic relations among the Victorians was the exclusivity of the family unit. The home was to be a world of isolated and comfortable pleasures, free from the troubles of the outside world. In England throughout the nineteenth century as the urban landscape rapidly expanded, the home became a place of shelter and comfort: Every Englishman has, in the matter of marriage, a romantic spot in his heart. He imagines a ‘home’ with the woman of his choice, the pair of them alone with their children. That is our own little universe, closed to the world.36 While the rise of an ideology of domesticity in nations such as England and France coincided with the narrowing of the family to include primarily parents and children, in Russia, at least throughout the first half of the century, membership remained a little more open.37 Recounting his travels through Russia, Baron von Haxthausen commented on the openness of gentry family arrangements: A Russian cannot live without a strong family tie. If he has none, he invents one; if he has no father he searches for and chooses one himself and has the same veneration for him as for his [birth] parents … if he has no children of his own, he adopts some.38


How far did the Russian family circle extend? Students, in their descriptions of their families as well as the families of their peers, largely confirmed Von Haxthausen’s characterization. Close ties that might have originated in the classroom or in the dormitory spilled over into the family parlor. The domestic unit had the flexibility to accommodate the integration of a number of non-blood relations, from a nanny to a young son’s university friend. In some cases, as Jessica Tovrov suggests in her work on the nineteenth-century Russian noble family, bonds forged among non-blood relations readily trumped blood ties.39 While studying at the university, young men searched for new filial ties – whether through family connections or through their friends’ families – where they would find domestic comforts and warmth by the hearth.40 Although this process of informal adoption did not necessarily mean full membership in economic terms, it could indicate integration into the family’s affective life. Students participated in domestic rituals, shared leisure time, and fulfilled their emotional needs in the company of their new, if short-lived, filial-like relationships. Many of the young men who found adopted families arrived at the university on their own. Iakov Petrovich Polonskii, from a Riazan gentry family, was one such young man. When he arrived in Moscow in 1839 to pursue his university training he was without any strong familial or social connections. As luck would have it, despite his miserable home life, in the first semester of studies Polonskii formed a close friendship with Nicholas Orlov, from a well-established Moscow family. Soon Polonskii sought refuge in his friend’s home. ‘Like a member of the family,’ Polonskii spent quiet evenings with the Orlovs and stayed the night with increasing frequency, sleeping in a corner that quickly was considered his own.41 Entrance into the Orlov domestic sphere also brought Polonskii a significant amount of paternal affection. The senior Orlov, he recalled, ‘loved me so much … that once in the evening as I dozed off, he blessed me in my sleep.’42 Far from his native family, Polonskii, like many of his classmates, enjoyed the tender affections of the patriarch in his classmate’s home. Under similar circumstances, future poet A. A. Fet, as recounted in his autobiography, became part of the emotional fabric of the domestic daily life of his classmate, Apollon Grigor’ev. The friendship with his beloved Apollon altered the course of Fet’s life. He not only participated in Apollon’s university circle (which met at the Grigor’ev’s residence), but also nurtured an intimacy with Apollon as well as his parents. Fet, while spending his Sundays with his friend either at their


Moscow home or on the estate in the countryside, created ‘an almost filial affection for Alexander Ivanovich [his friend’s father].’43 His connection with Apollon brought Fet out of his cramped student apartment and into the Grigor’ev domestic sphere, where he felt at home. In 1839, after a couple of years of friendship, Fet accepted the invitation to become a ‘member of the family’ and take up residency in their Moscow home, while he attended the university.44 Each day the two friends would eat breakfast together, go to the university, and at three each day, Fet along with the younger and the senior Grigor’evs returned home for their afternoon meal. Similarly, Fet remembered that at ‘8 o’clock in the evening they often met to drink tea and then each retired to his chambers until the following morning.’45 Fet acted as both brother and friend to Apollon and son to Alexander Ivanovich. He recalled this growing fraternal bond in his autobiography: ‘We sat together at the table on long winter nights. We then began to really understand each other, even when scant words were uttered between us.’46 Together they worked on poetry and spent long quiet hours reading Byron and Schiller.47 In some cases, connections with new families brought students’ social and financial improvement. Similar to the scenarios described above, Ianuarii Neverov became ‘like a member’ of the family of his bosom friend Vladimir Rzhevskii. Friendship between the two students linked Neverov closely with his friend’s entire family clan. As a member of the Rzhevskii household, Neverov lived and vacationed with Rzhevskiis for the final two years at the university. Neverov’s expanding family circle did not end there. Through his contact with the Rzhevskiis, he was able to make social connections that would last his whole life.48 Reflecting the fluidity between social and domestic realms, highlighted in students’ memoir accounts, there was a seemingly effortless movement between the language of filial and friendship address in students’ correspondence. Friends called one another ‘brother’ and brothers and sisters called one another ‘friend.’49 In the following particularly poignant example, a young man lamented the distance that had developed between himself and his childhood friend, now a university student. The distressed friend insisted: ‘my beloved bother … our connection is at once kindred (rodstvennaia) and friendly (druzhestvennaia). It connects us together as relatives and friends.’ Such a distance between friends, the author of the letter complained, had grown unacceptable: ‘And relatives and friends do not live so that between them a dead silence reigns.’50 The letter was signed: ‘your beloved brother.’ 51


At the same time, correspondences between students and their families revealed that the language of friendship penetrated into the family parlor. In her frequent correspondence with her university studentbrother Stepan Eshevskii, Liza began her letters ‘my sweet friend’ or ‘my dear friend’ or ‘my beloved friend’ or simply ‘my friend.’ While Liza signed her letters ‘your friend and sister,’ their father wrote similarly to ‘my sweet and priceless friend Stepan’ka.’52

Students and their families While at the university, young students not only created new bonds, but also maintained practical and emotional ties to their families of origin. Although the majority of university students left their families to attend school, others continued to live at home. Many celebrated their sustained connection to home in their letters and autobiographical narratives. In these writings, the family home provided the backdrop for continued affection and interaction between sons and their families. These often sentimentalized portraits of domestic life serve as a powerful antidote to Herzen’s story of alienation and isolation. The autobiographical account of Alexander Georgievskii emphasized the affection that connected students to the physical place of the home as well as the ties that were nurtured there. ‘The house,’ he recalled, ‘and especially the garden are connected with the very best memories of my childhood and youth.’53 The Georgievskii family consisted of six children–three girls and three boys. The Georgievskiis, well-established members of the gentry, continued to live in the outskirts of Moscow while the boys studied in town. As the years passed and each boy reached the age of university studies, he took the 45-minute drozhki ride from their country home to the center of Moscow. The youngest of the three boys, Alexander, recorded his memories of these days. His writings are replete with affectionate portrayals of the house itself, especially the quarters that he shared with his elder brothers. While the three boys studied, they lived together in a private wing of the house, overlooking the garden. The detailed description of the garden, and especially the father’s attachment to it, illustrates the ways in which the physical space of the family home anchored feelings of domestic contentment: The most important charm [of the house] came from its garden behind the big courtyard and the outbuildings. … The garden circled the house on three sides and had many fruit trees, especially


magnificent apples, bushes with raspberries, gooseberries, various sorts of currants, and beds of strawberries and potatoes. [Father] loved to work in there.54 In Georgievskii’s diary, the figure of his father loomed large. His diary descriptions highlighted the dual role that his father played: as disciplinarian and beloved parent. On the one hand, as in the above quote, the family spent free time together in the home or out in the garden. Outsiders rarely joined the intimate family circle, and the three boys were ‘very cautious’ about becoming close to their peers. Yet, no other company, he remembered, was necessary to his happiness. While a student, he remembers how ‘at home I could delight in the company of my brothers and sisters; I needed no other society.’55 On the other hand, there were rigid rules in the family, and the boys were constantly under the watchful eye of their strict father. Once the student-sons moved from the main house and into their own wing, they were overlooking not only the garden, but also their father’s study. In plain view, the father watched that his sons behaved properly and studied diligently.56 Once the patriarch died, Alexander focused his affections exclusively on his mother. ‘In these days [after father’s death] I again attended university lectures, I stopped by the cafés to read newspapers, journals and then spent the rest of my time at home, sitting with maman and serving her.’57 In this case, although unavoidably filtered through the lens of nostalgic sentiment, home provided the young student with comfort, discipline, and an outlet for his sense of duty. Reflecting the sustained nature of family ties, parents with the necessary resources often occupied homes near to the university where the entire family could live. The motivation for following their sons ranged from coddling to convenience, but the effect was the same: under these circumstances, sons remained in close contact with their parents and siblings. This closeness extended beyond the geographical. In December 1844, Boris and Vasilii Chicherin, soon to be university students, along with their mother – Ekaterina Borisovna – left their native Tambov for Moscow with the goal of gaining entrance into Moscow University. Once they arrived, the boys began to study for their entrance exams while their mother looked for a home to accommodate the rest of the Chicherins, who would join them in the months to come. The senior Chicherins dedicated themselves to remaining within close proximity while their sons studied. In August 1845, the two boys successfully completed their entrance exams and their father, Nicholas Vasilievich, along


with the remainder of his children, joined the mother and sons in Moscow, where they all lived together. The arrangement lasted two years and allowed the boys to study and remain with their family at the same time. After the initial two-year period had ended, the parents left Moscow for Tambov with their youngest and granted their other sons, who were still students, permission to attend the university and complete their degrees. On their own, the three sons moved into a centrally located apartment on Tverskoi Boulevard. When sons left their home for school, they often continued to foster filial intimacy through frequent correspondence and periodic visits. The relationship between Moscow University student Fedor Ivanovich Buslaev and his mother, Mariia Ivanovna Varykina, provides one such example. Up until the time that future academician Buslaev was preparing to embark on the adventures of university study, mother and son shared an intimate bond. This intimacy was related, in part, to the fact that the young Fedor was twice left fatherless – his father died when he was a little boy and his stepfather died in the cholera epidemic of 1830. Varykina had two daughters from her second marriage, both of whom survived to become adults. Throughout the course of their lives, mother and son remained very close. In his autobiography, Buslaev wrote that until he was 16 years old and he left for Moscow to attend the university, he lived with his mother ‘as if we lived one life.’58 Distance, though, did not shake their connection. When the young Buslaev left his home town of Penza for Moscow to take his university entrance exams in 1834, he remained in regular – sometimes weekly – contact with his mother through letters and occasional visits, until Varykina’s death in 1836.59 The frequency and tone of their correspondence reflect the continued deep affection they had for one another. Their letters were peppered with terms of endearment – ‘oh my sweet Fediusha’ and ‘hug me my little dove.’60 Varykina repeatedly reminded her son of the importance and ‘pricelessness of family life.’61 Fedor’s letters and diaries suggest that he shared his mother’s commitment to family. Approximately one year into his studies, Buslaev began to worry that his bond with his mother would weaken. Frightened, he begged her for reassurance. She replied by explaining that her love could not possibly grow: ‘You ask if … my love for you [could] increase tenfold, but my love for you is strong and I could not possibly elevate it any higher.’62 Mother and son were dependent on one another for support and love. In 1835 Buslaev sent his mother his portrait. Upon receipt of the gift, Varykina wrote that her feelings overwhelmed her. Although a portrait


was no substitute for seeing her son in person, it temporarily soothed her soul. While waiting for the gift, she wrote: ‘What contentment, what happiness! I see you my Fedor, my sweet student, and my comfort. I kiss you and I will soon kiss your likeness.’ She was thrilled with her son’s gesture. Once the portrait hung in her bedroom, she wrote to her son: ‘I am so grateful for the portrait, my friend. Kiss me, my sweet. … I look at the portrait and imagine you. … How you’ve cheered me up with such a gift.’63 In the year before her death, Varykina each day gazed at her son’s portrait on the wall and longed for his company. Like Buslaev, Stepa Eshevskii sent his mother his portrait to serve as a substitute while he was away at the university. The gift eased his mother’s longing to see her son: You cannot imagine what a comfort it is to me … I hung it [your portrait] above my bed and during dreamless nights I look at you there. I just think of you and sometimes even talk to you.64 His mother’s letters overflowed with affectionate exclamations and details about family life.65 Mother and son communicated in an intimate language and kept one another informed about the details of each other’s daily lives, including the health and welfare of family members. Students maintained close contact with their family members not only through packages, letters, and portraits, but also through periodic visits. Parents with ample resources often arranged to visit their sons at school or summoned them home during the Christmas holidays and summer vacations. Fathers visited as their work permitted and mothers when finances and health allowed. These meetings were confirmations of sustained affection between parent and child. Kazan’ student Ianeshevskii remembered the joy he felt at seeing his mother during the Christmas vacation. She came to Kazan’ to spend the Christmas holidays with her two student-sons. This was a change from their routine. Usually during holiday and summer breaks, their mother would send the horses for the boys to ride home, but on this occasion she came to spend some time with her sons in their new home. Unfortunately, her health kept her from remaining long in their company; the poor ventilation made it ‘difficult for mother in our apartment.’66 Ianeshevskii recalled the great unhappiness that he felt when, before long, his mother returned home. The next summer, though, the family was reunited. Ianeshevskii wrote about how overjoyed he was to be home


with his family in the Russian countryside and to see his father again after a year away at school. ‘I cannot describe the happiness I felt upon meeting my father, with all of our familiar domesticities, our provincial life, and our hunting and our strolls.’67 Student memoirists depicted summer as a time to visit relatives beyond the immediate domestic unit. In his memoir, Fet longingly described the summer breaks from university that he spent with his family circle in the countryside at their residence in Novoselkie. In the early mornings he would wander the countryside looking for birds to hunt with the rifle given to him by his uncle.68 Such moments reaffirmed the domestic bond. If resources were available, visits between parents and children were reciprocal. Despite her poor health, Ianuarii Neverov’s mother traveled to Moscow to see her son. In true martyr fashion, she died on the return journey.69 Buslaev and his mother Maria Varykina periodically traveled between Moscow and Penza to see one another. In 1835, Varykina came to Moscow for her son’s winter holiday break, where they spent every moment together and created a comfortable domestic arrangement by lodging together at a boarding house. (Varykina, of course, was not permitted to sleep in the dormitory where her son normally resided.) In his autobiography, Buslaev described the emotional and practical benefits he felt while she was with him–’The feelings of mother and son after a long separation and a much desired meeting … are difficult to explain.’70 He lovingly highlighted their intimate moments together; over the course of six weeks, Varykina witnessed and encouraged one of the key transforming moments of her son’s adult life. He described one evening when his mother came to his room and listened patiently to his musings and fantasies about his desire to become a professor. ‘My mother listened and looked at me lovingly, and finally … laughed, hugged me, and kissed me.’71 Varykina’s six-week visit was also quite useful to him socially. She charmed everyone she encountered, winning Fedor favor among his peers and social superiors. Varykina also put her son in the good graces of the administration. After her visit, Buslaev felt somewhat immune from punishment. The higher-ups in the administration must have thought, Buslaev guessed, ‘the son of such a … thoughtful mother would never act foolishly.’72 His mother’s charms cut through the protocol. Personal ties, at least in Buslaev’s perceptions, complicated the carrying out of disciplinary measures. Shortly after returning to Penza after her visit to Moscow, the charming Varykina died. Buslaev described his very last meeting with his mother: ‘bidding me farewell,


she blessed me for the last time in this world. Although it was such a difficult and bitter moment of life, her final blessing will always strengthen, save, and console me.’73 Familial intimacy was also expressed in students’ continued involvement in the daily details of their families’ lives. Parents, both mothers and fathers, advised their sons on issues of moral and practical importance. At the same time, sons were asked to help their families in domestic matters. Parental supervision in a son’s moral upbringing was not a new phenomenon. In fact, by the mid-nineteenth century, mothers in gentry homes routinely oversaw the moral training of their children. Although after the age of seven a boy moved from under the supervision of his mother to his father, his mother continued to exert an influence over his moral development.74 In fact, sons remained attached to their mothers throughout their lives. The relationship between Fedor Buslaev and his mother Maria Varykina highlights the degree to which mothers continued to advise their sons in their daily affairs, despite geographic distance. In her letters she urged Fedor to attend church and recite his prayers, and warned that if he wanted to grow up a decent man, he should go to church in good conscience. Varykina repeated the following sentiment: ‘If you have not been [to church today], please go and pray. It should be the first thing that you do when you step out of the apartment.’75 Varykina also felt it was within her rights to exert an influence over her son’s social life: she did not trust his newly acquired university comrades and warned him of the potential dangers. ‘Connections through comradeship cannot do anything good,’ she warned, ‘except engender ungratefulness towards that which you should study – like the church.’76 Perhaps afraid of divided loyalties, Fedor’s mother preached that friendship ‘is dangerous and brings nothing but evil.’77 Varykina, instead, urged Fedor to rely on the morals he had been taught at home in Penza. She stressed this perspective in her frequent correspondences with her son. I am glad, my friend that you are well acquainted with such wellknown and well-educated people. I only beg you not to become friends with them. You arrived in Moscow with good morals and in the eyes of good honest people that is worth more than the title of count or prince…. Use those principles [which I taught you] and which comfort me.78 As the above example illustrates, students had to cope with the possibly contradictory influences of parents and their peers. In November


1834, shortly after Fedor arrived in Moscow, Varykina sent her son a letter describing rumors she had heard about university students who turned against the Tsar. She pleaded with her son to remain loyal: ‘Please do as I ask. Remember the sweetness of the Tsar. Pray for him.’79 Whether or not her warnings had any effect on Fedor’s actions, her frequent letters, with their warnings and admonitions, were a constant reminder of his beloved mother, her values, and his responsibility toward her, and towards Nicholas I himself. In this case, domestic and autocratic obligations reinforced one another. The reach of Buslaev’s mother extended to the routines of daily life. In a letter of October 16, 1834, barely three months after Fedor arrived at the university, Varykina warned: ‘Don’t drink your host’s tea, but always drink your own tea: it’s cheaper and better … buy white bread for breakfast, you love it.’ Her suggestions were tinged with selfsacrifice. While advising Fedor to eat bread as needed, she added, ‘we [in Penza] will always turn away delicacies.’80 Varykina’s moral and practical advice was not always unsolicited. Fedor, for example, came to his mother to ask advice regarding the path of his university studies. He asked her, in particular, whether or not he should study more languages.81 Familial advice and responsibilities ran two ways. Mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers frequently turned to their sons and brothers, at the university, for guidance on domestic matters. The family correspondence of student Stepan Vasilevich Eshevskii reflected the degree to which students continued to participate in family decision-making and parents continued to ask for their sons’ guidance. 82 Eshevskii studied at Kazan’ University for only one year – 1846 – before being transferred to Moscow University, where he remained until 1850. Eshevskii’s father frequently wrote to his son in Moscow regarding domestic matters. On one occasion, Stepan’s father asked for his son’s ‘wise opinion on this priceless matter’ of his sister Liza’s marriage. ‘Tell me sincerely,’ the father inquired, if ‘I should permit’ Liza to become engaged. Liza’s intended, it is important to note, was an old friend of Stepan’s.83 Although admittedly Bestuzhev was – in Stepan’s father’s words – ‘a good man,’ he was without a decent position in state service. For this reason, the father turned to his son for guidance. Stepan replied that he would happily give his blessing to the match if his sister Liza understood the situation. The senior Eshevskii followed his son’s advice and the couple married two years later.84 Stepan’s parents also consulted him about his sister Vara’s education, asking where it would be appropriate to send her to


school. In this case also, the Eshevskiis heeded the advice of their son and sent her to a state boarding school for girls and applied for a state stipend to pay for her education. Through frequent correspondence, Stepan Eshevskii acted the part of teacher/mentor to his sister Liza. He suggested books for her to study and occasionally sent her materials to read, in both Russian and French. Liza’s letters consisted of reporting daily family events, keeping him up-to-date on birthdays as well as the health and well-being of all family members. Stepan, in turn, confided in his parents and sister his feelings and anxieties about life at school. In the months before Stepan’s graduation, he wrote his father to ask for advice on his postuniversity professional life. Although he was far from home and in the company of his peers, Stepan chose to turn to his father for wisdom on the matter of his future; the senior Eshevskii explained that Stepan must ask himself ‘first … and then look to God for guidance.’85 He continued, ‘if you need to know what my opinion is, I tell you to be useful in the scholarly arena. This would certainly earn you a living and an apartment.’ He suggested that his son work at first as a private tutor.86 Stepan also admitted to his father the deep loneliness that he felt while away from home. In response to his son’s unhappiness, his father advised him to find himself several good friends and then slowly the unhappiness and loneliness would ‘diminish and fade.’87 There were also concrete benefits of Stepan’s father’s involvement in his life at the university. His father attempted to use his connections through his service career to secure Stepan – ‘his priceless friend’ – a respectable post after graduation. In particular, his father tried to win his son a teaching position at Kazan’ University, where he would be near the family home. Being close to home was crucial for Stepan because it was assumed that he would take over the main family responsibilities once his father reached his declining years. If he did not, ‘who will look after the family?’88 Stepan’s first obligation was to his family. Individuals in the extended Buslaev household in Penza – like the Eshevskiis – called upon the young student Fedor for guidance in a range of problems. The death of Fedor’s mother Varykina in 1836 left him and his two half-sisters orphaned, elevating his own status within the family hierarchy. Even though he remained at the university in Moscow, he now had the final word on important family matters and was expected to become the guardian of the two girls. Soon after his mother died, Buslaev received a letter from a friend, Andrei Ivanovich Sergeev, informing Fedor of his new responsibilities: ‘on you lies the


responsibility to be a father to your sisters.’89 It is unclear from the sources whether Buslaev formally took such a responsibility upon himself. In practice though, Fedor began to play the role of family patriarch upon his mother’s death. His childhood nurse, Avdot’ia, for example, now turned to Buslaev for help. The year after his mother died, Buslaev received a desperate letter from Avdot’ia asking her ‘dear Fediusha’ for his intervention in a family matter.90 She feared that the Buslaev family, especially Fedor’s sister Sofia, no longer needed her and that she might consequently be dismissed. Sofia Ivanovna, Avdot’ia explained, ‘has grown out of the habit of her nurse’s company’ and now ‘finds her presence to be only a burden.’ In general, she feared, the whole family ‘practically does not need me at all.’ She solicited Fedor’s assistance not only to find out the truth of these suspicions, but also to plead her case if necessary. Since neither his mother nor stepfather was alive, Fedor was looked upon, at least customarily, as the senior decision-maker in such instances. Even as he continued his studies, Fedor agreed to take care of the matter and play this new role.91 Finally, finances tied university students to their families. Students relied on their parents and extended family members for funds and for socially advantageous connections. Fedor Buslaev depended upon his mother and sisters for money. In turn, they worried about his financial well-being. On one occasion, Fedor’s mother asked her son to ‘write to me of everything: how you take care of your apartment, how you pay for your driver, and how much money you have left.’92 Other students relied on domestic financial support, even at the expense of other family members. Such was the case with the unfortunate Ianuarii Neverov. In the fall of 1827 Neverov headed off to Moscow for his studies and bid his mother farewell. Once he arrived, he found himself with insufficient funds to pay the tutors he needed to prepare for the university entrance exams. His mother came to his rescue: she sold some family property. Neverov wrote in his autobiography how his ‘mother’s heart empathized and felt my prayers.’93 After her death, all her belongings were sold and the money was given to her son. This sum of 4,200 rubles allowed Neverov to complete his course of study. Not only did family members remain financially and emotionally linked to one another, but filial ties occupied a central place in students’ interactions with the state. The autocracy expected that students would maintain their domestic ties to their families, reinforcing the patriarchal order of the home and beyond.


The state and the family In June 1833, the cousin and guardian of former Moscow University student Pavel Sol’nstev wrote to the rector to inquire into the moral character and scholarly acumen of his young cousin and ward.94 Himself a member of the Nicholaevan educational bureaucracy (an assistant to the superintendent of the Kazan’ Educational District), the guardian turned to the authorities to verify his young relative’s sense of moral and academic responsibility. He was uncertain of Pavel’s character. When Pavel appeared on his guardian’s Kazan’ doorstep without official written notice of his release from the university, the guardian sensed that there was something amiss. The elder cousin turned to the authorities for guidance. Pavel had his own version of the story. He explained that he had become gravely ill at school and spent his time in and out of state and private hospitals. When the bills came due, Pavel thought immediately of his generous guardian as his means of salvation. Unconvinced of the truth of Pavel’s story, the cousin continued to suspect that he was being taken for his money and in his state of doubt turned to the university’s rector to verify his ward’s story. He enquired as to whether Pavel had a bad reputation or had been accused of any crime. Once the rector confirmed that Pavel ‘had conducted himself very well and studied respectably,’ the guardian trusted his ward.95 The rector, a state official, mediated the filial relationship between cousins, between guardian and ward. State officials in turn looked to families for help in molding young students’ morals and manners. Family and state, in this limited sense, relied on one another. Family relations, structured as they were around notions of patriarchy, reinforced the autocracy’s emphasis on hierarchy and obedience. Just as many gentry men were committed to sustaining the autocratic political system, albeit in some diminished form, so the state wished to maintain patriarchal and hierarchical control within the home. On the one hand, university disciplinary statutes specified that student inspectors were to rid young men of the bad habits they had acquired at home and turn them into proper state servitors while they studied. On the other hand, state officials relied on family members to cooperate with them in their project of molding future respectable servitors. According to official statutes, family members were required, for example, to formally share in the state’s surveillance of their sons. Fearing the negative influences of former (especially expelled) students, the university authorities appealed to parents to be sure that their sons steered clear of ‘harmful moral


influences.’ In Moscow in the late 1840s and early 1850s, after the post-1848/9 crackdown on students’ activities more generally, city and university officials ordered that all expelled students leave Moscow immediately and return to their home towns. The administration insisted that these former students be subjected to ‘compulsory parental supervision’ so that their destructive behavior would not infect their ‘more decent’ peers.96 The authors of the university statutes also institutionalized the role that parents were to play in overseeing certain aspects of their sons’ education. Parents, for instance, were required to formally monitor their sons’ training in the art of fencing. The 1843 version of the ‘Rules for St Petersburg University Students’ dictated differing rules for students who lived with their parents and those who lived on their own in apartments or in the state-run dormitories. Approved by the Minister of Education, the rules of student conduct stated that ‘those living in the homes of their parents or relatives’ could ‘practice their fencing exercises at home,’ while students who lived on their own were required to practice fencing in the designated halls where there would be an inspector or a teacher present at all times.97 In the absence of university officials, parents were expected to step in and oversee their sons’ fencing training. Families sometimes directly mediated their sons’ interactions with the university and city authorities.98 Parental involvement was particularly common in those cases where students committed crimes and were repeatedly subject to disciplinary action. In such instances, parents wrote to the authorities pleading on their sons’ behalf. The effectiveness of these interactions, however, depended in part on a family’s social connections and a father’s service record. The relationship that existed between a father’s social origins, his service record, and the degree of leniency shown his son by the university authorities, was reflected in law. The autocracy codified the central role that family of origin would play in the future of university students. Students who were members of the raznochintsy – people of various ranks, including sons of merchants and clergy – and repeatedly misbehaved (whether they were on a state stipend or self-supporting) were formally subject to harsher punishments than their gentry peers. A university statute passed in 1811 stipulated that if sons of raznochintsy repeatedly misbehaved, they were to be shipped off to low-level military service. Correspondence between district and central educational authorities suggests that this law was frequently invoked.99


Students were judged not only by the social station of their parents, but also – reflecting the patriarchal culture – by the moral character and military record of their fathers. Recognizing these criteria, students routinely invoked the loyalty of their fathers in hopes of getting lighter sentences for their crimes. The authorities assumed that the moral character of a father, whether admirable or reprehensible, was passed on to his son. Upon being charged with inciting his classmate Petr Verderevskii to an illegal duel, St Petersburg student Dmitrii Bibikov employed this strategy. When the university authorities caught the two students as they were challenging one another, they were initially given harsh punishments: Bibikov was expelled and Verderevskii was sent to military service at a lowly position. These punishments, however, did not stick. As the result of a series of pleading letters, Bibikov’s sentence was substantially reduced, leaving his nemesis to suffer alone. Desperate to reduce his son’s punishment, Bibikov’s father, a respected military officer, appealed to the university authorities based on his own service record.100 He began his letter with the phrase ‘as a respected servant of the monarchy’ and pleaded that they listen to his request that his son be allowed to finish his final year in the law department. After receiving a remorseful apology from Dmitrii himself as well as his father’s letter of appeal, the Minister of Education reduced the student’s punishment. In the following passage, the Minister made clear his motivations for his change of heart: Due to the respectful nature of his remorse, his good behavior up to this time, and especially [due to] the service of his father as the Kiev’s military Governor General, [the student] may remain at the university in St Petersburg until the end of his course.101 His sentence was reduced from disgrace and expulsion – which would have permanently affected his career as lawyer – to two weeks in the university prison-room (kartser), allowing him to finish his degree and become a successful professional without a stain on his university record. Petr Verderevskii, Bibikov’s opponent in the aborted duel, however, was not so fortunate. Without the backing of a respected father, he was forced to leave immediately. His own remorseful apology was enough, however, to lessen the severity of his punishment, from ‘expulsion’ to being ‘let go’ and he entered the military at a higher position than that of an ordinary soldier.102 The differing punishments granted to these two students for committing identical crimes speaks volumes about the influence that


fathers could exert vis-à-vis the state authorities on their sons’ behalf. The patriarchal system, which linked father and son, could either harm or benefit a young man. If his father had served well, the state authorities were more generous to the student. Either way, in the eyes of the state a young man had trouble disassociating himself from his father’s achievement and failures. The quality of a young man’s domestic attachments defined for the authorities his potential usefulness. Success in Nicholaevan society required that a student not only prove himself independently, but also that he come from a respectable and loyal family. Despite the relatively clear-cut above example, there were no official rules dictating how a father’s honorable service could help his son. The situation of Kazan’ University student Edward Fischer illustrates that other factors – in this case nationality/religion – could take precedence over a decent, if not high-status, service record. Fischer requested that he be considered for the position of ‘inspector’s aid’ after he graduated in 1848. His application, though, was ultimately rejected because his father’s low status as a music teacher. Although the father had been ‘a faithful servant to the Tsar,’ the combination of the father’s lack of professional prestige and the boy’s ethnicity and religion – he was Lutheran and likely Baltic German – deterred the authorities from promoting the student. Instead, the government required that the younger Fischer become an Armenian language teacher at a Kazan’ high school. There were limits to how much a father’s honorable service record could help his son.103 Mothers, although less frequently than fathers, petitioned the authorities on behalf of their sons. In a rather unusual case, Moscow student Vladimir I. Konchivskii disguised himself and took a university Latin examination for one of his classmates, Norbert Savich. Although initially Savich received a four on the examination, ultimately the lie was exposed – and the authorities kicked Konchivshii out of the university for his part in this deception.104 Several years later, in 1850, Konchivshii’s mother wrote to the Superintendent of the Moscow Educational District on her son’s behalf to request that he be readmitted to the university to complete his studies. He had committed, she described, ‘a serous crime only out of a false sense of friendship.’ This ‘unhappy mother’ pleaded her case: ‘he is my only son and my only hope.’ Her pleas to grant her only son ‘a new life’ were heard. The authorities granted Konchivshii permission to return to Moscow University as a student, albeit under the close watch of the inspector.105


Students themselves frequently invoked their familial obligations in their interactions with the state. They relied on the presumed connection between the worlds of filial attachment and state service. When appealing to the student inspector or university rector for a punishment to be commuted, students commonly pleaded for mercy based on their familial responsibility, whether caused by the death in a family or due to a declining economic situation. The language of students’ requests to the university administration, whether successful or not, suggests the degree to which students and officials alike assumed that university officials would take familial obligations seriously. Fedor Veretnnikov, for instance, pointed to his troubled family as the reason for his lack of academic success. Veretnnikov left Moscow two years before earning a Moscow University diploma (the document students received upon passing their exams). Two years after his departure, in 1850, the university administration decided to deny the young man an honorable discharge and certificate (attestat) (the document students received upon completion of only a couple of years of university study and no exams). Instead, they gave him a certificate that stated not only that he failed to complete his academic course of study, but also that his morals were indecent. Administrators based these conclusions on the fact that Veretnnikov failed to attend his examinations during the 1848/9 school year.106 Responding to this humiliation, Veretnnikov complained to the administration that he had been treated too harshly and requested that his official status on his certificate be changed from ‘being expelled’ to ‘being let go,’ which would have been a less serious stumbling block to his future career pursuits. In his letter, the student explained to the authorities that he did not leave the university irresponsibly, but rather, ‘I was obligated to direct my attentions to family matters.’ His family, he wrote, was in a very difficult personal and financial situation and, therefore, needed him more urgently than the state did. When his parents died in 1848, three children – Fedor and his two sisters – survived them. The situation required that he remain in the family’s home town to run the family-run factory. He insisted that had he returned to Moscow, the family business would have passed into ‘strange and unknown hands.’ Finally, he explained that if he remained in Moscow to study, he would have already spent much of the family’s wealth on his education. This was not a viable option. The university authorities granted Fedor’s request and issued the former student a certificate with an honorable discharge. The rate at which students appealed to the inspectors, the rectors, and the Minister of Education to reduce their punishment on the basis


of familial duties suggests that the authorities honored family loyalty and considered domestic obligations legitimate.107 But there were limits. Although ultimately unsuccessful, Larion Biriulin, a student who defied the rules countless times, increasingly invoked his family responsibilities as a means of gaining the sympathy of the university and state authorities. During his time as a student of Kazan’ University, Biriulin committed a series of punishable, indecent acts, including skipping prayers, smoking in prohibited areas, getting drunk and passing out in public, shouting obscenities outside the inspector’s door, and disturbing the peace. After being caught by the university disciplinary authorities numerous times, Biriulin received the punishment expected of a student of his rank and status. As a raznochinets, he was immediately sentenced to expulsion and sent to military service as a low-level soldier. Biriulin fought this fate by appealing his case to the inspector and rector based on his family obligations. In a letter to the authorities, Biriulin explained that being forced into low-level military service would devastate his parents, emotionally and financially. By subjecting him to the military, the university was dooming his parents to an impoverished old age. He thus requested that the inspector and rector reduce his sentence so that he could fulfill his family responsibilities. He asked that he be permitted to return home to his family to help them out around the house. In pleading with the authorities, Biriulin emphasized the great loss that his family would suffer if he were immediately sent to serve as an ordinary soldier. ‘Will you really take away from me my only means to thank and help my family?’ the student wrote. When these appeals fell on deaf ears, Biriulin’s mother stepped in, by writing to the authorities to verify her dependence upon Larion. In her letter of February 5, 1828, to the Kazan’ Educational District authorities, she wrote that she counted on having a ‘peaceful and easy old age with the help of her son.’ If the authorities sent him away, her hopes would be shattered. She also defended him by writing, ‘I know my son’s heart is soft.’ She advised the authorities to punish Larion, but to allow him to remain in Kazan’ with severe surveillance. Despite the strength of the appeal and the claim of family well-being, the authorities rejected the requests of both mother and son.108 Similar appeals were made by a group of troublemaking students in Kazan’ in the late 1830s. After being caught disturbing the peace by throwing stones through a church window, a group of students was sentenced to harsh punishments ranging from expulsion to military service.109 Several of the students penned letters to the rector as well as


the superintendent to plead for reduced sentences. Their reasoning revolved around their obligations as sons. One young student explained, ‘rumors of my misfortune will be very distressing to my parents in their declining years. I am their only son … and I am obliged to help them in their old age.’ He begged the authorities not to send him to the military: ‘May I take the liberty of begging you … to please not separate me from the fate of my parents.’ The father of another of the students, General Lieutenant Neratov, wrote to the superintendent of Kazan’ Educational District. He asked whether his son could be allowed to finish his studies instead of being expelled so that he could take responsibility for the family once the father himself became too old. Being ostracized at such a young age would ultimately, the father argued, destroy his son’s chances to live up to his family responsibilities. Touched by the father’s plea, the superintendent presented the case to the Minister of Education. He argued, in particular, that based on Neratov’s father’s ‘service to the Fatherland’ and the deteriorating health of his wife, the Minister of Education should consider allowing the student to stay near his family. Even though Neratov’s father gained some sympathy from the superintendent, the Minister of Education ultimately rejected his plea.110 Like Neratov’s father, families routinely intervened on their sons’ behalf. The story of the un-reformable St Petersburg student Nicholas Mitinskii highlights the degree to which parents turned to the authorities to help their sons.111 While still a university student in the early 1830s, Mitinskii on occasion left the university without permission and returned late at night, completely drunk. The administration at first decided to invoke the 1811 Law requiring that all raznochintsy who engaged in misconduct be sent off to military service. But, in the case of Mitinskii, the St Petersburg superintendent was easy on him and wrote to the inspector that while deciding a young man’s fate, they [the administration] must consider ‘whether or not he has a family.’ Mitinskii’s parents were old and depended on their son. Instead of military service, he should be allowed to live with his father where he would be put back on a ‘good moral path’ toward sobriety and respectability. At first, this was granted and Mitinksii took up a post as a teacher near his family’s home (since he had received state funds for his education, he was required to teach for five years). But, soon after taking up his new post, Mitinskii was found drunk in the classroom. Devastated by his son’s actions and frightened of the possible consequences, Mitinskii’s father asked the state to give his son one last chance before sending him away to the military. In his letter to the


superintendent, the father explained that ‘my son is only 23 years old; he is still in the period of life where it is possible to change his habits.’ Forcing Nicholas into military service, the father explained, would not only destroy his chances in life, but also disrupt ‘the well-being of the entire family.’ Joann Mitinskii assured the superintendent that such an outcome would hasten his own death. The autocracy, though, had its limits. The father’s request was rejected and the young Nicholas was sent to the military.112 The web of filial ties affected students’ relationship with the university and state. For its part, the state took family into account in its judgments of its pupils. In turn, autocratic officials acknowledged – and relied upon – the institutions of family life and patriarchal authority. At the same time that official culture encouraged students to direct their sense of loyalty exclusively to the state, the university also acknowledged the role that family played in students’ lives and relied upon those families to help monitor students’ behavior. State and family worked in tandem to mold decent young men and guarantee the continuation of the tsarist, patriarchal order. The majority of students’ own recollections, in contrast to Herzen’s eloquent portrait, indicated that the family did continue to occupy a central role in their lives while they attended the university. An ideology of domestic affections – adhered to by autocracy and family alike – continued to tie university students to their families. Codes of acceptable masculine behavior encouraged young students not only to express their affections for their peers, but also for their mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers. The autocracy in turn relied upon the patriarchal culture of family life – with its emphasis on subordination, obedience, and hierarchy – to reinforce its own authority over Russia’s future fathers, officers, and officials.

Epilogue: Beyond the Nicholaevan Ideal – Russia in the Coming Years

In 1849, just five years after the Minister of Education had ‘winked’ at the discovery of student corporations in St Petersburg, only a year after students in Kazan’ posted their letter of protest against their ‘scoundrel’ inspector Lange, and amidst waves of revolutionary protest across Europe, a group of men known as the Petrashevsty were discovered by the authorities in St Petersburg. Members of this group, scores in number, were suspected of hatching a conspiracy against the autocracy. On April 22, 1849, these young men – many of whom were graduates of the Empire’s most elite institutions, including the university – were arrested. The group’s leader, Mikhail Butashevich-Petrashevskii, himself a recent graduate of St Petersburg University, hosted regular meetings in his home on Fridays where members socialized and discussed the burning questions of their day, from serfdom to censorship to the legal system. Although they rarely agreed on strategy or approach regarding the direction of Russia’s future, the group as a whole represented, as Cynthia Whittaker remarks, ‘a conspiracy of ideas.’ They were, in many respects, what Nicholas had always feared. The connection between education and revolution had been confirmed in the eyes of the autocracy on that April day.1 The Tsar reacted not only by arresting and sentencing to death many of the participants (sentences later commuted), but also by seeking to impose strict rules from above on Russia’s educational system, especially on the universities. Just over a week after the arrests, Nicholas issued an imperial order curtailing the number of students a university could enroll; every university could have a maximum of 300 students, each of whom had to have an ‘outstanding moral character.’ Although this ambitious goal was never reached, by 1850, the total number of students had fallen to 3,000, an approximate drop overall of 25 percent. 125


The University of St Petersburg, where the conspirators had made their home, suffered especially severely, with only 378 students remaining in 1850.2 Moreover, there was increased surveillance not only of selfsupporting students but also of those expelled students, who continued to reside in the city. The administration feared that these young men would ‘infect’ their peers.3 Curtailing the number of students and monitoring their activities, though, was not the autocracy’s only means of asserting its might. After Minister of Education Uvarov’s retirement in October 1849, the Tsar appointed the sycophantic Prince Platon Shirinskii-Shikhmatov – who died in 1853 – to take Uvarov’s place. The new Minister’s strong suit was doing what he was told, which he expressed in the following famous quotation: ‘You should know I have neither a mind nor a will of my own–I am merely the blind tool of the Emperor’s will.’4 Reflecting this strength, Shirinskii-Shikhmatov proceeded to implement a series of repressive measures ordered by Nicholas. In 1850 all philosophy classes, with the exception of those in logic and psychology, were taken off the curriculum. And the two philosophy courses that remained were now to be taught by Orthodox priests. In addition, European state law and ancient history were considered ‘too sensitive’ and removed. Foreigners were no longer allowed to fill departmental chairs, despite many vacancies. Censorship increased to the point where the university no longer had any autonomy at all. When in 1850 Alexander Nikitenko, a censor and literature professor, inquired whether any new literary works had been published, he was told that ‘there are no new books.’5 Given the extremes of Nicholas’s last years, his death no doubt brought a collective sigh of relief among many of those within the Russian university system, from students to professors to administrators.

From the death of the Tsar to the new statute The Tsar’s death in 1855 and Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Crimean War in 1856 initiated an era of wide-reaching reform of the Russian social, political, and economic system. The Crimean war in particular revealed the government’s ‘underlying corruption and disorder and shook … the patriarchal authority on which the regime was based.’6 The war challenged the absolute faith in the autocratic form of governance so characteristic of Nicholas I’s rule. Tsar Alexander II (1855-81), although devoted to his father, initiated fundamental changes in the relationship between the autocracy and subjects, from peasants to

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nobles.7 One substantial change, relevant to the new role that the university would play within Russian society was the ceasing of the autocracy’s attempt to use its institutions–including educational institutions –to ‘impose social morality from above.’8 Nicholas’s project of relying on the state’s coercive structures to mold moral men was no longer viable or desirable. Instead, Alexander turned to Russia’s educational institutions in order to encourage the ‘development of citizenry’ with its own sense of responsibility.9 The university would become a key institution in the creation of active citizens of the Empire. Alexandrine students would be required – and require one another – to serve not only the gosudarstvo (state), but, more significantly, to serve the obshchestvo (society).10 Accompanying this shift, censorship was curtailed, the ban on foreign travel was lifted, and life within the university was less rigidly monitored from above. Many of the changes within the university environment, however, were not immediately codified. The years 1855 to 1863 – the year the ‘Tsar liberator’ Alexander II issued a new university statute – marked a period when old rules were being disregarded but new ones were not yet in place. Although there was no formal change in the relationship between the university and the autocracy or between students and university officials, the old disciplinary administrative regime was broken down piecemeal. Within four years of Nicholas’s death, many of the pillars of the Nicholaevan university system were undermined. Philosophy departments reemerged and student admissions increased. The system of student prison-rooms was dismantled and students – with increasing frequency – began to hold mass meetings involving hundreds. Reflecting this new atmosphere, in 1857, Nicholas’s system of university policing and surveillance had all but ceased to function. City officials were alone left to ferret out immorality and were far from vigilant.11 City police, in particular, were notoriously lax and tended to sympathize with the students. By 1859, students were no longer required to wear a uniform and – at least in Dorpat – as early as 1855 were allowed to form corporations.12 The Nicholaevan university regime had become a thing of the past. Overall, in the years leading up to the 1863 All University Statute, students were granted, if through neglect, increased autonomy in their daily lives. Freed from the main mechanisms of state coercion, students came together more freely to form what one historian has termed ‘a student estate with its own code of behavior, organizations, traditions and a sense of mutual obligation.’13 This phenomenon of


studenthood or studenchestvo, which was solidified in the age of the Great Reforms, had significant roots in the age of Nicholas I.14 The seeds of a collective identity – as this book has demonstrated – were planted by Nicholaevan students, who found pockets of autonomy and semi-autonomy in taverns, fraternity halls, and friendships. Nonetheless, in these post-Nicholaevan years, the growth of student corporate identity accelerated in pace and broadened in scope. One manifestation of this change was the increase in student organizations, including a literary journal in 1856 in St Petersburg, whose editorial board organized a student aid society to help defray the costs of poorer students’ university tuition.15 These years also marked the regularizing of student skhodki (gatherings), which took place within the university walls and outside in the courtyards.16 Students in Dorpat, whose corporate culture had long been developed, also expanded and accelerated their organized institutions of social life. On April 13, 1855 – just months after Nicholas died – Alexander II gave student corporations official sanction. 17 By 1862, students were permitted to stroll around not only the university, but also the city of Dorpat in their corporate colors. 18 Moreover, other societies emerged and expanded, including the ‘Akademicheskaia Mussa,’ which welcomed professors and members of the broader educated public. The leaders of Dorpat’s music clubs crossed lines of status and gender hierarchies by allowing not only their professors, but also women to participate.19 These new organizations flourished in post-Nicholaevan Russia.. Protest, another reflection of students’ collective interests, became much louder. Discontent among students, although expressed during the years of Nicholas’s rule, now erupted. This was certainly the case in Kazan’ in 1857, where students continued to voice their increasing dissatisfaction with Inspector Lange. In these years of relative thaw, university students found expanded space to criticize the very same inspector, whom their colleagues had publicly condemned almost a decade earlier. They wanted Lange dismissed for his dishonesty and disrespect. In 1857, unlike nine years prior, students confronted Lange and posted the following poem (‘Hymn to Your Highness’) all over the university buildings: You long wielded power over us, You long persecuted and tortured us You long have been an enemy to each of us. You stole our soap, our candles, our bread and our kvas

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So, let the devil suffocate you! You bought us with bribes By giving us rum and vodka And then you expelled us for drunkenness! You treat the university laws like those of your regimen. You lost your honor by glorifying yourself With your soldier’s, barbarian’s brain, We’ve put up with this ego for a long time! You’ve long offended our honor! The time has come, we believe For you to be plunged into the ashes/earth/ground; we have found a spot! ‘Down with the villain!’ we said. And he is gone: his fate is decided. Vivat! And we rejoiced. He is now ground into the ashes! Years will pass so quickly, like iron falls. And maybe our children will ask us: ‘What kind of man was that Lange?’ ‘Scum!’20 In this rendering, the man who was charged by the Tsar to oversee the manners and morals of the Empire’s future servitors was himself a despicable thief, who flouted official rules and regulations. Students again took up the mantle of protest to demand respect from their superiors, although more transparently and vociferously than before. This poem reflected a growing sense among students not only of their discontent, but also their collective identity and rights. When Superintendent Molostvov berated these Kazan’ students for their pranks against their inspector by denouncing their ‘vile crimes’ considered ‘improper for even the lowest of class of people,’ students fought back. When he returned home that evening, the superintendent found a throng of students waiting for him.21 They began to hiss and whistle at their superintendent, who screamed for help, forcing them to disperse. As a result, Molostvov insisted that in the future the much-hated Lange would serve as his personal bodyguard.22 The long arm of the disciplinary regime no longer muted students’ collective interests, as it had in the past. This increasingly public antagonism between students and the authorities had grown so great that a group of Kazan’ students were accused of ‘defaming the memory of our former Tsar-Emperor.’ These students, born in Siberia and Saratov province, lived together in an


apartment that the nicknamed ‘the colony of tadpoles.’ City and university authorities accused these young men of ‘drawing attention to themselves because of their immoral lives.’23 This accusation inspired a strong student response; together the students drafted a letter to Alexander II and complained ‘that the Superintendent and all of the university police authorities [including the inspector] did not act respectfully when talking with the students.’24 Students’ growing sense of solidarity combined with the administration’s increasing concern, culminated in the events of 1861, the same year that Tsar Alexander liberated Russia’s serfs.

1861: Culminating year Against the backdrop of the autocracy’s planning and promulgation of major reform programs – including the emancipation of the serfs and the creation of the zemstvo – students continued to protest. In Kazan’, students targeted their professors and inspectors. On one occasion, a group gathered to demand an explanation for why their university comrade Oliger had been expelled; they blamed their professor Balzan for this grave injustice.25 About 30 students gathered in a campus reading room and hatched a plan to revenge their comrade: they confronted the superintendent and demanded that Balzan be dismissed. Upon being rebuffed, the group of students, increasing in numbers to 150, approached their inspector, who also refused to take up their cause. In response, the students physically threatened him by surrounding him and shouting: ‘Go away! Go away! We don’t need an inspector! We have no inspector!’ Shouts such as ‘scum, fool, coward!’ also reverberated through the university’s corridors.26 Once the number of protesters reached about 400, the administration took action and expelled several of the ringleaders.27 Students’ activities became more organized after the issuing of the new regulations in 1861. These regulations, known as the ‘May Rules,’ were ‘designed to restore student discipline and eliminate student corporatism.’28 They were, in essence, a direct response on the part of the authorities to students’ increased collective strength, social autonomy, and organized protests. The regulations, in particular, forbade unauthorized student meetings and collective petitions, required all students to pay an annual lecture fee of 50 rubles, and outlawed the creation of student mutual aid societies. Perhaps the most controversial aspect of these new rules included the issuing of a ‘special passport,’ the matrikul’. Each young man was to have his matrikul’ stamped to

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indicate that he had paid his fees in full, registered his residency, and obtained the proper library permits. In other words, the passport would allow the authorities to keep tabs on students’ financial and physical well-being; it indicated in essence the reintroduction of control and surveillance. University officials wanted to track student movements, although not to the degree of their predecessors. Now, when a young man entered the university grounds each morning, he had to present a ‘special ticket’ to the policeman on duty.29 These new rules, although issued in May, were not announced until the fall of 1861. When the laws were proclaimed in St Petersburg in September, the students refused to accept the new system and denounced it outright. In response, the administration closed the university and did not open its doors until the fall of 1863. Students, and some professors, were outraged. On September 25, 1,000 students gathered to protest and 32 were arrested. A few weeks later, in mid-October more demonstrations ensued, leading to the police beating students.30 The students of Moscow, upon learning of these events in the capital, began to organize themselves. They called a meeting to decide how to respond. When the authorities discovered the large student gathering, they broke it up and arrested a handful of participants. More significantly, the Moscow University administration, wary of future trouble, forbade first- and second-year law students – thought to be responsible for the activities – from attending classes until further notice.31 This action, though, did not deter them. On September 27, 300 Moscow students signed a petition condemning the May Rules. In the petition the students offered an alternative new order, where students did not have to accept the matrikul’ system, where mutual aid societies would be permitted, where there would be no fees, and where students would have the right to issue collective petitions. They also wanted an increased student presence in university governance, including ‘student representation on the university judicial council and a student role in appointing professors.’32 Much to their chagrin, no such autonomy was forthcoming. On the contrary, the conflict between students and the authorities intensified. On October 3, large groups of students gathered in professors’ offices to demand that poorer students be able to attend the university free of charge.33 A secret memorandum written the same day stated that these students demanded justice for their ‘brothers’ in St Petersburg: ‘We must be involved in the affairs of our brothers in scholarly pursuits. The interests of St Petersburg students are intimately connected with our own.’34


Discontent exploded the next day, the anniversary of the death of their beloved Moscow professor Timofei Granovskii. Several students decided to use the occasion to make their demands known. On October 4, at Granovskii’s grave, student auditor Sergei Borisov gave a speech calling for the ‘an end to tyranny and despotism.’35 Over 500 students had gathered at the graveside. Borisov ‘expressed dissatisfaction with the direction and innovation of the university’ as he honored Granovskii. Although some protested that this was not the place for grandstanding, Borisov was undeterred. He called for increased student participation in university governance; in particular, he declared that they must have a say in the appointment of professors.36 Several students were arrested when the police broke up the gathering. One week later, students marched to the rector’s offices to inquire into the status of the arrested students; their requests were met with silence. Rebuffed within the university, students turned their attention to the city police authorities. On October 12 they led what would be their last march for a while to the home of General Governor Tuchkov. Hundreds of students gathered within the university walls, then left the premises and proceeded through the main streets of Moscow until they reached the square on Tverskaia where their victim resided. Approaching the building, students asked: ‘Why were our comrades arrested?’37 The police and gendarmes were summoned to defend the official and beat back the students. Although the students did not go down without a fight, many were injured and arrested. This would be the last of the students’ street demonstrations in Moscow before the issuing of the New All University Statute in 1863.

Autocracy, university, and students transformed Students – along with the university officials themselves – represented their interests very differently than they had during the heyday of the Nicholaevan disciplinary regime. Rather than emphasizing their devotion to the Tsar and fatherland, students in their writings articulated their commitment to improving and serving society. Therefore, when they appealed to officialdom they did so not out of an obligation to serve the autocracy, but out of a desire to serve ‘society.’38 The letter that students wrote to Tsar Alexander II in October 1861 reflected this new emphasis.39 In their plea to the sovereign, students no longer articulated a sense of obligation to uphold the Nicholaevan ideology of autocracy, orthodoxy, and nationality as representatives of

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the state, as they had in the past. Now, their allegiances were to one another and to a broader – in their words – ‘educated society.’ In this letter written during the protests, they wrote: Society is suffering through a difficult moment. Society needs now more than before people who are educated and passionately committed to the truth. Such a demand is felt everywhere. Everyone looks to the university to fulfill these grand expectations …. We thus come to you, our greatness, and declare our needs; we have not concealed them. 40 The particulars of what students asked for highlighted their new sense of corporate identity and social obligation. They expressed, in particular, their desire to participate in university governance, to have autonomy in their social lives, to help their less fortunate peers, and finally to reopen the university in St Petersburg. Each of these requests was meant to bolster student autonomy vis-à-vis the university and state authorities. They wrote: ‘We want students to have the right to organize societies’ in order ‘to help poor comrades and have moral control over one another.’ Such societies, they explained, must have ‘a judicial face, like the judicial face of the government. That is why we ask you to allow us our own deputies to investigate the crimes and misdemeanors of students, which destroy the general laws of the government.’ This, they proposed, would lead to ‘better relations between the authorities and the students, and would lessen the clash between the student masses and the authorities, which hampers our progress.’41 Students claimed that the granting of autonomy from the administration would ease tensions and allow them to help their comrades in need. Their idea of studenthood was based on a notion of equality; they explained how the university should be open to ‘everyone, regardless of title or sex’ and that fees should be waived for the poor. Finally, they declared that ‘like all members of educated society’ they insisted upon the reopening of the university in St Petersburg.42 Students were neither appealing to the fatherland, nor attesting to their moral qualities. Overall, in this letter to their sovereign, these young men articulated a collective sense of purpose not on behalf of the state, but rather on behalf of society, which in this case included their comrades in St Petersburg, the poor and less fortunate, and even women. It is interesting to note that, contrary to student demands, the new statute of 1863 codified, for the first time, the all-male nature of the student body.


Nonetheless, six years later in 1869 in St Petersburg, women began to enroll in the university’s special higher courses for women. Perhaps both were responses, however delayed, to the changing place of university students within Russian society and politics. 43 The university too had significantly changed in these few short years; it was no longer imagined primarily as an instrument of the state. Although the university continued to educate young men, who would staff the bureaucracies of the vast Russian Empire, its purpose had shifted. Released from many of its disciplinary functions, the university became increasingly autonomous from the bureaucratic apparatus. It would now begin to educate citizens of society (although by no means fully autonomous) rather than servants of the state. The university decrees of 1861 and 1863 reflected this new purpose. Kazan’’s officials issued the ‘Rules for Students of Imperial Kazan’ University’ in 1861. These compelled students – under the threat of much lighter punishments than was previously practiced – to ‘serve the needs of society.’44 The statute remained remarkably silent on the needs of the autocracy. Instead, the university would ‘give society a significant number of lawyers, technicians, teachers, and doctors … and in general people with real intelligence and morals.’ If university officials failed to fulfill this goal, they would be beholden not to Alexander II, but to ‘the court of contemporary society.’45 Thus, students’ irresponsibility and ‘non-performance ‘could lead to ‘the decay of civilization of the whole country.’ The university and society were reflections of one another: ‘In a word, the stronger their [students’] influence on society – by improving the intelligence and moral capital of society – the more honor and glory will fall to the university and the respect and gratefulness of society.’46 No longer tied so closely to the needs of the autocracy, the university now had an obligation to educate young men and prepare them for participation in the growing arenas of public life. This did not mean complete freedom for students. They were urged by the authorities to accept the matrikul’ and the other new rules, not through coercion, but through a sense of moral and social obligation. This new moral aesthetic could flourish in the most open, postNicholaevan university environment. Professors were instructed not to ‘stifle the freedom or intelligence or moral sensibilities of their pupils.’ For their part, students were told they must give their ‘honor as citizen[s]’ to try to meet society’s needs. 47 When the 1863 All-University Statute was announced – replacing the 1835 statute written by Uvarov under the guidance of Nicholas – it represented a new era in the university’s autonomy from the central work-

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ings of the state. It explicitly ‘restored the former self-government’ and ‘abrogated the curator’s right to interfere.’48 The faculty would have a much larger role to play, including the election of their peers and higher administrators, whether the rector or deans. The position of the inspector, such a central figure in the lives of Nicholaevan students, was diminished.49 He now resembled the inspectors of bygone days, defined by the original 1804 All University Statute. In particular, he was now likely to be a member of the faculty, chosen by the faculty, rather than a civil servant, chosen by the state. His monitoring of the daily movements, manners, and morals of students had largely ended; and there was no mention of his – or students’ for that matter – moral character. This 1863 document also created the position of the pro-rector – with whom the inspector would share responsibilities – also chosen from among the professorate, with a simple approval by the Minister of Education for a three-year term.50 The student prison-room system was dismantled, leaving inspectors and pro-rectors fewer disciplinary options. When a student was caught transgressing by the inspector, he was encouraged to appeal the decision to ‘higher authorities’ in the government. Overall, the inspector would no longer be such a powerful and significant figure in the lives of Russia’s university students.51 In the eight years following Nicholas’s death, much had changed within the university. Students, for one, were no longer being molded under the close watch of the autocracy to serve the needs of the state. In 1863 they were enlisted – and enlisted themselves – to ‘serve the needs’ of a changing society. Yet, as this book has attempted to show, these impulses had been nurtured years earlier. Students’ sense of collective identity did not emerge out of thin air. This book has tried to demonstrate that even during the height of autocratic control, students found spaces where they could develop a collective identity, whether based on corporate statutes or drunken rituals. As the story of the Kazan’ students, who protested against their inspector in 1848, suggests, some young men embraced official ideology and engaged in protests against their superiors – much like those that came later – years before the Tsar died. The following digression, a description of two protests that occurred three decades prior to the era of the Great Reforms, highlights how students’ demands were heard during the height of autocratic control. In My Past and Thoughts, Alexander Herzen portrayed what he termed ‘a declaration of war on Malov’ as a moment of student action against their politics professor Malov.52 Indeed, as Herzen suggests, this 1831


incident reflected students’ shared interests and demand for respect from their superiors.53 In the end, the superintendent intervened on behalf of the students and punished the professor and rector.54 In his private investigation, Superintendent Golokhvostov reported that ‘students were bored and fatigued by Malov’s lectures’ and found him personally disrespectful. In response, the students ‘shuffled their feet and forced Malov to flee.’55 The young men succeeded. What this incident suggests is that, contrary to what some scholars have argued, successful student collective action began decades before 1860.56 While some students were busy shuffling their feet, others were engaged in more mundane protests in Moscow that year. A number of state-supported students refused to eat in the cafeteria.57 They declared that the food was tainted and unfit for human consumption. Despite the administration’s initial demands that they eat their food regardless of its quality, the students refused and turned to their superior’s superior to demand justice. Ultimately, they succeeded in protecting their collective interests; the superintendent reprimanded the rector and his assistant was fired. To make matters worse for the rector, the superintendent put the students – who were ‘very pleased and were truly grateful’58 – in charge of monitoring the food’s freshness.59 Albeit on a much smaller scale than what was to come, these two incidents suggest that students’ sense of autonomy and collective rights – whether in Malov’s lecture hall or the university’s cafeteria – emerged under Nicholas’s watchful gaze. And yet, the conditions had drastically changed. The respectable servitor, with his three-cornered hat, close-cropped hair, and buttonedup uniform, was a character of the past. The young students of the post-Nicholaevan age, who dressed in civilian clothes, grew their hair long, and at least briefly in St Petersburg, shared their lecture halls with women, had a whole new set of challenges before them.60 Norms of masculinity among university students in the age of the Great Reforms, although no less complex than before, would become less intertwined with the needs of the autocracy and more connected with emergent, increasingly autonomous spheres of social and political life.

Conclusion

The all-male university served as a key institution in Tsar Nicholas I’s project of civilizing Russia’s subjects. By usurping the universities’ institutional autonomy granted by Tsar Alexander I, and erecting systems of surveillance and discipline, the autocracy of Nicholas I attempted to educate and transform unruly boys into obedient, pious and proper men. The Nicholaevan system thus was never uniformly repressive. Instead, the Tsar enlisted officials and institutions to participate in the project of creating respectable men – imbued with the administrative ideal of masculinity – to serve the regime as teachers, doctors, administrators, and soldiers after graduation. In these civilian and military posts they were expected to spread autocratic values into the far corners of the Empire. The tensions inherent within the administration’s particular prescriptions for propriety and subservience reflect the challenge faced by Nicholas in general. Tsar Nicholas I and his officials were attempting to create an image of Russia as a civilized, European power, while at the same time upholding autocratic principles, where deference to rank and obedience to authority were paramount. Achieving this goal meant that, on the one hand, young Russians were expected – like their European counterparts – to become proper, well-mannered, moral and controlled men. On the other, and unlike their comrades in the more liberal societies of Europe, Russian young men were increasingly subject to mechanisms of disciplinary control. Rather than (internally) self-controlled bourgeois citizens, Russian students were to become loyal and (externally) disciplined subjects. At the very moment when European monarchs were beginning to yield ground to emergent institutions of civil society, the Russian sovereign created coercive mechanisms for enforcing an ideology of respectable masculinity.1 There may 137


have been echoes of the bourgeois ideal in Russian prescriptions for manliness, but the mechanisms for ensuring its cultivation were uniquely autocratic. Russian officials, though, could never do a flawless of job of disciplining and molding students. And indeed they did not always try. As this book has suggested, official prescription and daily practice often diverged. Officials sometimes failed to contain, and even encouraged, raucous behavior among their protégés. Students, for their part, forged their own notions of masculinity, alternately in support or at odds with official norms. Becoming a man therefore required a balancing act. Young Russian men negotiated their way through this maze of fluctuating expectations, emanating from within official, social and domestic life. The Nicholaevan university, as this book has argued, is a particularly productive site for exploring the multiple contexts in which boys learned the norms and prohibitions of manhood. On the one hand, the university was an all-male state institution, where the autocracy deliberately attempted to inculcate its official values. On the other hand, whether fighting a duel in St Petersburg, writing intimate letters to a friend in Moscow or roaming the Kazan’ streets in a drunken state, university students spent much of their time outside of the classroom and in comradely society. While they attended classes and wore their officially-issued three-cornered hats, these young men were taught, and taught one another, to be courageous, rowdy, honorable, expressive, passionate and loyal comrades, friends and sons. Many, as the following scene suggests, cultivated multiple allegiances even as they remained loyal to the Tsar. Alexander Nikitenko, future censor and St Petersburg professor, recorded the following incident in his student diary: 2 Feb 1828: ‘Blessed day! I have long ago arranged with my comrades, that at the end of exams, we would organize a friendly farewell supper, to which each of us would contribute twenty rubles. … We gathered at four o’clock at Gorlov’s. Our first toast at the supper was, as usual, dedicated to the Fatherland and the Sovereign. For the second goblet of champagne each of us came up with a heartfelt subject and offered a toast. Krupskii drank to friendship; Ivanov – to the success of dramatic poetry; Gedershtern – to the health of friends; Gebgardt – to love and friendship; Del’ – to the Fatherland; Armstrong – to honor and friendship; Mikhailov – to his beloved; Gorlov – to the sanctity of ties of friendship and I – to the happiness

Conclusion 139

and glory of friends. At the end of the supper, we had swallowed the last goblet…five hours had flown by. …[In that time there was] not a single thought, not a single word to defame our morals, our honor or our friendship…The Fatherland might wish that everyone’s heart possessed such righteousness and such noble inspiration.’ 2 Nikitenko’s scene of young students pooling resources, drinking champagne, celebrating friendship and declaring their devotion to the Fatherland reflects the experiences of young men within the Nicholaevan university writ large. Among these young men we find echoes of many of the students described in the preceding pages, drunken comrades, devoted friends, and loyal subjects. Against the backdrop of surveillance and control, students gathered together, toasted one another, developed attachments, and some embraced the autocracy.

Multiple masculinities Scholars have described how daily life for members of the educated elite in the first half of the nineteenth century required the management of a number of contradictory roles, including Orthodox Christian, state servitor, serf owner, salon member and resident patriarch. They have highlighted in particular how individual men cultivated diverse commitments, which included Romanticism, nationalism, sentimentalism, mysticism, neo-classicism, Orientalism, Russian Orthodoxy, and religious obscurantism.3 In these decades, Russian men – and women – struggled with impulses and expectations that were often at odds with one another. Historians and literary scholars have postulated, therefore, that in this era of multiple influences and sets of values, individual men led fractured lives, where home and hearth represented the realm of authenticity and feeling and civil service and society were more superficial, and for some meaningless. In order to negotiate the demands of each arena, scholars have suggested, individuals had to perform a balancing act and embrace a ‘multiplicity of perspectives.’4 They were expected to enact differing narratives of behavior in professional and personal life. Values such as good taste and civility were the necessary uniform to enter into polite company, whereas home was the arena of meaning and morals. According to Iurii Lotman in his Conversations about Russian Culture, a male member of polite society – as if an ‘actor on the stage’ – might appear as ‘state servant, Orthodox Christian, landowner, serf owner, fashionably


scientific farmer, paterfamilias, amateur poet and member of polite society.’5 Similar observations about the fractured nature of identity among educated men have been made of a slightly later period. Writing on the career pattern of a new type of bureaucrat emergent in Nicholaevan society, W. Bruce Lincoln describes how in the 1820s meaning was found outside of service and in social and domestic arenas, from the salon to the family parlor. This changed a couple of decades later when bureaucrats no longer experienced work life as banal. They had learned to fulfill their moral and idealistic imperatives not only in private life, but also through service to the state.6 They had become integrated individuals. Writing on the birth of the legal profession in nineteenth-century Russia, Richard Wortman describes a similar process by which young lawyers became more integrated individuals over time. Although in the early decades of the century young men lived divided lives where virtue resided in home life, by the end of the 1840s members of the budding legal profession combined their idealism with their professional identity; at that moment the ‘diplomat sentimentalist type’ transformed into the ‘legal ethical type’.7 A decade or so before the era of the Great Reforms, Russians continued to embrace many of the values of polite society, while mobilizing them in the service of the state, including ‘courage, manliness and virtue.’ By the end of the Nicholaevan age, young men emerge in these narratives as ‘unified subjects.’8 This book on the practices and representations of masculinity among Russian university students, like the three studies mentioned above, is engaged in understanding how individuals managed conflicting impulses. This book suggests that the process of socialization for these young men was not – and indeed is never – coherent. For the students of the university, the process of becoming men involved negotiating through a maze of expectations and roles, including respectable servitor, honorable korporant, romantic friend, drunken comrade, and loyal son. These models of masculinity were far from uniform. Therefore, rather than describing the creation of unified subjects under Nicholas’s tutelage, this book has attempted to show how young men encountered, created and negotiated multiple masculinities as they grew into men. The tensions inherent in the obedience of the respectable servitor and the passion of the romantic friend were not necessarily resolved upon graduation. The phenomenon of educated Russians juggling expectations was not unique to the nineteenth century. Ever since Peter the Great

Conclusion 141

attempted to impose from above western norms of comportment on members of Muscovite elite society, Russian men and women have encountered competing expectations of how to dress and carry themselves. Throughout the eighteenth century, as is well known, elites alternately imbibed and rejected aspects of European enlightenment culture in their daily lives. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Russians were confronted with a particular set of contradictory allegiances and norms of behavior. In these decades, individuals struggled with impulses that were seemingly at odds with one another. The combination of an increasing emphasis on Russian national identity in the wake of the Napoleonic wars and the steady flow of ideas from western neighbors, meant that those who participated in literary life and the salons of polite society from the early decades of the century, encountered – and themselves created – multiple allegiances within official and unofficial spheres of life. Even among conservative thinkers who might have despised certain aspects of the French enlightenment, by and large could not reject Europe as a whole. After all, most likely they themselves were touched in profound ways by culture and cultural artifacts from France, England and the German states. Many condemned French culture in the same breath that they employed French tutors for their children and decorated their homes and their persons with items from Europe.9 Wholesale rejection of European influences – whether in the realm of everyday models of behavior, philosophical ideas or high literary tastes – would have been impossible. By the start of the nineteenth century, westernized manners and morals were fully integrated into Russian everyday behaviors and values, stretching well beyond the borders of elite circles. Europe had become not simply a geographical place on a map, but a ‘region of the mind.’10 Russians were confronted, thus, with multiple value systems, sometimes at odds with one another. And, with the rise of Nicholas I, the autocracy had a heightened interest in the ways in which its male subjects managed this multiplicity. Perhaps, therefore – as Todd postulates in his study of literature and polite society – individuals were required to choose among a particularly ‘large repertoire of roles’ in the first half of the nineteenth century. But, in any modern society (or in this case, one struggling to become modern), masculine roles were never singular or – to use Todd’s term – ‘unified’.11 Rather than fluctuating between a fractured, disjointed identity in one instance and a one cohesive in the next, gender theorists posit that identity in general – and gender in particular – always involves the filtering of


multiple value systems.12 The lens of masculinity provides an analytic framework for understanding how individual young Russian men negotiated their way through this maze of often disparate cultural values and social roles as they came of age. And by exploring the range of expectations that Nicholaevan university students confronted and forged, the book suggests several challenges to traditional understandings of the autocracy and its relationship to society in the decades leading up to the Great Reforms. In particular, this study casts doubt on the familiar narrative of a growing polarity between an omniscient, repressive state and a uniform and increasingly alienated society. What emerges in its place is a story of individual representatives of the state, whether the drunken inspector Nakhimov or the winking minister Uvarov, crossing lines of authority to school young men in the art of drink and tacitly encourage the fostering of corporate rituals. Beyond individuals, the university disciplinary system itself was flexible and – with its routine granting of second and third chances to students who transgressed – allowed, at least within limits, boys to be boys there, as they drank, sang, punched, dueled, and even professed their attachments to one another. For their part, students lived multifaceted lives. No matter how much the autocracy ‘strictly patrolled the social landscape’ it could never do a perfect job.13 Even during the years of the notoriously ‘intolerant Nicholas I’, representatives of state and society intermingled to produce varied institutions of social life. Whether they spent their days in the classroom, their afternoons in the pub, or their evenings declaring their affections for one another, young men, with their stateissued hats and swords in hand, created their own autonomous arenas of social and domestic life as they grew into men.

Notes Introduction 1 Nicholas Ovsiannikov, ‘Zapiski studenta kazan’skogo universiteta,’ Russkii arkhiv 12, no. 3 (1909): 469. 2 I. I. Mikhailov, ‘Universitet v 1840–kh godakh,’ Russkaia starina 10/11 (October/November 1899): 50. 3 Boris Nicholaevich Chicherin, Vospominaniia B. N. Chicherina (Moscow: Moscow University Press, 1991), 26. 4 Dan Healey and I make a similar point in our Conclusion to Russian Masculinities in History and Culture, ed. Barbara Clements, Rebecca Friedman, and Dan Healey (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 223–35. 5 There have been two recent collections, focused on the study of masculinity: Russian Masculinities in History and Culture; and Serguei Oushakine, ed., O muzhestvennosti (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2002). Scholarship, which explores masculinity in the imperial period within another context, includes Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); and Irina Paert, Old Believers, Religious Dissent and Gender in Russia, 1760–1850 (Manchester and New York: University of Manchester Press, 2003). Additionally, there is a growing field of Russian sexuality studies, including: Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: the Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: the Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Jane Costlow, Stephanie Sandler, and Judith Vowles, eds., Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). 6 Historians, sociologists, and literary scholars alike make this point. Sociologist R. W. Connell outlines the multiplicity of masculinity in Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). See also S. A. Smith, ‘Masculinity in Transition: Peasant Migrants to Late-Imperial St Petersburg.’ In Russian Masculinities in History and Culture, 94–112. On the German context, see the very interesting article by Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ‘Civility, Male Friendship, and Masonic Sociability in Nineteenth-Century Germany,’ Gender and History 12, no. 2 (2001): 224–48. 7 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), ix; and Judith Kegan Gardiner, ed., Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 11. 8 On the question of Greek homosexuality, see David Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (New York: Routledge, 1990); and David Halperin, ‘Does Sex Have a History?’ History and Theory 28, no. 3 (1989): 257–74. On middleclass domesticity, see the work of John Tosh, including his monograph 143

144 Notes

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). Particularly useful examples include Isabel V. Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1985); Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press 1998); and Tosh, A Man’s Place. This body of scholarship is vast and ever-expanding and includes: J. A. Magan and James Walvin, eds., Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987); Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality; Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor; Michael Roper; John Tosh (eds.), Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain Since 1800 (New York and London: Routledge, 1991); and Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society. This wording is from Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society, 1. Historians of later periods have begun to address this question in the Russian context. For a discussion of the negotiation between the state and professionals, see in particular Laura Engelstein, ‘Combined Underdevelopment: Discipline and the Law in Imperial and Soviet Russia,’ American Historical Review 98, no. 2 (April 1993): 338–53; and Jane Burbank, ‘Discipline and Punish in the Moscow Bar Association,’ Russian Review 54, no. 1 (January 1995): 44–64. Within German universities, which were controlled by state interests to a far greater degree than their counterparts in France or England, the mechanisms for control over the social lives of students were diminishing by the early nineteenth century. Never as rigorous in molding students’ behavior as Russian universities, German universities moved toward even more formal autonomy from the state. Although the degree of autonomy differed from state to state, when the University of Berlin was founded in 1810, William von Humboldt published a memorandum that created more distance between state and university. This changing dynamic is discussed in Friederich Paulsen, German Education: Past and Present (London, 1908), 187. For a more thorough discussion of the German university and its relationship to state and society, see Charles E. Mcclelland, State, Society and University in Germany, 1700–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). On the gendering of elites within German universities, see Patricia Mazon, Gender and the Modern Research University: the Admission of Women to German Higher Education, 1865–1914 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003). In Sexuality, State, and Civil Society, Hull describes how, as the state relaxed some of its control over disciplining its subjects, the ‘individual citizen now founded civil society.’ This citizen was, she contends, ‘married, heterosexual and male,’ 5. R. W. Connell emphasizes how, at least in European and North American societies, there exists a form of masculinity – what Connell calls ‘hegemonic masculinity’ – that is ‘exalted’ and reflects the accepted ‘gender order’ at a particular time. Connell, Masculinities, 77. On respectable masculinity in nineteenth-century England, see Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (New

Notes 145

16

17

18

19 20 21

22

23

24 25 26 27 28 29

York: Routledge, 1992); Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Tosh, A Man’s Place; and Sonya O. Rose, Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Tosh, A Man’s Place; and John Tosh, ‘What Should Historians do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-century Britain,’ History Workshop Journal 38 (1994): 179–202. Robert Nye, writing on France, shows how gender norms could be defined by one social group and appropriated by another. The approbation of gender norms suggests not only the changing nature of masculinity, but also the degree of agency ascribed to social groups and individual historical actors in facilitating those changes. In particular, Nye explores how the aristocratic code of male honor – with its dueling rites and rituals – was transformed by the male members of the new middle classes and used to solidify their gender status in a changing world. Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor, 8. On the dynamic, see the excellent essay by Marc Raeff entitled Understanding Imperial Russia: State and Society in the Old Regime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). Catriona Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 9. See Kelly, Refining Russia, 32–42. On polite society in the Alexandrine era, see William Mills Todd, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, and Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Iurii M. Lotman, Besedy o russkoi kul’ture: byt i traditsii russkogo dvorianstva (xviii-nachalo xix veka) (St Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB, 1994). On the university in the first quarter of the century, see James Flynn, The University Reform of Tsar Alexander I, 1802–1835 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1988). Wortman makes the point that Nicholas tried to prevent the development of a ‘professional bureaucratic ethos.’ Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. I (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 322. Nicholas Riasanovsky comments on the importance of individuals to Nicholas and his philosophy of rule. ‘The monarch liked to think in terms of individuals rather than institutions or legal abstractions.’ Nicholas I and Official Nationality, 1825–1855 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 199. Sidney Monas, The Third Section: Police and Society in Russia under Nicholas I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961). Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The Development of Manners (New York: Urizen Books, 1978). Quoted in W. Bruce Lincoln, Nicholas I: Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1989), 49. Wortman, Scenarios, 312. Ibid., 313. Marquis de Custine, Empire of The Tsar: a Journey Through Eternal Russia (New York: Anchor Books, 1989), 20.

146 Notes 30 P. P. Kolomnin, ‘“Ne trogat”: (epizod iz vremen imperatora Nikolaia I),’ Istoricheskii vestnik (November 1895): 519. 31 Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 247. 32 Along these lines, Presniakov compares Nicholas with Ivan the Terrible: ‘The personal retinue of members of the sovereign’s suite became the Oprichnina of Nicholas I, separated not only from society, but even from those in regular state service.’ E. Presniakov, Emperor Nicholas I of Russia: The Apogee of Autocracy (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1974), 42. 33 Presniakov, Emperor Nicholas I of Russia, 9. 34 Ibid., 6. 35 Wortman discusses this at length in chapters 9 and 10 of Scenarios of Power, vol. I, 256–332. 36 De Custine, Empire of the Tsar, 136. 37 The years of Nicholas’s rule experienced a boom in literary and philosophical publishing. The main venues for the exchange of these ideas were the monthly journals, known as ‘thick journals,’ including Sovremennik and Otechestvennye zapiski, both of which emerged in the 1830s. It is worth noting that Biblioteka dlia chteniia was, among others, considered a ‘thick journal,’ despite its support among officials close to the Tsar. 38 Biblioteka dlia chteniia, edited by Osip Senkovskii, a former St Petersburg University professor and state censor, provided its audience with a wide variety of authors and subjects (it has been compared to Reader’s Digest), ranging from serious literary efforts to selections of the latest Parisian fashion. The journal attempted, as historian Marker remarks, to ‘define and shape the Russian public’ in this era. Gary Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700–1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 101. 39 In the 1830s, Severnaia pchela boasted a readership of 7,000, as did Biblioteka dlia chteniia at its peak in 1837. Charles A. Rudd, Fighting Words: Imperial Censorship and the Russian Press, 1804–1906 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 74. 40 Severnaia pchela 51 (April 1827): 4. 41 Severnaia pchela 37 (March 24, 1827): 3–4. 42 Readers of these popular periodicals could also learn about proper – and more frequently improper – roles for women. In a Biblioteka dlia chteniia 1834 story entitled ‘An All Feminine Life,’ for example, the author enumerated the natural differences between females and males. Gender differences were depicted as natural, distinct and not necessarily complimentary. ‘The soul of a woman is sweet, soft, fragrant, light, transparent, crystal,’ and ‘saturated with love.’ By contrast, ‘a man’s soul is brave, proud, and strong; it is kicking with a thirst for blood … it is a soul without fear, without inborn shame.’ Biblioteka dlia chtennia 1 (1834): 33–63. 43 Severnaia pchela 50 (April 27, 1826): 2–4. 44 Ibid. 45 Severnaia pchela 51 (April 1827): 4. 46 Of all of the military training institutions on Russian soil – including the elite Corps of Pages, the Noble Regiment, the School of Guards Sub-Ensigns, the Engineer Artillery schools, and the Cadet Corps – the Cadet Corps was

Notes 147 both the largest network and the most prestigious. In 1825 there were five schools, 400 instructors, and 5,300 students, while by 1855 the numbers had exploded, there were 23 schools, 1,400 instructors and 8,300 students enrolled in the network. John Curtiss, Russian Army under Nicholas I (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1965), 179–80. Svod voennykh postanovlenii St Petersburg 1838 (parts 1–3). See in particular, book 3, chapter 4 ‘About the general physical, moral and intellectual upbringing of the pupils,’ 176. Leonid Alekseevich Ushakov, ‘Korpusnoe vospitanie pri imperatore Nikolai I,’ Golos minuvshago 6 (June 1915): 90–133. M. M. Rot, ‘Iz vospominanii starogo kadet o Gosudare Imperatora Nikolae Pavloviche,’ Russkaia starina 151, no. 7 (July 1912): 241. Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 315. The perspective is reflected in the following works: Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, Parting of Ways: Government and the Educated Public in Russia, 1801–1855 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976); Marc Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth-Century Nobility (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966); and Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812–1855 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961). W. Bruce Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia’s Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825–1861 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1982); and Richard S. Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). See also Cynthia Whittaker, The Origins of Modern Russian Education: an Intellectual Biography of Count Sergei Uvarov, 1786–1855 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1984). Jane Burbank and David Ransel, eds., Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), xiv. In addition to Ransel’s discussion of the merchant family in this collection, the works of Cavender and Randolf reflect this new emphasis on the centrality of domestic life to members of the Russian gentry. See John Wyatt Randolph, ‘The Bakunins: Family, Nobility, and Social Thought in Imperial Russia, 1780–1840’ (University of California, Berkeley, 1997); and Mary Wells Cavender, ‘Nests of the Gentry: Family, Estate and Local Loyalties in Provincial Tver’, 1820–1860’ (University of Michigan, 1997).

47

48 49 50 51

52

53 54

1 Respectable Servitors, Obedient Men, and the Autocracy’s Administrative Ideal 1

2 3 4

Sections of this chapter appear in my article ‘From Boys to Men.’ In Russian Masculinities in History and Culture, ed. Barbara Clements, Rebecca Friedman, and Dan Healey (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 33–50. Konstantin Aksakov, Vospominaniia studentchestva (St Petersburg: ‘Ogni,’ 1910), 11. Instruktsia inspektoru studentov imperatorskogo kazan’skogo universiteta (Kazan’: Kazan’ University, 1835), 6. Historians who emphasize the repressive nature of Nicholaevan educational policy include: Allen Sinel, The Classroom and the Chancellery: State

148 Notes

5

6

7

8

9 10 11

Educational Reform in Russia under Count Dmitry Tolstoi (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973); and Nicholas Hans, The History of Russian Educational Policy (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964). When Alexander I came to power in 1801, he set about the ambitious goal of reforming the autocratic administration; for this he knew he would need cadres of educated men to carry out his ambitious plans. Marc Raeff explores the importance of education for the state in his essay in Interpreting Imperial Russia: Education, Culture and Society in Tsarist Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). See also James C. McClelland, Autocrats and Academics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1979); and Nicholas Hans, The Russian Tradition in Education (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 1963). Touched by the Enlightenment-inspired notion that education ‘can uplift and perfect the individual,’ Alexander and his young friends created a system of higher education that was tuition-free and broad in scope. Without the fear of so-called free-thinking, the Alexandrine administration created a model of education that has been called by one scholar ‘the most liberal [act] of the nineteenth-century.’ Sinel, The Classroom and the Chancellery, 5. Walter Pinter, ‘Evolution of Civil Officialdom, 1755–1855.’ In Russian Officialdom: The Bureaucratization of Russian Society From the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 209. The 1804 Kazan’ and Kharkov University statutes were identical to the Moscow statute (St Petersburg University was not officially established until 1819). See Sbornik rasporiazhenii po ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia, vol. 1 (St Petersburg, 1866), 295–331. The quote is from James T. Flynn, The University Reform of Tsar Alexander I, 1802–1835 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 24. In 1722, after studying foreign bureaucracies, Peter the Great introduced the Table of Ranks to Russia. The Table arranged rank in the three branches of service – military, civil, and court – into 14 levels. In theory, every nobleman and commoner, regardless of social position, could work his way up the ladder from rank 14 to the top (although they would have had different starting points). The system lasted until 1917. Richard S. Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 48; and Daniel R. Brower, Training the Nihilists: Education and Radicalism in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 35. Spravnitel’naia tablitsa ustavov un-tov: 1884, 1863, 1835, 1804 (St Petersburg, 1901); and Cynthia H. Whittaker, Origins of Modern Russian Education: an Intellectual Biography of Count Sergei Uvarov, 1765–1855 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1984), 175. Flynn, The University Reform, 22. Patrick L. Alston, Education and the State in Tsarist Russia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1969), 26. Hans discussed the radical nature of Alexander’s educational reform efforts. In particular, he listed those involved in the reform process and in writing the new statute. These men included: A. J. Czartoryski, N. N. Novosiltsev, P. Stroganov, and V. P. Kochebei (all members of the

Notes 149

12

13

14

15 16

17

18 19 20 21

22

23 24 25 26

Unofficial Committee) as well as F. C. La Harpe, S. Potocki, M. Speransky, M. Murav’ev, F. von Klinger, and N. Mordvinov. Several members of this group had themselves received training in France under the tutelage of radical French thinkers. The Russian Tradition in Education, 19–24. James Flynn, ‘Russian Educational Philosophy,’ Slavic Review 36, no. 1 (March 1977): 56. On the enlightened nature of Alexander’s educational system, see Alston, Education and the State in Tsarist Russia. I. N. Borozdin, ‘Universitety v Rossii v pervoi polovine XIX veka.’ In Istoriia Rossii v XIX veke 2 (1907–1911), 352. See also Flynn, The University Reform of Alexander I, 1802–1835, 22. In 1722 when Peter the Great promulgated the Table of Ranks, nongentry who attained the eighth rank in the civil service, or twelfth in military service, became hereditary members of the gentry. Whittaker, The Origins, 60. Alexander M. Martin discusses the role of the Bible Society among conservatives during the reign of Alexander I. See his Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries: Russian Conservative Thought and Politics in the Reign of Alexander I (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997). There is a discussion of Kazan’ students’ bad behavior in James T. Flynn, ‘Magnitskii’s Purge of Kazan’ University: A Case Study in the uses of Reaction in 19th-century Russia,’ Journal of Modern History 43, no. 4 (December 1971): 598–614. As Flynn explains, student disciplinary troubles became so widespread that in 1816 the faculty protested against students’ unruly behavior and also complained to the central administrative authorities that they could not control the students. Flynn, ibid., describes Magnitskii as an opportunist. Quoted in Flynn, The University Reforms, 91. Quoted in Flynn, ‘Magnitskii’s Purge of Kazan’ University,’ 611. Flynn, The University Reforms, 97. Flynn argues that the interpretation of Magnitskii as a reactionary does not quite do it. He was an opportunist who took advantage of the situation. See Flynn, ‘Magnitskii’s Purge of Kazan’ University.’ Flynn writes about this committee in ‘The Committee on the Organization of Academic institutions and the Dorpat’s Professors’ Institute: a note on statecraft in the Russia of Nicholas I,’ Slavic and European Education Review 9, nos. 1–2 (1985): 51–63. On Shishkov and his conservative ideology, see Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries, especially chapter 1. Flynn argues that in 1835, with the new statute, Uvarov was following up on the enlightenment principles of 1804. The University Reforms, 54. Narodnost’ is often translated as ‘nationality.’ There is some debate about whether Uvarov was inspired by a desire to implement the conservative values of orthodoxy, autocracy, and narodnost’ or rather by his more enlightened goal of increasing knowledge and ensuring an expansion of the communities within Russia who have access to learning. Whittaker, with whom I tend to agree, errs on the side of the latter. Whittaker argues that Uvarov was not interested in enforcing ‘a rigid Orthodoxy,’ but rather wanted to ‘stimulate learning.’ The Origins, 154.

150 Notes 27

28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37

38 39

40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49 50

Ibid., 157–8. Whittaker emphasizes that there was still some autonomy. She notes that the statute did well to stimulate university life until ‘disaster struck’ in 1848. Alston, Education and the State in Tsarist Russia, 34. Whittaker, The Origins, 175–6. This usurpation of power began with Nicholas’s accession to the throne, and culminated in the publication of the 1835 All University Statute. Ibid., 237. On this see also Sinel, The Classroom and the Chancellery. Wortman, Birth of a Russian Legal Consciousness, 166. Sbornik rasporiazhenii po ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia II (St Petersburg, 1866), 170–5. Whittaker, The Origins, 162. Ibid. Sinel, The Classroom and the Chancellery, 20–3. In his biography of Chicherin, Gary Hamburg discusses these student protests in Boris Chicherin and Early Russian Liberalism, 1828–1866 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 218. There is a discussion of the changing relationship among autocracy, university, professors, and students in the years after Nicholas’s death in Hamburg, Boris Chicherin and Early Russian Liberalism, especially 217–24. See also Daniel Brower, Training the Nihilists: Education and Radicalism in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975). Instruktsiia inspektoru studentov imperatorskago kazan’skago universiteta (Kazan’, 1835), 6. According to Flynn, ‘all classes except gentry could be assumed to be obligated.’ Though, he tells us, the term remained ‘undefined.’ Flynn, ‘Tuition and Social Class,’ 233. It is interesting to note, though that students were not considered entirely released from their class until they had successfully completed a university course. On this see James T. Flynn, ‘Tuition and Social Class in the Russian Universities: S. S. Uvarov and “Reaction” in the Russia of Nicholas I,’ Slavic Review 35, no. 2 (June 1976): 234–5. Flynn, The University Reform, 74. Flynn, ‘Tuition and Social Class,’ 235. Nicholas I is quoted in Sinel, The Classroom and the Chancellery, 14. Flynn, ‘Tuition and Social Class,’ 237. Borozdin, ‘Universitety v Rossii,’ 350. Ibid., 373. This quote is from Whittaker, The Origins, 179. Cynthia Whittaker explains that in the post–1835 university statute period, ‘Uvarov waged a successful public relations campaign to attract the aristocracy, and beginning in 1835–6 contemporaries noted the influx of student names such as Shcherbatov, Golitsyn, Dolgorukov, and Kochubei.’ Ibid., 178. Flynn, ‘Tuition and Social Class,’ 242fn. Ibid., 239. Alston’s figures are slightly different: in 1836 there were 2,016 pupils overall and in 1848 4,566. Education and the State in Tsarist Russia, 34.

Notes 151 51

52 53

54 55 56

57 58 59

60 61 62

63

64

65 66 67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74

Borozdin provides the figures in ‘Universitety v Rossii,’ 359. The 1840 and 1850 figures for Kazan’ University are cited from M. K. Korbut Kazan’skii gosudarstvennyi universitet za 125 let 1804/05–1929/30 I (Kazan’, 1930), 70. These figures come from Whittaker, The Origins, 236. F. I. Buslaev, Moi vospominaniia Akademika F. I. Buslaeva (Moscow, 1897), 7–9. On dormitory conditions in Moscow, see also Istoriia moskovskogo universiteta, 1755–1955 (Moscow, 1955), 206. Buslaev, Moi vospominaniia, 96–7. Ibid., 7–10. N. I. Pirogov, ‘Iz zhizni moskovskogo studenchestva 20–kh godov xix veka.’ In Iu. N. Emel’ianov, ed., Moskovskii universitet v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1989), 95. A. N. Afanas’ev, ‘Moskovskii universitet v 1840–kh godakh,’ Russkaia starina 55 (September 1887): 646. Both Moskovskiia vedomosti and Peterburgskiia vedomosti printed advertisements for renting apartments in the respective cities. Nikolai Dmitrievich Dmitriev, ‘Studencheskie vospominaniia o Moskovskom universitete: part III,’ Otechestvennye zapiski, 122, no.1 (January 1859): 4–5. Dmitriev, ‘Studencheskie vospominaniia: part III,’ 2. Buslaev, Moi vospominaniia, 3. Konstenetskii described his living situation in part I of his memoir: Ia. Kostenetskii, ‘Vospominaniia iz moei studencheskoi zhizni,’ Russkii arkhiv 1 (January 1887): 117. On the question of student socio-economic status, see also James Flynn, ‘Tuition and Social Class in the Russian Universities: S. S. Uvarov and the “Reaction” in the Russia of Nicholas I,’ Slavic Review 35, no. 2 (June 1976): 232–48. Both authors described their experiences in their memoirs: Boris Chicherin, Vospominaniia B. N. Chicherina (Moscow: Moscow University Press, 1991); and Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973). F. N. Fortunatov, Vospominaniia o S-Peterburgskom universitete za 1830–1833 gody (Moscow, 1868). E. P. Ianishevskii, Iz vospominanii starogo Kazan’skogo studenta (Kazan’, 1893), 56–7. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) fond 109, eks. 1. d. 52, l. 41. Arkhiv gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii muzeia g. Moskvy (GIM) fond 404, op. 1, d. 24, ll. 8–8ob. Whittaker, The Origins, 175. See also ‘Universitetskii ustav, 1835.’ In I. M. Solov’ev, ed., Russkie universitety: v ikh ustavakh i vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, vol. 1 (St Petersburg, 1899), 42–3. GIM fond 404, op. 1, d. 24. 1l. 10–10ob, 21, 8. Sbornik rasporiazhenii po ministerstva norodnogo prosveshchenii, vol. 2 (St Petersburg, 1866), 46. GIM fond 404, op. 1, d.24, l. 35. Sbornik rasporiazhenii, 121. Ibid., 123.

152 Notes 75 76 77 78 79

80 81 82 83 84 85 86

87 88 89

90 91

92 93 94

95

Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA) fond 733, op. 41, d. 57 and GIM fond 404, op. 1, d. 24, l. 7ob. Musin-Pushkin is quoted in Whittaker, The Origins, 175. GIM fond 404, op. 1, d. 24, l. 10ob. Sbornik rasporiazhenii, vol. 2, 123–4. GIM fond 404, op. 1, d. 32, l. 304. See also GIM fond 404. op. 1, d. 24, l. 9ob. In a moment of exaggerated discipline in 1835, the superintendent of Kazan’ University, Musin-Pushkin, requested permission from the Minister of Education to forbid students from traveling out of town to visit their families during winter holiday. Musin-Pushkin reasoned that a great majority of those students who visited their relatives during the break failed to return in time for the start of classes. Students wrote him with flimsy excuses for their late return, the superintendent explained, from lack of horses to illness. His request, at least temporarily, was approved. RGIA fond 733, op. 41, d. 151. RGIA fond 733, op. 41, d. 200 and Tsentral’nyi isoricheskii arkhiv Moskvy (TsIAM) fond 16, op. 39, d. 324. GIM fond 404, op. 1, d. 24, l. 36. Ibid. Buslaev, Moi vospominanii, 8. On the abolition of the kartser, see Hamburg, Boris Chicherin, especially chapter on ‘Crisis at Moscow University,’ 216–43. Natsional’nyi akhiv respubliki Tatarstan (NART) fond 977, op. ins., d. 12. These circumstances included holding a student back, withholding a medal for bad behavior, and refusing to grant a state stipend. GIM fond 404, op. 1, d. 24, l. 37–37ob. This anecdote appears in my ‘Romantic Friendship in the Nicholaevan University,’ The Russian Review 62, no. 2 (April 2003), 262–80. The word prilichie has several meanings in English, including decency, propriety, and decorum. N. Auget de Rancour, ‘V dvukh universitetakh,’ Russkaia starina 86, no. 6 (June 1896): 574–5. Although Auget de Rancour made no mention of climbing up her balcony, the inspector charged him with that offense. Ibid., 575. Since Auget de Rancour failed to provide his readers with the conclusion to the story, one can only guess the results of the inspector’s threats. (Perhaps he shaved, fearful of punishment.) Ibid., 575. Nicholas Ustrialov was a professor of Russian history at St Petersburg University. Auget de Rancour, ‘V dvukh universitetakh,’ 574–5. Rules for students’ behavior were written in various forms, from ‘Instructions to the Student Inspector’ – which included regulations for students’ internal and external lives – to the ‘Rules and Codes for Students.’ Versions of these codes appear in various published and unpublished forms, including Instruktsiia inspektoru studentov imperatorskago Kazan’skago universiteta and in GIM fond 404, op. 1, d. 24, l. 21ob. The archives contain many examples of inspectors’ notes, primarily located within correspondences between inspectors and the higher authorities, whether the rector, the head of the Third Section or the

Notes 153

96 97 98 99 100 101

102 103

104

105 106 107

108 109 110 111

112 113 114 115 116

117 118 119

Minister of Education. One such example may be found in GARF fond 109, eks. 1, delo 52, ll. 38–41. The language is from Instruktsia inspektoru studentov (Kazan’, 1835), 9–10; and ‘Instruktsia direktoru Kazan’skago universiteta,’ Kazan’skii vestnik (February 1821): 93. The language here is from Instruktsia inspektoru studentov, 9–10 and ‘Instruktsia direktoru,’ 93. GIM fond 404, op. l d. 24 ll. 7ob–8. Instruktsia inspectoru studentov, 14. Sbornik rasporiazhenii, vol. 2, 43. GIM fond 404, op. 1, d. 24, l. 21ob and GARF, fond 109, 1 eks, d. 52. GARF fond 109, eks 1, d 53, l. 3. Rules for students’ behavior were written in various forms, from ‘Instructions to the Student Inspector’ – which included regulations for students’ internal and external lives – to the ‘Rules and Codes for Students.’ Sbornik rasporiazhenii, 2, 56. Kazan’skii vestnik (February 1821): 94–6. See this volume, chapter 4 for a discussion of this new law and its significance. These provisions appear in Article 677 of the Svod zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii: Zakony ugolovnye (St Petersburg, 1835), 213. GIM fond 404, op. 1, d. 24, ll. 17ob–18 and 21ob. Materials on Kazan’ students are found in Kazan’’s main historical archive, NART fond 977, op. ins, d. 12. Zhurnal ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia 7, no. 19 (July 1839): xxv, xxvii. TsIAM fond 418, op. 251, d. 1. RGIA fond 735, op. 10, d. 114. TsIAM fond 16, op. 40, d. 236. Since I have no other account of a student caught either in a robbery or at a brothel, it is difficult to discern if the administration severely punished Shumilik because of one or the other crime. Yet, the administration’s general intolerance toward students’ sexuality suggests that the severity of this punishment was related, at least in part, to his brothel visit. The punishment of ‘release’ corresponds to uvol’nenie, while ‘expulsion’ corresponds with iskliuchenie. The latter was much more severe. TsIAM fond 459, op. 2, d. 1356. Kazan’skii vestnik (February 1821): 20. Ibid. The university regulations use a number of words, in addition to the word pokornost, which translate into English as ‘obedient.’ These include poslushanie and povinovenie. Sbornik rasporiazhenii, vol. 2, 122. Kazan’skii vestnik (February 1821): 90. In minor incidences, when a student admitted his culpability, he was arrested for ‘no longer than seven days.’ Sbornik rasporiazhenii, vol. 2, 56. NART fond 977, op. insp, d. 17, ll. 14–15. Sbornik rasporiazhenii, vol. 2, 122–3. RGIA fond 735, op. 10, d. 175 and TsIAM fond 418, op. 252, d. 20. The ritual also included removing one’s hat with the left hand and was to be performed in the presence of any member of the imperial family. TsIAM fond 418, op. 266, d. 84. Sbornik rasporiazhenii, vol. 2, 49–50. Sbornik rasporiazhenii, vol. 2, 126–7.

154 Notes 120

121 122 123

124 125 126 127

128 129

130 131 132 133 134 135 136

137

138

139 140 141 142

Sbornik rasporiazhenii vol. 2, 51. Inspections of students’ clothing, linen, rooms, and bodies therefore were daily occurrences. In order to cultivate healthy bodies, inspectors watched over students’ diet and exercise regimes; inspectors provided ‘simple, healthy, and fresh food,’ planned ‘pleasant walks in the springtime,’ and found ‘locations for games and exercise in the fresh air in the winter.’ Kazan’skii vestnik (February 1821): 96. Sbornik rasporiazhenii vol. 2, 46. Kazan’skii vestnik (February 1821): 20. For information on the details of required student classes at Moscow University, see Otchety moskovskogo universiteta. For St Petersburg and Kazan’ universities, see the corresponding Otchety. Sbornik rasporiazhenii, vol. 2, 46. RGIA fond 735, op. 10, d. 175. TsIAM fond 418, op. 251, d. 1 and RGIA fond 733, op. 44, d. 26. Nancy Shields Kollmann describes the birth of Petrine masculinity, which included an emphasis on etiquette and good morals. ‘“What’s Love Got To Do With It?”: Changing Models of Masculinity in Muscovite and Petrine Russia,’ Russian Masculinities in History and Culture, 15–32. TsIAM fond 418, op. 266, d. 84. Whittaker, Origins also mentions the attention paid to students’ hair length, 174–5. This is noted in Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. I (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 311. Rules for student dress are in Zhurnal ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia 5 (May 1857): clxxx. TsIAM fond 418, op. 251, d. 1 and RGIA fond 733, op. 44, d. 26. Zhurnal ministerstva narodnogo prosvishchenii 5 (May 1837): clxxx. Ibid. Ibid., clxxviii–clxxx. In 1834, the superintendent of Moscow declared that ‘students must wear their uniforms in public places without fail.’ GIM fond 404, op. 1, d. 7. Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 312. Wortman also mentions how Nicholas himself wore a mustache, and only officers of the highest rank were allowed to emulate his style. He appointed his brother Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich to lead the Corps. This is discussed in Leonid Alekseevich Ushakov, ‘Korpusnoe vospitanie pri imperatore Nikolai I,’ Golos minuvshago 6 (June 1915): 90–133. Svod voennykh postanovlenii parts 1–3 (St Petersburg, 1838). See in particular, book 3, chapter 4 ‘About the general physical, moral and intellectual upbringing of the pupils,’ 176. Ushakov, ‘Korpusnoe vospitanie pri imperatore Nikolai I,’ 100 and 117. M. L., ‘Neskolko zametok o vtorom kadetskom korpuse,’ Voennyi sbornik 24, no. 4 (1862): 405–6. Svod voennykh postanovlenii, 177. John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York:

Notes 155

143

144

145 146 147 148 149 150

151 152

2

Oxford University Press, 1993); and Isabel V. Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). I have borrowed the term ‘administrative state’ from Laura Engelstein, ‘Combined Underdevelopment: Discipline and the Law in Imperial and Soviet Russia,’ American Historical Review 98 no. 2 (April 1993): 338–53. The notion of self-regulation did not emerge on the Russian landscape until the end of the century. At that point it came not from official corners, but rather from within new professional spheres. In her study of sex and liberalism in fin-de-siècle Russia, Laura Engelstein describes how turn-of-the century Russians preoccupied themselves with male sexuality and declared, in their medical and pedagogical literature, that young boys needed to exercise self-restraint to control their libido. Whether in their new professional journals or prescriptive literature based on new scientific research, Russian psychiatrists, pediatricians, and others urged individual young men to exercise self-control over their sexuality in particular, and self-regulate their behavior in general. On this subject see especially, ‘Eros and Revolution: The Problem of Male Desire,’ The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), 215–53. GARF, fond 109; 1 eks, d. 52, ll. 22–23ob. GARF fond 109, 1 eks; d. 52, l. 31. GIM fond 404, op. 1, d. 71. l. 27. Ibid. RGIA fond 733 op. 21 d. 188. This quotation is from RGIA fond 733, op. 20, d. 316. Similar student appeals appear in the following archival folders: RGIA fond 733, op. 99, d. 381; RGIA fond 733, op. 21, d. 7; GIM fond 404, op. 1, d. 71, l. 27; GIM fond 404, op. 1, d. 32, l. 14; GIM fond 404, op. 1, d. 61; TsIAM fond 16, op. 40, d. 236. RGIA fond 733 op. 99, d. 381. GARF fond 109, 1 eks, d. 52, ll. 44ob–45.

Tavern Sociability

1 This chapter contains sections that appear in ‘From Boys to Men: Masculinity in the Nicholaevan University.’ In Russian Masculinities in History and Culture, ed. Barbara Clements, Rebecca Friedman, and Dan Healey (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 33–50. 2 Ia. Kostenetskii, ‘Vospominaniia iz moei studencheskoi zhizni: Part III,’ Russkii arkhiv 1 (1887): 335. 3 L. Ray Drinkwater, ‘Honor and Student Misconduct in Southern Antebellum Colleges,’ Southern Humanities Review 27, no. 4 (Fall 1993): 328–31. Many scholars have pointed to the relationship between masculinity and transgressive behavior, including alcohol consumption. Writing on Oxbridge students in the nineteenth century, Paul Deslandes notes that ‘successful attempts to evade disciplinary actions were celebrated as manly achievements.’ The same was certainly true of Russian university students.

156 Notes

4

5 6 7

8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18

Paul Raymond Deslandes, Jr., ‘Masculinity, Identity and Culture: Male Undergraduate Life at Oxford and Cambridge, 1850–1920’ (University of Toronto, 1999), 233. Others have explored the relationship between alcohol consumption and working-class masculinity. On this see S. A. Smith, ‘Masculinity in Transition: Peasant Migrants to Late-Imperial St Petersburg.’ In Russian Masculinities in History and Culture, 94–112. In his monograph on modern masculinity, George Mosse describes how outsiders – ‘the countertype’ – are key components of understanding, in Mosse’s terms, the ‘stereotype’ of modern masculinity. See his The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), especially 56–76. Boris Chicherin, Vospominaniia B. N. Chicherina I (Moscow: Moscow University Press, 1991), 70–1. Ibid. Douglas Smith, ‘Freemasonry and the Public in Eighteenth-Century Russia.’ In Jane Burbank and David Ransel, eds, Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 286. For an expanded version of these arguments, see Douglas Smith, Working the Rough Stone: Freemasonry and Society in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Dekalb: Northern Illinois Press, 1999). On the history of drinking establishments, see R. E. F. Smith and David Christian, Bread and Salt: A Social and Economic History of Food and Drink in Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 87. They mention in particular that the word kabak was used in the sixteenth century to mean state-licensed drink shop. To describe the places where they drank in the nineteenth century, student memoirists often used the term traktir, which – at least in eighteenth-century usage – was ‘primarily a drinking establishment where eating was of secondary importance.’ On this see George Munro, ‘Food in Catherinian Russia.’ In Food in Russian History and Culture (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 42. Nikolai Dmitrievich Dmitriev, ‘Studencheskie vospominaniia o Moskovskom universitete,’ Otechestvennye zapiski 122, no. 1 (January 1859): 3. F. I. Buslaev, Moi vospominaniia akademika F. I. Buslaeva (Moscow, 1897), 12. A. Georgievskii, ‘Moi vospominaniia i razmyshleniia,’ Russkaia starina 165, no. 6 (June 1915): 428. Dmitriev, ‘Studencheskie vospominaniia,’ 3. Ibid. ‘Zheleznyi’ means iron in Russian. This student seemed intent on denying any consumption of alcohol among students. However, the majority of accounts of student sociability emphasize that alcohol – beer, wine, vodka, and other spirits – did indeed play an important part in students’ pub and café interactions. F. M. Ustrialov, ‘Vospominanniia o st. peterburgskom universitete v 1852–1856 godiakh,’ Istoricheskii vestnik 16, no. 6 (1884): 131. In memoir sources, students often mentioned drinking ‘vino,’ which could mean wine or stronger spirits. On this see Smith and Christian, Bread and Salt, 88, 300. Buslaev, Moi vospominaniia, 11–12. Dmitriev, ‘Studencheskie vospominaniia,’ 3. Ibid., 5.

Notes 157 19 P. P. Semenov Tian-Shanskii, ‘Sankt Peterburskii universitet (1845–1848 gg.),’ In Leningradskii universitet v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov: tom I. Peterburgskii universitet 1819–1894, ed. V. V. Mavrodin (Leningrad: Leningrad University Press, 1956), 44. 20 Buslaev, Moi vospominaniia, 14. 21 Ibid., 15. 22 Ibid., 15–16. 23 Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA) fond 733, op. 40, d. 278. One can only guess at the source of his feelings of aggression towards his roommate. 24 RGIA, fond 733, op. 40, d. 119; and N. P. Zagoskin, Istoriia Kazan’skogo universiteta za perviia sto let ego sushchestvovaniia IV (Kazan’, 1906), 98–9. Zagoskin emphasized the fact that Bobin was a Tatar, and therefore the university and state authorities were far less lenient with him. There are many examples of students fighting with other students as well as students fighting with non-students or former students. Archival documents on the former include: Arkhiv gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii muzeia g. Moskvy (GIM) fond 404, op. 1, d. 32, l. 13; RGIA fond 733, op. 47, d. 85 and Tsentral’nyi istoricheskii arkhiv Moskvy (TsIAM) fond 16, op. 39 d. 213. On the later: GIM fond 404, op. 1, d. 32 ll. 28–32 and TsIAM fond 16, op. 39, d. 161. 25 RGIA fond 733, op. 30, d. 61. 26 GIM fond 404, op. 1, d. 32, ll. 26–7. In Moscow in 1848, to give another example, the authorities arrested a pair of drunken university students for harassing several unknown men on the street into a heated fistfight: TsIAM fond 418, op. 265, d. 31. Another archival example includes National’nyi Arkhiv Respubliki Tatarstan (NART) fond 18, op. insp., d. 977. 27 NART fond 18, op. insp., d. 977. 28 GIM fond 404, op. 1, d. 32, l. 24. 29 GIM fond 404, op. 1, d. 21, l. 32. For additional descriptions of drunken students’ aggression towards women, see GIM fond 404, op. 1, d. 75. 30 Buslaev, Moi vospominaniia, 14–15. 31 Descriptions of this incident appear in RGIA fond 733, op. 42, d. 182; and in P. F. Vistengof, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii,’ Istoricheskii vestnik 16, no. 5 (1884): 349. 32 GARF fond 109, eks. 1, d. 52, l. 10. On another Kazan’ evening in 1846, a group of drunken students deliberately threw a stone through an inspector’s window. GARF fond 109, 1 eks. 1, d. 52, ll.3–4. 33 Ibid., ll. 35–42; and RGIA fond 733, op. 46, d. 188. 34 The rules appear, for instance, in GIM fond 404, op. 1, d. 24, l. 10ob. 35 GIM fond 404, op. 1, d. 32, ll. 3–4. 36 GARF fond 109, eks 1, d. 52. Other administrators emphasized the inevitability of discipline problems among students. One university official expressed the notion that a young man might have ‘good behavior’ but will always have ‘a weak character’ and easily will slip into debauchery. RGIA fond 733, op. 40, d. 278. 37 For instance, students Bobin and Levingof, after three incidents of drunkenness and fighting, were sent for military service. RGIA fond 733, op. 40, d. 119. 38 Many student disciplinary files contain correspondences among officials, who debated the question of students’ punishment reduction. When a

158 Notes

39 40

41

42

43

44

45

46

group of Moscow students repeatedly gathered in the city to drink, sing, and ‘make mischief’ in 1834–5, they were given many chances before the punishment of expulsion was handed down. Moreover, even after punishments were handed down, several young men were able to get their sentences reduced. RGIA fond 733, op. 30, d. 138. Other similar stories are found in TsIAM fond 418, op. 252, d. 7. RGIA fond 733, op. 46, d. 188, l. 27. RGIA fond 733, op. 45, d. 104. It is interesting to note that even in the case of suspicious activities involving secret societies, prior reputation was a central factor in determining punishment. RGIA fond 733, op. 30 d. 103. NART fond 977, op. insp., d. 13, ll. 42–3. In 1830, one evening after evening prayers, student Nicholas Shabanov shouted a series of crudities at the inspector’s assistant in front of many students. The inspector sent Shabanov to the prison-room on bread and water for three days. His repeat offense, however, was punished much more severely. The following semester, Shabanov again uttered obscenities at the inspector’s assistant. For his second offense, Shabanov was confined to the prison-room for a full month with only bread and water to sustain him. The authorities believed that repeat offences were especially shameful, because the perpetrators failed to show the humility required to reform and learn from their behavior. RGIA fond 733 op. 22 d. 33. This story is even more interesting because of the role played by Mitinskiis’s parents; they pleaded on their son’s behalf to the authorities. See this volume, chapter 5. One of the complicating factors in Stadler’s punishment was that as his father was a French nobleman, the authorities could not easily give him the punishment of low-ranking military service, which was generally reserved for sons of raznochintsy or ‘people of various ranks.’ Yet, since his noble status was foreign, the options were ambiguous. Ultimately, he was sent for military service, but not at the lowest rank. RGIA fond 733, op. 40, d. 419. It is worth noting that Stadler had a disciplinary record before entering the university; he had been punished for instigating a duel in 1827. The opportunity for redemption for some came in the form of a transfer from one university to another. Rather than being expelled or sent for military service for repeated disciplinary infractions, a student might have been given the opportunity for a fresh start – with increased surveillance – at a new institution. Examples abound, including: RGIA fond 733 op. 45 d. 104 and RGIA fond 733 op. 30 d. 102. This was the case with Auget de Rancour mentioned in chapter 1. In a mock letter sent by students in 1855, Kazan’ Inspector Lange along with the superintendent Molostvov were accused of drunkenness. GARF fond 109, 1 eks. d 52, l. 44. One student memoirist alludes to drunkenness among the faculty in general. P. F. Vistengof, ‘Iz moikh vospominaniiakh,’ Istoricheskii vestnik 16, no. 5 (May 1884): 340–1. In December 1856, a Kazan’ city police officer wrote: ‘Here in Kazan’, young students and especially self-supporting everywhere have evil examples in many young citizen professors, who lead depraved lives, engage in drunkenness and card playing. They invite students into their wild merrymaking.’ GARF fond 109, op. 1 d. 32, 11. 54–54ob. A report from 1858 also emphasized the corrupting influence of professors. On a late May 1858 night a

Notes 159

59 60 61 62

groups of students, a professor and town dwellers engaged in a fight over a billiard game near a pub on the outskirts of Kazan’. Upon losing the game, the professor encouraged the students to run away from their opponents rather than settle their debt. GARF fond 109, eks. 1, d. 32, l. 79. N. A. Popov, ‘Iz vospomiananii starogo studenta,’ Istoricheskii vestnik 12, no. 18 (December 1884): 687. A. N. Afanas’ev, ‘Moskovskii universiet v 1840–kh godakh,’ Russkaia starina 55 (September 1887): 651. Buslaev, Moi vospominaniia, 31. Afanas’ev, ‘Moskovskii universiet,’ 651. There are other student accounts of Nakhimov’s drinking, including N. A. Popov, ‘Iz vospomiananii starogo studenta.’ In Russkie universitety v ikh ustavakh i vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, ed. I. M. Solov’ev (St Petersburg, 1914), 136–7. Ibid., 686–7. Ibid., 687. Georgievskii, ‘Moi vospominaniia i razmyshleniia,’ 467. Dmitriev, ‘Studencheskie vospominaniia,’ 86. Afanas’ev, ‘Moskovskii universitet,’ 359. Popov, ‘Iz vospominanii,’ 687. Ibid., 686–8. Nikolai Dmitrievich Dmitriev, ‘Materialy dlia kharakteristiki,’ Russkoe obozrenie 19, no. 1 (January 1893): 726–7. Fet remarked in his memoir that Nakhimov often played a prominent role in his student poetry and that of his peers. He mentioned, in particular, a poem that Polonskii wrote to Nakhimov. A. A. Fet, Rannye gody moei zhizni (Moscow, 1893), 210–11. Dmitriev, ‘Materialy dlia kharakteristiki,’ 726. Popov, ‘Iz vospominaniia,’ 687. Afanas’ev, ‘Moskovskii universistet,’ 359. Popov, ‘Iz vospominanii,’ 686.

3

Fraternities, Dueling, and Student Honor

47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

1 2

3 4

A. A. Chumikov, ‘Studencheskaia korporatsiia v peterburgskom universitete v 1830–1840 gg,’ Russkaia starina 30, no. 2 (February 1881): 374. Ivan D. Belov, ‘Universitet i korporatsiia,’ Istoricheskii vestnik 1, no. 4 (April 1880): 781. Chumikov described the Ruteniia uniforms in ‘Studencheskaia korporatsiia,’ 372–3. The city is in present-day Estonia, and is known as Tartu. The literature on the history of masculinity and honor in the Western European context includes: Ute Frevert, Men of Honour: A Social and Cultural History of the Duel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Peter Gay, The Cultivation of Hatred. The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, vol. III (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1993), especially chapter 1; George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985) and The Image of Man: the Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Robert Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

160 Notes 5 6 7 8

9 10

11

12 13

14 15

16 17 18

Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes, vii. Mosse, Image of Man, 3–4. Frevert, Men of Honour, 90. On Muscovy, see the following works by Nancy Shields Kollmann: By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1999); ‘Women’s Honor in early Modern Russia.’ In Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, ed. Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine D. Worobe (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 60–73; and ‘Honor and Dishonor in Early Modern Russia,’ Forschungen zur osteuropaischen Geschichte 46 (1992): 131–46. On the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Irina Reyfman, Ritualized Violence Russian Style: the Duel in Russian Literature and Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Ia. A Gordin, Dueli i duelianty: panorama stolichnoi zhizni (St Petersburg: Pushkinskii fond, 1996). Kollmann, By Honor Bound, 28. The students’ statutes are quoted in S. Melgunov, Iz istorii studentcheskikh obshchestv v russkikh universitetov (Moscow: Pravda, 1904), 8. Additionally, Melgunov provides information about student societies from the opening of Moscow University in 1755 through to the end of the nineteenth century; his focus, however, is on the first half of the nineteenth century. Melgunov, Iz istorii, 17. Melgunov writes that the 1815 Kazan’ ‘Society for the Perfection of Oratory and Written Works’ expected such patriotic loyalty of its members. It is interesting to note that students at other institutions formed similar societies. At the Alexandrovski Lyceum, a boarding school for Russia’s most elite young men, for instance, the director ran a student society called the ‘Society of Lyceum Friends.’ Members held public and private meetings, collected funds and met weekly for literary discussions. Melgunov, Iz istorii, 20–1. Ibid., 17. On January 14, 1822 the Tsar, following Minister of Education Golitsyn’s recommendation, shut down the ‘Society of Lyceum Friends’ at the Alexandrovski Lyceum stating that ‘such a society among pupils is unnecessary.’ See Melgunov, Iz istorii, 20–1. E. Presniakov, Emperor Nicholas I of Russia: the Apogee of Autocracy: 1825–1855 (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1974), 16–17. On the Petrashevtsy, see J. H. Seedon, The Petrashevtsy: a Study of the Russian Revolutionaries of 1848 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). Tsentral’nyi istoricheskii arkhiv Moskvy (TsIAM) fond 16, op. 39, d. 213. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA) fond 1405, op. 29, d. 2896. In St Petersburg in 1849, students were arrested for reading ‘harmful books.’ RGIA fond 735, op. 10, d. 223. Tensions were especially high when Polish students were involved, as they were in a reading circle in Moscow in 1849, which the government targeted. RGIA fond 735, op. 10, d. 221. There are also official reports of students put under surveillance in Moscow in 1849 for their suspected participation in a literary society. TsIAM fond 16, op. 39, d. 213.

Notes 161 19

20

21

22 23

24

25

26

N. I. Pirogov, ‘Iz zhizni moskovskago studenchestva 20–kh godov po dnevniku N. I. Pirogova.’ In Russkie universitety v ikh ustavakh i vospominaniiakh sovremennikom, vol. I, ed. M. Solov’ev (St Petersburg: St Petersburg University Press, 1914), 95. N. A. Argillander, ‘Vissarion Grigorevich Belinskii.’ In Moskovskii universitet v vospominaniiakh studentov, 1755–1917 (Moscow: Moscow University Press, 1989), 97–101. P. I. Prozorov, ‘Belinksii i moskovskii universitet v ego vremia.’ In Moskovskii universitet v vospominaniiakh studentov, 1755–1917 (Moscow: Moscow University Press, 1989), 102–14. The quote is from 108–9. A. N. Afanas’ev, ‘Moskovskii universitet v 1840–kh godakh,’ Russkaia starina 55 (September 1887): 646. I. I. Mikhailov, for one, recalled the Kazan’ student literary gatherings held weekly in the apartment of a charismatic student, here called Ch-v. The group disbanded when Ch-v left for Moscow. I. I. Mikhailov, ‘Universitet v 1840-kh godakh,’ Russkaia starina 10/11 (1889): 50–99. Boris Chicherin, while a candidate at Moscow University, formed a small club – Club Maikov – with his brothers in their apartments. Chicherin described how a group of students gathered in the evenings to socialize, eat, and talk. When the inspector discovered the club in 1850 he reported to the authorities that there was nothing irregular about the meetings and did not pursue disciplinary actions against participants. On the club, see Boris Nicholaevich Chicherin, Vospominaniia B. N. Chicherina (Moscow: Moscow University Press, 1991), 70. On the inspector’s investigation, see TsIAM fond 16, op. 40, d. 40. In room no. 15 in the Moscow boarding house Irlandiia, a student collective regularly gathered to socialize, sing, and recite poetry. N. D. Dmitriev, ‘Studencheskaia vospominaniia o moskovskom universitete,’ Otechestvennye zapiski 120, no. 10 (1858): 1–15. There is a large scholarship on this unofficial sphere of social life, especially in the years of Nicholas I’s reign. Alexander Herzen highlighted the centrality of the kruzhok, in My Past and Thoughts. Others have followed in his footsteps to varying degrees, including: Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961); Edward J. Brown, Stankevich and his Moscow Circle: 1830–1840 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966); and Abbott Gleason, Young Russia: The Genesis of Russian Radicalism (New York: Viking Press, 1980). In her study of seventeenth-century provincial life, Valerie Kivelson challenges the view of the ‘state school’ of Russian and Soviet historians that ‘a single, divinely sanctioned ruler’ controlled all aspects of Muscovite society. Instead, she turns our attention to the autonomous arenas of social life where individuals conducted their own affairs outside of the purview of the state. Valerie A. Kivelson, Autocracy in the Provinces: the Muscovite Gentry and Political Culture in the 17th Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 1. In her biography of the Minister of Education Sergei Uvarov, historian Cynthia Whittaker writes that in the late 1830s, St Petersburg students ‘began imitating their German counterparts by forming fraternities that

162 Notes

27

28

29 30

31 32

33

34 35 36

37 38 39 40

picnicked, sang, and ate together.’ The Origins of Modern Russian Education: an Intellectual Biography of Count Sergei Uvarov, 1796–1855 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1984), 176. A. A. Chumikov, ‘Peterburgskii universitet polveka nazad,’ Russkii arkhiv 3, no. 9 (March 1888): 12. In 1838, there were 241 St Petersburg students, of whom 193 were members of the gentry and/or sons of officials. Since St Petersburg University did not open in earnest until 1819, its numbers remained low throughout this period. This statistic is from Nicholas Hans, The History of Russian Educational Policy, 1701–1917 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), 79. The two detailed memoir accounts of St Petersburg corporations are by A. A. Chumikov, ‘Peterburgskii universitet polveka nazad,’ Russkii arkhiv 3, no. 9 (March 1888): 367–80; and Ivan Belov, ‘Universitet i korporatsiia,’ Istoricheskii vestnik 1, no. 4 (April 1880): 779–804. Whittaker, The Origins, 200–1. Konrad H. Jarausch, ‘The Sources of German Student Unrest, 1815–1848.’ In The University in Society, vol. II, ed. Lawrence Stone (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 538. See also Konrad H. Jarausch, Students, Society, and Politics in Germany: the Rise of Academic Illiberalism (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982); and Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud: the Cultivation of Hatred, vol. III (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 19–20. RGIA fond 735, op. 10, d. 273. Ibid. One version of the Russian and German statutes of the Burschenschaft society are held in RGIA fond 735, op. 10, d. 97, ll. 25–57 (Russian version). See also Belov, ‘Universitet i korporatsiia,’ 781–94. A. A. Chumikov, ‘Letopis zabav i shalostei derptskikh studentov, 1803–1862,’ Russkaia starina 65, no. 2 (February 1890): 357, 365. There exist records of the official discovery of these societies by the university authorities in 1833. RGIA fond 735, op. 10, d. 273. Pavel Tveritinov ‘Iz vospominanii derptskago studenta,’ Biblioteka dlia chtennia 157, no. 9 (September 1859): 1–28. Chumikov, ‘Letopis zabavov i shalistei,’ 367. Student Chumikov described how students from Dorpat arrived with their statutes in hand around this time. In late 1837 in particular, student P. Preis arrived from Dorpat and resolved a dispute among fraternity members on the St Petersburg campus. ‘Studencheskaia korporatsiia,’ 369 and 372. RGIA fond 735, op. 10, d. 97. Chumikov, ‘Studencheskaia korporatsiia,’ 372–3. E. A. Matisen, ‘Vospominaniia iz dal’nikh let,’ Russkaia starina 31, no. 5 (May 1881): 156. RGIA fond 735, op. 10, d. 175. This was part of a larger investigation into corporate life in St Petersburg conducted by the educational administration along with the Third Section. In addition, during an investigation on the part of the Third Section looking into corporate activities in Dorpat, General Benkendorf discovered that one of the main students involved in Dorpat in the late 1830s, ended up in St Petersburg by 1844. RGIA fond 1286, op. 7, d. 24.

Notes 163 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

70 71 72

RGIA fond 733, op. 30, d. 102. RGIA fond 735, op. 10, d. 97 and RGIA fond 725, op. 10. d. 273. Chumikov, ‘Studencheskaia korporatsiia,’ 372–3. Ibid., 372. RGIA fond 735, op. 10, d. 175. RGIA fond 735, op. 10, d. 97, ll. 33–7. Ibid., ll. 29–32. Belov described the hierarchy established by corporate members. Belov, ‘Universitet i korporatsiia,’ 786–8. RGIA fond 735, op. 10, d. 97, l. 36. Belov, ‘Universitet i korporatsiia,’ 793–4. Ibid. Ibid., 787. Ibid., 788. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 783. RGIA fond 735, op. 10, d. 97, ll. 25ob, 38. Ia. Kostenetskii, ‘Vospominaniia iz moei studencheskoi zhizni, part III,’ Russkii arkhiv 1 (1887): 334. See Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes; and Mosse, The Image of Man. RGIA fond 735, op. 10, d. 97, ll. 38, 42ob, 45ob–46. Chumikov, ‘Letopis zabav i shalostei,’ 359. Irina Reyfman mentions the role that women played in disputes over honor, including as objects of inspiration for duels. See Reyfman, ‘The Duel as an Act of Violence: Terms and Definition,’ Ritualized Violence. RGIA fond 735, op. 10, d. 97, ll. 29–32. RGIA fond 735, op. 10, d. 175 and d. 97, ll. 41, 42ob. RGIA fond 735, op. 10, d. 97, l. 51ob.; RGIA fond 735, op. 10, d. 273. RGIA fond 735, op. 10, d. 97, l. 51ob. Ibid., l. 42ob. Belov, ‘Universitet i korporatsiia,’ 790–3. Chumikov, ‘Studencheskaia korporatsiia,’ 369. RGIA, fond 735, op. 10, d. 97, l. 48. Nicholas is quoted in Iurii Lotman, Besedy o russkoi kul’ture: byt i traditsii russkogo dvorianstva (xviii-nachalo xix veka) (St Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB, 1994), 166. This quote also appears in Gordin, Dueli i duelianty, 31. Irina Reyfman, ‘The Emergence of the Duel in Russia: Corporal Punishment and the Honor Code,’ The Russian Review 54, no. 1 (January 1995): 26. Reyfman makes this argument in both ‘The Emergence of the Duel in Russia,’ 26–43 and in her monograph Ritualized Violence. Reyfman, ‘The Emergence of the Duel in Russia,’ 30. For a slightly different twist on this argument, see Abby McKinnon’s article. In her discussion of the duel in the eighteenth century, McKinnon emphasizes the powerful, leading role of the state. She argues that the duel and its honor codes helped the gentry in its struggle to create a ‘private space’ out of the reach of the oppressive state. ‘Duels and the Matter of Honour.’ In Russia and the World of the Eighteenth Century (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1988), 230.

164 Notes 73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80

81 82 83 84 85

86 87

88

89 90 91

92 93

Gordin, Dueli i duelianty, 17, 20, 115. Ibid., 5. Gay, The Cultivation of Hatred, 32. Reyfman, Ritualized Violence, 27. The rules for dueling can be found in Lotman, Besedy, 164. Reyfman, ‘The Emergence of the Duel in Russia,’ 26. See also Gordin, ‘Pravili duely,’ Dueli i duelianty, 125. Lotman, Besedy, 167. Alexander Pushkin, ‘The Shot.’ In The Captain’s Daughter and other Stories (New York: Dutton, 1936), 148. The most widely relied-on rules followed by Russian duelists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were taken from the French codes. According to a late nineteenth-century compilation of earlier codes, the types of insults that often resulted in a duel fell into three main categories, including minor insults, insults with swear words, and finally an altercation ending in physical violence. If the rules were to be meticulously followed, the more severe the offense, the more dangerous the weapons used. Gordin, Dueli i duelianty, 93. Ibid. Ibid., 95. Belov, ‘Universitet i korporatsiia,’ 792–3. Gay, The Cultivation of Hatred, 31–2. In his memoir, former student Chumikov remarked that although a duel was supposed to take place within fourteen days of the offense, occasionally there would be an entire month’s lapse between the challenge and the duel itself. By the time the duel came around, often the opponents would not remember the reason they had called it in the first place. This type of confusion occurred most often when both parties were drunk. Chumikov, ‘Studencheskaia korporatsiia,’ 373–4. RGIA fond 735, op. 10, d. 97, ll. 52ob–54. Chumikov, ‘Studencheskaia korporatsiia,’ 373. Due to a scarcity of sources, both primary and secondary, it is difficult to precisely measure the number of student duels fought each year. The archival and memoir evidence implies that the duel was a way of working out corporate disputes. In addition to the two duels discussed in the text, archival records show that in Moscow in 1849 a student Alexander Nevedomskii was challenged to a duel by a classmate. The documents show, too, that the duel never came to fruition. RGIA fond 735, op. 10, d. 222. RGIA fond 733, op. 25, d. 199. Belov, ‘Universitet i korporatsiia,’ 797. Chumikov explained that when korporatsiia duels took place, they were usually between members of the same organization – Baltiki members fought Baltiki and Ruteniia members fought Rutenians. ‘Studencheskaia korporatsiia,’ 373–4. Belov ‘Universitet i korporatsiia,’ 797–8. The yearly university publication Otchety moskovskogo universiteta listed the classes available for students to take. Fencing ceased to be taught at Moscow in 1848.

Notes 165 94 95 96

97

98 99 100 101 102

103

104

105 106 107 108 109

4

RGIA fond 735, op. 10, d. 175. Ibid., d. 273 and RGIA fond 735, op.10, d. 97. ‘The Instructions to the Inspector of St Petersburg University (August 19, 1835).’ In Sbornik rasporiazhenii po ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia, 122–3. There are numerous police reports on the confiscation of students’ letters and books: TsIAM fond 16, op. 224, d. 6 and TsIAM fond 16, op. 41, d. 327. RGIA, fond 735, op. 10, d. 273. Ibid., d. 175. Ibid. Ibid. ‘Iz vospominanii derptskogo studenta.’ In Russkie universitety v ikh ustavakh i vospominaniiakh sovremennikom, ed. I. M. Solov’ev (St Petersburg: St Peterburg University Press, 1914), 155. After the closings of Warsaw and Vilna universities, students flooded into Moscow, St Petersburg, and Kazan’. In the years, 1836–7 there were 47 Polish students out of a total of 269 in St Petersburg, and 30 out of 436 in Moscow, a much smaller percentage. Johannes Remy, Higher Education and National Identity: Polish Student Activism in Russia, 1832–1863 (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2000), 76–8. Remy also discusses the difficulties of assessing exactly who was Polish. Some students were expelled not for their political activities alone, but for committing offenses against the code of conduct, such as punching a classmate, issuing a challenge to a duel. or even ‘for being idle.’ TsIAM fond 16, op. 39, d. 185. See also RGIA fond 735, op. 10, d. 167. Remy, Higher Education and National Identity, 201. Ibid., 215 and 76–8. Melgunov, Iz istorii, 53. Chumikov, ‘Letopis zabav i shalostei,’ 368. Ibid., 369.

Friendship, Romance, and Romantic Friendship 1 2

3 4

Parts of this chapter appeared in The Russian Review 62 no. 2 (April 2003): 262–80. This is from a letter written by Michael Orlov in Penza to his friend Buslaev who was studying in Moscow. Rukopisnyi otdel, Rossiiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka fond 42, op. 12, d. 38. Ia. Kostenetskii, ‘Vospominaniia iz moei studencheskoi zhizni,’ Russkii arkhiv 1 (1887): 329. In the first volume of his book Scenarios of Power, Richard Wortman argues that during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, friendship played a prominent role in autocratic ideology. Tsar Alexander I used the trope of friendship to consecrate the bond between monarch and subjects. Upon his accession, Alexander created a committee of ‘young friends’ and ‘Russia’s best sons’ to assist him in carrying out his reforms. By evoking a ‘feeling of friendship’ and ‘feelings of affection,’ Alexander

166 Notes

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6

7 8

9 10

11

united himself not only with his Committee of Young Friends, but also with his subjects more generally, who in turn were obligated to fulfill the wishes of their friend and Tsar. Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, Volume 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 195 and 204. There is an extended discussion of radical youth in Daniel Brower, Training the Nihilists: Education and Radicalism in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975). Nicholas Riasanovsky, A Parting of the Ways: Government and the Educated Public in Russia, 1801–1855 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). See also Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); and Gary M. Hamburg, Boris Chicherin and Early Russian Liberalism, 1828–1866 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 7. Scholarship that addresses the question of friendship and makes this connection includes: Malia, Alexander Herzen, Edward J. Brown, Stankevich and His Moscow Circle: 1830–1840 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966), Lidiia Ia. Ginsburg, ‘The “Human Document” and the Formation of Character,’ The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 188–224; and Edward Hallett Carr, The Romantic Exiles: A Nineteenth-Century Portrait Gallery (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961). Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 62. See M. J. Ailes, ‘Love, Separation and Male Friendship: Words and Actions in St. Anselm’s Letters to His Friends.’ In Masculinity and Medieval Europe, ed. D. M. Hadley (New York: Longman, 1999), 240. Alan Bray and Michel Roy, ‘The Body of the Friend: Continuity and Change in Masculine Friendship in the Seventeenth Century.’ In English Masculinities: 1600–1800, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Michele Cohen (New York: Longman, 1999), 65–84. There is a growing literature on American and European male friendships and expressions of desire before the invention of homosexuality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to the above examples, the list includes Jonathan Ned Katz, Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Stepan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ‘Civility, Male Friendship, and Masonic Sociability in Nineteenth-Century Germany,’ Gender and History 13, no. 2 (August 2001): 224–48; Eve Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York, 1993); and Jeffrey Richards, ‘Passing the Love of Women: Manly Love and Victorian Society.’ In Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940, ed. J. A. Mangan and James Walvin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 92–122.

Notes 167 12 13

14

15

16

17 18

19

20

21

22

Richards, ‘Surpassing the Love of Women,’ 93. Biographer John Buxton writes: ‘Their friendship was the most important relationship of their lives.’ Byron and Shelley: the History of a Friendship (London: Macmillan, 1968), x. In her collective biography of Byron and Shelley, critic Jane Blumberg comments that Byron routinely had relationships with younger boys. See Byron and the Shelleys: the Story of a Friendship (London: Collins and Brown Limited, 1992). Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 47 and 108. There are many examples of such friendships stretching into the second half of the nineteenth century. See, for instance, David Newsome, A. C. Benson: the Diaries (London: John Murray Publishers, 1980), 39. Tennyson, In Memoriam, 44. As one historian of nineteenth-century male friendships observes: the ‘sexual system ironically decreed more restrictions on the intimacies of men and women than on those between men and men and women and women.’ Katz, Love Stories, 41. Michelle Perrot, ed., A History of Private Life: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, Volume 4 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 562–3. Rotundo, American Manhood, 76. Ibid., 84–5. Here Rotundo describes how in academies and colleges, boys more often than not shared a bed. John Chandos also mentions this in Boys Together: English Public Schools, 1800–1864 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1984), 292–3. This was not the case in Russia. See the Military Code for the rules governing cadets’ sleeping habits: Svod voennikh postanovlenyi: Chast pervaia. Obrazovanie voennikh uchrezhdenii (St Petersburg, 1838), 178. Voltaire acknowledged that there is a special character to the love between young boys. Although same-sex desire was ‘an infamous outrage against nature,’ wrote Voltaire, it was ‘so natural’ as young men are ‘brought up together … and often resemble beautiful girl[s].’ Such dalliances, too, rarely were thought to last for more than a short time. Quoted in D. S. Neff, ‘Bitches, Mollies and Tommies: Byron, Masculinity and the History of Sexuality,’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, no. 3 (2002): 395–438. It is interesting to note that the very idea of the modern research university was inspired by Romanticism. Michael J. Hofstetter describes how writers such as Fichte and Schelling believed that ‘universities could make society more moral, more cultured’ and that the university would contribute to the ‘moral regeneration of man.’ For a thorough discussion, see The Romantic Idea of the University: England and Germany, 1770–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), xii and 40. For a full exploration of Nicholaevan ‘Official Nationality,’ see Nicholas Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825–1855 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969). In 1833, Nicholas’s Minister of Education Sergei Uvarov famously declared these three tenets of official ideology, orthodoxy, autocracy, and narodnost, most often translated as ‘nationality.’ Riasanovsky, Nicholas I, 175.

168 Notes 23

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25 26

27

28

29 30

31 32

33 34 35

36

Wortman, Scenarios of Power, vol. I, 275. Alexander Martin explores the ways in which Romantic ideas influenced official circles in the reign of Alexander. Alexander M. Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries: Russian Conservative Thought and Politics in the Reign of Alexander I (Dekalb: Northern Illinois Press, 1997). Orlando Figes in Natasha’s Dance: a Cultural History of Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), and Alexander Martin in Romantics, Reformers and Reactionaries, both discuss the revival of a national spirit in the aftermath of 1812. Catriona Kelly describes how this new emphasis on Russianness manifested itself in a number of ways among the educated elite in the capitals, including the wearing of peasant dress and marrying peasant women as an indication of one’s devotion to Russia. Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), especially 137–53. Wortman, Scenarios of Power, vol. I, 275. This scholarship includes Malia, Alexander Herzen; Brown, Stankevich; and Marc Raeff, ‘Russian Youth on the Eve of Romanticism: Andrei I. Turgenev and His Circle.’ In Revolution and Politics in Russia: Essays in the Memory of B. I. Nicolaevsky, ed. Alexander and Janet Rabinowitch, with Ladis K. D. Kristof (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), 339–55. Cynthia Whittaker, The Origins of Modern Russian Education: an Intellectual Biography of Count Sergei Uvarov, 1786–1855 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1984), 154. Among the professoriate in Moscow, the conservatives M. Pogodin and S. Shevyrev as well as the liberal-minded Timofei Granovskii espoused Romantic ideas. Priscilla Reynolds Roosevelt, Apostle of Russian Liberalism: Timofei Granovsky (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1986). Whittaker, Origins of Modern Russian Education, 165. Yet, the Tsar himself was notoriously disdainful of Schiller. If Nicholas was touched by some of Herder’s romantic nationalism, he was intolerant of the ideas of the philosopher who most influenced his future servitors in their adolescence: Friedrich Schiller. The Tsar, in fact, is known to have remarked amidst all of the revolutionary turmoil of 1848 that it was ‘your Schiller and your Goethe who had corrupted the youth.’ Original from ‘Iz zapisok A. O. Smirnovoi,’ Russkii arkhiv 9 (1895): 85. Quoted in Martin Malia, ‘Schiller and the Early Russian Left.’ In Russian Thought and Politics, ed. Hugh McLean, Martin Malia, and George Fischer (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1971), 170. Malia, ‘Schiller and the Early Left,’ 170. Konstantin Aksakov, ‘Vospominanie studenchestva: 1832–1835 godov.’ In Russkie obshchestvo 30-kh godov XIX veka: Memuary sovremennikov, ed. I. A. Fedosov (Moscow: Moscow University Press, 1989), 317. Whittaker, The Origins, 165. Malia, Alexander Herzen, 41. Malia discusses the impact of these two works on the lives of Herzen and Ogarev in ibid. In particular, see the chapter entitled ‘Ogarev and Schiller,’ 38–56. It is important to note that the Schillerian aesthetic also inspired an earlier generation. Marc Raeff suggests that Schiller’s ideas significantly

Notes 169

37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

impacted intellectual circles in the first years of the nineteenth century. One such circle formed around the figure of Andrei Turgenev, a minor poet and prominent member of the Friendly Literary Society in the Alexandrine period. In Raeff’s assessment of this circle, friendship ‘played a seminal role in the revolutionary movement.’ Raeff, ‘Russian Youth on the Eve of Romanticism,’ 45–6 and 54. Writing on Boris Chicherin’s coming of age, historian Gary Hamburg notes that it was not only Schiller that may have inclined Chicherin to male intimacies, but also his reading of Byron. Gary Hamburg also comments on the impact of Schiller on the nature of Chicherin’s friendships. G. M. Hamburg, Boris Chicherin & Early Russian Liberalism, 1826–1866 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 35–7. A. I. Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh II (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1954–64), 403. Ibid. Quoted in Malia, Alexander Herzen, 46. Ia. Polonskii, ‘Moi studencheskie vospominaniia’ Ezhemesiachnyi literaturnoe prilozheniia k Nive (December 1898): 644–87. Quoted in Malia, ‘Schiller and the Early Russian Left,’ 185. Original from Belinskii, pisma II, ed. E. A. Liaskii (St Petersburg, 1914), 196. P. V. Annenkov, The Extraordinary Decade (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), 23. Ibid., 94. Ibid. Quoted in Malia, ‘Schiller and the early Russian Left,’ 189. Original in V. Belinksii, Pis’ma I 347–8. Malia also discusses Stankevich’s own romantic failings. It is worth noting that Stankevich was briefly engaged to Liubov’ Bakunina, the sister of Bakunin. In discussing this liaison, Randolph explains that the engagement was broken as a result of the generation’s ‘high standards for love.’ Randolph also discusses the love affair that Stankevich had with another of Bakunin’s sisters, Varvara D’iakova. See John Randolph, ‘“That Historical Family”: the Bakunin Archive and the Intimate Theater of History in Imperial Russia, 1760–1925,’ The Russian Review 63 (October 2004): 574–93. I am grateful to John Randolph for allowing me to read an advanced copy of his article. Brothels near to the university in St Petersburg are mentioned in Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA) fond 735, op. 10, d. 114. A. A. Fet, Rann’ie gody moei zhizni (Moscow: A. I. Mamontiv Publishers, 1893), 175–6. Wayne Dobbler, An Unnecessary Man: the Life of Apollon Grigor’ev (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1995), 25. Arkhiv gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii muzeia g. Moskvy (GIM) fond 371, op. 1, ed. khr. 1, l. 180. GIM, fond 371, op. 1, ed. khr. 1, l.180. Ianuarii Neverov, ‘Glava iz ‘Avtobiografii Ia. M. Neverova,’ Vestnik vospitaniia 26, no. 6 (September 1915): 107–8. Ibid., 108–9. Ibid., 107.

170 Notes 56 57

58 59 60

61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

73

74 75 76 77

78

Ibid. In a letter written in Polish by Alexander Veishtort to his childhood friend Ivan Mikilich, Veishtort recounted his involvement in a scandal of antiRussian activity and affirmed his feelings for his friend: ‘My beloved Ivan [I want you to know that] your beloved Alexander is now, as always, from the first moment of our acquaintance – breathing together with you, almost as if with one breath.’ RGIA fond 733, op. 99, d. 381. F. I. Buslaev, Vospominaniia akademika F. I. Buslaeva (Moscow, 1897). Ibid., 24. Ibid., 35–7. It was his ‘tender heart’ that both attracted Buslaev and led to Voitsekhovskii’s tragic downfall. After he finished the university, Voitsekhovskii fell in love with the daughter of the director of the gymnasium where he was teaching. Upon hearing that his love’s father (and his boss) forbade the match, Voitsekhovskii killed himself. Prince Dondukov-Korsakov, ‘Vospominaniia kniazia Dondukova-Korsakova,’ Starina i novizma 5 (1902): 170. Boris Chicherin, Vospominaniia B. N. Chicherina (Moscow: Moscow University Press, 1991), 31. On Granovskii’s own romantic friendships while a student, see Roosevelt, Apostle of Russian Liberalism, 17–19. Dondukov-Korsakov, ‘Vospominaniia kniazia Dondukova-Korsakova,’ 170. P. I. Bartenov, ‘Vospomiannie o S. M. Solov’eve,’ Russkii arkhiv 318 (1907): 554. N. L. Brodskii, Literaturnye salony i kruzhki: pervaia polovina xix veka (Hildesheim, Zurich, and New York: George Olms Verlag, 1984), 252. Ibid. Chicherin, Vospominaniia, 9. Ibid. Ibid., 52. Ibid. Quoted in Hamburg, Boris Chicherin, 37. Hamburg speculates that such male-male closeness was due in part to the fact that ‘social arrangements … segregated women from the education process.’ Ibid., 37–8. The language of friendship is found in many correspondences between students and their hometown friends. Two additional examples can be found in: Rukopsnyi otdel, Rossiiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka fond 42, op. 11, d. 25; and in RGIA fond 733, op. 99, d. 381. Grigorii Pavlovich Galagan, ‘Otryvki iz iunosheskogo dnevnika G. P. Galagana,’ Kievskaia starina 62 (1898): 203. Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, 63–4. Konstantin Aksakov, Vospominaniia studenchestva (St Petersburg, 1910), 14–15. Nicholas Dmitrievich Dmitriev, ‘Studencheskie vospominaniia o Moskovskom universitete: part II,’ Otechestvennye zapiski, 120, no. 10 (October 1858): 4–5 and 7. It is worth noting Barbara Walker’s very interesting article on the kruzhok in the early Soviet period. ‘Kruzhok Culture: the Meaning of Patronage in the Early Soviet Literary World,’ Contemporary European History 11, no. 1 (2002): 107–23.

Notes 171 79 80 81 82

83

84 85

86

87 88

89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105

Herzen, ‘O sebe,’ Sobranie sochinenii I: 170. This passage is translated in Malia, Alexander Herzen, 67–8. Pushkinskii dom fond 3, op. 7, d. 29, l. 1. Historians writing on this subject include Malia on Herzen and Brown on Stankevich. This emphasis appears in Marc Raeff’s discussion of the eighteenth century, in Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: the Eighteenth-Century Nobility (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966) and in Malia, Alexander Herzen, 57–68. In his discussion of masculinity in revolutionary fiction, Eliot Borenstein emphasizes the distinction between friendship and comradeship in the revolutionary context. See Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Soviet Fiction, 1917–1929 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). William Mills Todd, The Familiar Letter as a Literary Genre in the Age of Pushkin (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 40–2 and 76–7. Mary Wells Cavender, ‘“Kind Angel of the Soul and Heart”: Domesticity and Family Correspondence among the Pre-Emancipation Russian Gentry,’ The Russian Review 61, no 3 (2002): 391–408. On the question of genre and letter writing among members of Russian educated society, see Randolph ‘“That Historical Family”.’ The Stankevich circle has been held up as an example of the first stages in the development of the Russian intelligentsia. On Stankevich and his circle see Brown, Stankevich. Ibid., 6. Pushkinskii dom fond 3, op. 7, d. 29, l. 1. Quoted in Poety kruzhka N. V. Stankevicha (Moscow-Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’: Leningradskoe otdelenie, 1964). This description is from an unpublished part of Aksakov’s memoirs. See also Aksakov, Vospominaniia studenstva, 27. Quoted in Brown, Stankevich, 5. On the preservation of Stankevich’s correspondence, see Randolph, ‘“That Historical Family”.’ Ibid., 48. GIM, fond 372, op. 1, ed. khr, 1, l. 186 ob. Although Neverov’s first name was ‘Ianuarii,’ Stankevich called his friend ‘Ianvar’ – Russian for January. Perepiska Nikolaia Vladimirovicha Stankevicha: 1830–1840, ed. Aleksei Stankevich (Moscow, 1914), 208. Perepiska Stankevicha, 208–9. Ibid., 217. Ibid., 220–1. Ibid., 221. Ibid., 220. Ibid., 251. Ibid., 251. Ibid., 219. Ibid., 209. S. I. Mashinskogo, in Poety kruzhka N. V. Stankevicha, 116. Malia provides a description of this circle in Alexander Herzen, 64–8. ‘Moral center’ is Malia’s phrase, 65.

172 Notes 106

107 108

109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133

134

Nicholas P. Ogarev, Izbrannie sotsial’no-politicheskie i filosofskie proizvedeniia 1 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1952–6), 304–5. Ibid., 2, 305. Edward Acton, Alexander Herzen and the Role of the Intellectual Revolutionary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 106; Malia, Alexander Herzen; Brown, Stankevich; Abbott Gleason, Young Russia: The Genesis of Russian Radicalism in the 1860s (New York,: Viking Press, 1980); Edward Hallett Carr, Mikhail Bakunin (New York: Octagon Books, 1975); and Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populaist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1960). Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii XXI, 19–20. Ibid., 18–19. Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii XXII, 104. Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii XXI, 17. Ogarev, Izbrannye, 2, 314. Ibid., 292. Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, 64. Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii, XXII, 19. Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii XXVI, 63. Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii XXII, 104. Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii XXVI, 224. Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii XXI, 25. Ogarev, Izbrannie 2 260. Ibid., 269. Ibid., 274. Ibid., 292. Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii XXII: 20. Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii XXVI: 62–3. Carr, The Romantic Exiles, 345. Ibid., 186. Ibid., 189. Ibid., 194. Ogarev is quoted in Carr, but there is no direct reference to the original source of Ogarev’s words. Katz, Love Stories, 36. Ibid., 40. The meaning that society assigned to these feelings, however, shifted over time. Robert Nye, ‘Kinship, Male Bonds and Masculinity in Comparative Perspective,’ American Historical Review 105, no. 5 (2000): 1665. There has been some speculation that the Russian public was not inclined to attach the same symbolic importance to the sexual preferences of its members, as did its western neighbors. In Evgenii Bershtein’s study of Oscar Wilde, he explains that Wilde did not have the same reputation in Russia as he did in the other countries of Europe. In Russia, conversations about Wilde were more likely to involve an emphasis on ‘his rebellion, suffering, and saintliness’ than on his sexual improprieties. The lack of attention to erotic desires in general and homoeroticism in particular reflected, scholar Evgenii Bershtein suggests, the general prohibition

Notes 173

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136 137

138 139 140 141 142

143

against discussions of sexuality. Evgenii Bershtein, ‘The Russian Myth of Oscar Wilde.’ In Self and Story in Russian History, ed. Laura Engelstein and Stephanie Sandler (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 169. Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-desiècle Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 57–8; and Daniel Healey, ‘The Russian Revolution and the Decriminalisation of Homosexuality,’ Revolutionary Russia 6, no. 1 (June, 1993): 29. According to Healey, the ‘queen’ did not become a social prototype until the 1870s. ‘The Disappearance of the Russian Queen, or How the Soviet Closet was Born.’ In Russian Masculinities in History and Culture, ed. Barbara Clements, Rebecca Friedman, and Dan Healey (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 152–71. There are numerous factors that emerge in any attempt to map shifts in normative understandings of male friendship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from the role that status, class, and age played, to say nothing of cultural difference. A recent AHR forum explored these very questions. See American Historical Review 105, no. 5 (2000). George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 66. Scholars have argued, taking their cue from Michel Foucault in his History of Sexuality, volume I, that prior to ‘the invention of homosexuality’ by social science professionals in the late nineteenth century, individuals were not assigned a particular social, sexual, or personal identity based on their sexual habits. Sodomy was imaged to be the ‘temporary aberrant act of an isolated individual’ and not the basis for a social identity. Historians of various national contexts have suggested that until the late nineteenth century, the category ‘homosexual’ was not recognized at all. At that time, across Europe, ‘sexual practices … once considered moral choices became regarded by the bourgeoisie as symptoms of biological and physiological flaws.’ John N. Chandos, Boys Together: English Public Schools, 1800–1864 (New Haven, CT: Harvard University Press, 1984), 303. The second quote is from Angus McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1780–1930 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 8–9. On the Russian/Soviet context, see also Dan Healey, Homosocial Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001); and Engelstein, Keys to Happiness. Borenstein makes the same contention in Men without Women, 184. McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity, 8–9. On the invention of sexuality, see David Halperin, ‘Is there a History of Sexuality?’ History and Theory 28, no. 3 (1989): 257–74. Katz, Love Stories, 45. Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia, 80–1. Engelstein emphasizes how in 1845 the issue of morality became even more pronounced; the 1845 code explicitly prohibited ‘vices contrary to nature.’ Keys to Happiness, 59. These provisions appear in article 677 of Svod zakonov rossiiskoi imperii: zakony ugolovnye (St Petersburg, 1835), 213. Dan Healey mentions this in Homosexual Desire, 291 n. 14.

174 Notes 144 145 146

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Svod voennikh postanovlenyi: chast’ pervaia. Obrazovanie voennikh uchrezhdenii (St Petersburg, 1838), 178. D. Naguevskii, Professor Frants Ksvarii Bronner (ego dnevnik i perepiski) (Kazan’, 1902), 128. In his book on sexuality in Russian and Soviet literature and culture, Igor S. Kon attributes the intensity of male connections in the nineteenth century to a variety of causes, including sublimation and androgyny. The Sexual Revolution in Russia: From the Age of the Tsars until Today, trans. James Riordan (New York: Free Press, 1995), especially 23–38. Robert Nye mentions this in his review of literature on masculinity in the Chinese context in ‘Kinship, Male Bonds, and Masculinity in Comparative Perspectives,’ American Historical Review 105, no. 5 (December 2000): 1656–66. The quotation is from 1666.

Loyal Sons and the Domestic Ideal 1 2 3

4

5 6 7 8

9

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Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, trans. George Reavy (New York: Signet Classics, 1989), 61. Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 65. The most poignant example is Martin Malia’s biography of Alexander Herzen. Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961). Daniel R. Brower, Training the Nihilists: Education and Radicalism in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 22. See also Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: a History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). Marc Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: the Eighteenth-century Nobility (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), 129, 141. Ibid., 141. Alexander I. Georgievskii, ‘Moi vospominaniia i razmyshleniia,’ Russkaia starina 164, no. 9 (September 1915): 439–42. Georgievskii, ‘Moi vospominaniia i razmyshleniia,’ Russkaia starina 165, no. 9 (June 1915): 464–65. Boris Chicherin, Vospominaniia B. N. Chicherina I (Moscow: Moscow University Press, 1991), 55–6. Riasanovsky discusses the seriousness with which Nicholas took his role as tsar-batushka: ‘the common popular term for the ruler of Russia was more than a superficial epithet in the reign of Nicholas I.’ Nicholas Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825–1855 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 120. Although there were a number of differences between the domesticity in the Victorian context and the patterns of domestic life in Russia, not least of which were the composition of the family and women’s rights to own property in Russia, the symbolic power of the father was of the utmost importance in households across Europe. On property rights, see Michelle Lamarche Marrese, A Woman’s Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia, 1700–1861 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).

Notes 175 11

12 13 14 15

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18 19 20 21

22

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24

25

M. Pogodin is quoted in Riasanovsky, Nicholas I, 118–19. The original is from M. P. Pogodinim, Rechi proiznesennie v torzhestvennikh i prochikh sobraniiakh, 1830–1872 (Moscow, 1872), 90. Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. I (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 334–5. Ibid., 335. Ibid. Catriona Kelly, ‘Educating Tatyana: Manners, Motherhood and Moral Education (Vospitanie).’ In Gender in Russian History and Culture, ed. Linda Edmondson (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 17. The 1852 instructions to the administrators in charge of girls’ schools stated: ‘Since a woman is a delicate creature who is naturally dependent upon others, her destiny is the family.’ Therefore, instruction itself at school was ‘decorative rather than practical’ and focused on the languages and the acquisition of manners. On this, see Barbara Alpern Engel, Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-century Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 24–5. This is quoted in Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 6. It is also important to note that a married woman was obligated to ‘obey her husband,’ and needed his permission to travel, work, study, or move around locally. John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 1–2. Ibid., 1. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 4. Many historians of western Europe have written about the connections between domesticity and emotionality in family life. In addition to Tosh, see Catherine Hall and Leonore Davidoff, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Diana Greene describes how a domestic ideology had made its way into Russia by mid-century; her work examines thick journals and children’s magazines. ‘Mid-19th-century Domestic Ideology in Russia.’ In Women and Russian Culture: Projections and Self Perceptions, ed. Rosalind Marsh (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 78–97. See, for example, Barbara Engel’s seminal work on mothers and daughters among the nineteenth-century intelligentsia. She writes that Russia ‘never developed a comparable [to Western Europe] ideology of domesticity’ because Russia lacked a bourgeoisie. As a result, she argues that mothers passed on their sense of morality to their daughters, who used that to justify their own process of radicalization and anti-government activities. Engel, Mothers and Daughters, 6. Mary Wells Cavender, ‘“Kind Angel of the Soul and Heart”: Domesticity and Family Correspondence among the Pre-Emancipation Gentry,’ The Russian Review 61 (July 2002): 391–408. Mary Wells Cavender, ‘Nests of the Gentry: Family, Estate and Local Loyalties in Provincial Tver’, 1820–1860’ (University if Michigan, 1997), 29–30.

176 Notes 26

27 28

29 30

31 32

33 34 35

36

37

38

Jessica Tovrov, ‘Mother-Child Relationships among the Russian Nobility.’ In The Family in Imperial Russia: New Lines of Historical Research, ed. David Ransel (Urbana, Chicago, and London: University of Illinois Press 1978), 19. Ibid. Literature on the Victorian ideal of femininity is abundant. Seminal texts include: Cynthia Russett, Sexual Science: the Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Carol SmithRosenberg, ‘The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America.’ In Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes; and Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: the Ideological Work of Gender in mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Greene, ‘Mid-Nineteenth Century Ideology,’ 84. Ibid., 86. Greene argues that boys were not expected to have the same traits of piousness, submissiveness, and purity. My readings of military statutes for cadets indicate quite the contrary. Although purity in not mentioned per se, certainly cleanliness, submissiveness, and piousness were required of the young boys ages seven to 18. On this, see the Military Law Codes. Svod voennikh postanovlenyi: chast’ pervaia. Obrazovanie voennikh uchrezhdenii (St Petersburg, 1838). Engel, Mothers and Daughters, 4. Barbara Clements, ‘Introduction: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation.’ In Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, ed. Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine D. Worobec (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 3. Catriona Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 128. Ibid., 130. Just as masculine virtues were taught in the Empire’s training institutions, so were feminine ideals taught in all-girl school environments. In her memoir of her days in the Ekaterininsky Institute in Moscow in the early 1840s, for instance, Sofia Khvoshchinskaia describes how pupils were taught feminine skills and virtues, which included a French-only policy and the placement of pans of vinegar to ‘purify the air.’ Sofia Khvoshchinskaia, ‘Reminiscences of Institute Life.’ In Russia through Women’s Eyes: Autobiographies from Tsarist Russia, ed. Toby W. Clyman and Judith Vowles, trans. Edward Hynans (New Haven, CT and New York: Yale University Press, 1996), 75–108. This is a quote from Hippolyte Taine, Notes on England trans. E. Hyams (Fairlawn, NJ: Essential Books, 1958), 78. This passage is quoted in Tosh, A Man’s Place, 29. Tosh discusses the degree to which family membership was narrowing so that although it included blood-kin, guests were expected to come by invitation only. Ibid., 21–3. Baron von Haxthausen, The Russian Empire (London: Chapman and Hall, 1856), 103. This passage is quoted in Tovrov, ‘Mother-Child Relationships,’ 16.

Notes 177 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

Jessica Tovrov, The Russian Noble Family: Structure and Change (New York: Garland Publications, 1987), 2 and 112–13. On domesticity and masculinity in Victorian England, see Tosh, A Man’s Place; and on the arrival of domesticity in the Russian context, see Tovrov, The Russian Noble Family. Iakov Petrovich Polonskii, ‘Moi studencheskii vospominaniia,’ Ezhemesiachniia literaturniia prilozheniia k Nive 12 (December 1898): 645. Ibid. Wayne Dowler, An Unnecessary Man: the Life of Apollon Grigor’ev (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 12. A. A. Fet, Rannye gody moei zhizni (Moscow: A. I. Mamontov Publishers, 1893), 140. Ibid., 150. Ibid., 152. Ibid., 142. Ianurii Neverov, ‘Glava iz “Aftobiografii” Ia. M. Neverova,’ Vestnik vospitaniia xxiv, no. 6 (September 1915): 109–10. These ties included those with the Beyer family and Maria Afanaseva Dokhturova, a distant relative of the Beyers. Letter from his sister was found in Arkhiv gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii muzeia g. Moskvy (GIM), fond 312, op. 1, ed. kh 5. Cavender notes the same language of friendship in the Mershcherskii brothers’ correspondences. Cavender, ‘Kind Angel of the Soul and Heart,’ 400. Rukopisnyi otdel, Rossiiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka (RO, RGB) fond 42, karton 12, ed. khr. 11. Ibid. GIM fond 312, op. 1, d. 7, l. 8.The sister’s letter is in GIM fond 312, op. 1, d. 11. Alexander Georgievskii, ‘Moi vospominaniia i razmyshleniia,’ Russkaia starina 165, no. 2 (February 1915): 347. Ibid., 346. Alexander Georgievskii, ‘Moi vospominaniia i razmyshleniia.’ Russkaia starina 165, no. 6 (June 1915): 163. Ibid., 464–5. The space of the garden played an important role within European home life as well. See The History of Private Life: Volume IV: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, ed. Michelle Perrot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 172. Alexander Georgievskii, ‘Moi vospominaniia i razmyshleniia.’ Russkaia starina 165, no. 3 (February 1916): 290. F. I. Buslaev, Moi vospominaniia akademika F. I. Buslaeva (Moscow, 1897), 98. RO, RGB fond 42, karton 11, ed. khr. 41. Ibid. Ibid. Buslaev, Moi vospominaniia, 98. Ibid., 93–4 GIM fond 312, op. 1, d. 7. Ibid., d. 11.

178 Notes 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

96 97 98

99

E. P. Ianeshevskii, Iz vospominanii starogo kazan’skogo studenta (Kazan’, 1893), 64–5. Ibid., 79–80. Fet, Rannye gody, 164–7. GIM, fond 372, op. 1, ed. khr., 1, ll. 170–171ob. Buslaev, Moi vospominaniia, 95. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 97. Tovrov discusses the significance of the age seven in ‘Mother-Child Relationships,’ 22–4. Buslaev, Moi vospominaniia, 86. Ibid. Ibid., 90. Ibid., 88. Ibid., 90. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 93. GIM, fond 312, op. 1, d. 5. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., d., 7, l. 8. Ibid. Ibid., d. 6. Ibid., d. 11. RO, RGB fond 42 op. 12 d. 58. RO, RGB fond 49, karton 11, ed khr. 19. Ibid. Buslaev, Moi vospominaniia, 86. GIM fond 372, op. 1, ed. khr. 1, p. 170. Tsentral’nyi istoricheskii arkhiv Moskvy (TsIAM) fond 418, op. 491, d. 29, l. 170. Although Pavel’s story was truthful, he was sent back to Moscow for violating his traveling permit that specified that he could go to Orlov and not Kazan’. TsIAM fond 16, op. 39, d. 324. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA) fond 735, op. 10, d. 175. In her dissertation, Mary Wells Cavender writes: ‘Family members helped one another interact with the state as a matter of course.’ ‘Nests of the Gentry,’ 41. The invoking of this 1811 law recurs in city and university archival records of students’ arrests. For instance, when students Buriulin and Klobukov were repeatedly caught breaking the rules – leaving the university grounds without permission, skipping prayer services, engaging in excessive drinking – the 1811 law required that as members of the raznochintsy they were threatened with low-ranking military service. RGIA fond 733, op. 40, d. 278. Similarly, the law was invoked in the case of the repeat offender, St Petersburg student Nicholas Mitinskii. RGIA fond 733, op. 22, d. 33. These cases are discussed in detail below.

Notes 179 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112

RGIA fond 733, op. 25, d. 199. Ibid. Ibid. RGIA fond 733, op. 44, d. 78. RGIA fond 733, op. 33, d.175. Ibid. TsIAM fond 16, op. 40, d. 253. He was a student in Moscow from 1845 to 1848. RGIA fond 733. op. 40, d. 278. Ibid. RGIA fond 733, op. 42, d. 182. Ibid. RGIA fond 733, op. 22, d. 33. Ibid.

Epilogue 1 Cynthia H. Whittaker, The Origins of Modern Russian Education: an Intellectual Biography of Count Sergei Uvarov, 1786–1855 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1984), 235. 2 Ibid., 35–236. Samuel Kassow points out that the numbers in St Petersburg rose after 1855. By 1855, the total number in St Petersburg had risen to 476 and by 1858 to 1,026. On this, see Samuel D. Kassow, Students, Professors and the State in Tsarist Russia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 53. 3 Tsentral’nyi istoricheskii arkhiv Moskvy (TsIAM) fond 469, op. 2. d. 587 and TsIAM fond 16, op. 41, d. 230. 4 Whittaker, The Origins, 237. 5 Ibid., 238. 6 Marc Raeff, Understanding Imperial Russia: State and Society in the Old Regime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 203. 7 Richard S. Wortman discusses Alexander’s devotion to his father in Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 20–91. 8 Raeff, Understanding Imperial Russia, 244. 9 Ibid. 10 This shift in vocabulary is mentioned in Abbott Gleason, ‘The Terms of Social History.’ In Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Edith Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 15–27. This new emphasis anticipated the changes on the horizon at the end of the century, as individuals were increasingly able to create autonomous spaces for their participation in a growing civil sphere, between Tsar and people. 11 Gary M. Hamburg, Boris Chicherin and Early Russian Liberalism, 1828–1866 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 224. 12 Kassow, Students, Professors and the State, 53. 13 Ibid., 52.

180 Notes 14 For a discussion of studenchestvo in the twentieth century, see Susan Morrissey, Heralds of Revolution: Russian Students and the Mythologies of Radicalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 15 Whittaker, The Origins, 55. 16 Kassow, Students, Professors and the State, 54. 17 S. Melgunov, Iz istorii studencheskikh obshchestv v russkikh universitetakh (St Petersburg, 1904), 53. 18 A. A. Chumikov, ‘Letopis zabav i shalostei derptskikh studentov: 1802–1862,’ Russkaia starina 65, no. 2 (February 1890): 370. 19 Melgunov, Iz istorii, 54–5. 20 Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) fond 109, eks. 1, d. 52 ll. 74–75ob. 21 In this instance, Molotstov was reacting not only to the poem, but also to the growing feeling among students that their inspector – and superintendent – had to go. This sentiment was expressed in the following letter from a Kazan’ student to a friend at home written on April 5, 1856. In it he wrote: ‘You will be interested to hear about the arrangements at Kazan’ university: we have … scoundrel upon scoundrel … the Superintendent is an utter fool, a marionette in the full meaning of the word … He is followed by inspector Lange – a terrible scoundrel, a villain, who makes many suffer …. there is no one there to defend.’ GARF 109, eks. 1, d. 52, ll. 48–9. 22 GARF fond 109, op. 1, d. 209, ll. 54–54ob. 23 GARF fond 109, op. 1, d. 52, ll. 50–50b 24 Ibid., d. 52. 25 GARF fond 109, eks. 1, d. 52, l. 172. 26 Ibid., l. 173. 27 Ibid., l. 174ob. 28 Hamburg, Boris Chicherin, 218. 29 Hamburg discusses this in his biography. This requirement is also found in GARF fond 109, eks., 1, d. 52, ll. 156–66. These rules for students were published by the Kazan’ University publishing house in 1861. 30 Hamburg, Boris Chicherin, 219. 31 Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA) fond 1642, op. 1, d. 36. This is also mentioned in Hamburg, Boris Chicherin, 218–19. 32 Hamburg, Boris Chicherin, 219. 33 GARF fond 109, eks. 1, d. 372, l. 5. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., ll. 18–20. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., ll. 28–30ob and 31–34ob. 38 After the incident at Tuchkov’s house, a group of students wrote a poem denouncing Tuchkov. This poem was ironically dedicated to the ‘Victory of Tuchkov over the students’. GARF fond 109, eks. 1, d. 372, ll. 66–67ob. In addition, students made an appeal to citizens of Moscow to come to their defense. Students tried to enlist all of Moscow in their project: ‘Muscovites! / Students tried to get their rights and they were beat by the police, who dismissed this as lies and rumors. / The police were prepared to beat all, who stood up and asked about how they were deranged. / Muscovites! Are we going to tolerate this? / Bravo students! / Scoundrels

Notes 181

39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53

54 55 56

Police! / Scoundrels police/ Bravo students… / The police scoundrels ruined the honor of our capital … without honor and with other reason.’ GARF fond 109, eks. 1, d 372, l. 85. Ibid., ll. 39–40. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Spravnitel’naia tablitsa ustavov universitetov 1884, 1863, 1835, 1804 (St Petersburg, 1904) 186–202. It is interesting to note that contrary to student demands the new statute of 1863 codified, for the first time, the all-male nature of the student body. Six years later in 1869 in St Petersburg women began to enroll in the university’s special higher courses for women. One student memoirist indicated in his writings that from the fall of 1869 several women appeared in the lectures of K. D. Kavelin, a very popular St Petersburg professor. The university, closed for much of 1861–3, officially disallowed female students in the new statute of 1863. On this brief interlude, see L. F. Panteleev, ‘Zhenshchini v peterburgskom universitete.’ In Leningradskii universitet v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, ed. V. V. Mavrodin (Leningrad: Leningrad University Press, 1963), 62–5. GARF fond 190, eks., 1 d 52, ll. 156–66. Ibid., ll. 157–157ob. Ibid. Ibid., l. 158. From Nicholas Hans, The Russian Tradition in Education (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1963), 60. Spravnitel’naia tablitsa ustavov universitetov, 186–202. Kazan’ University published its own supplemental document in 1863. It very much echoes the same patterns discussed above. GARF fond 109, 1 90 (1863) Spravnitel’naia tablitsa ustavov universitetov, 82–3. Ibid. Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, 91. In Kostenetskii’s memoir, he recounts the events involving Malov and, like Herzen, calls them a ‘demonstration.’ Yet, the detail he provided reflects not a general upsurge against authority, but anger at the professor’s mockery and rudeness. Ia. Kostenetskii, ‘Vospominaniia iz moei studencheskoi zhizni,’ Russkii arkhiv 5 (January 1887): 340. GARF fond 109, eks. 1, d. 209, ll. 10–13ob. Ibid., l. 13. What scholarship there is on the beginnings of studenchestvo in the 1860s, has tended to neglect the period of nascent corporate identity found in Nicholaevan universities and painted its emergence in rather stark terms. S. Melgunov makes a statement to this effect in his Iz istorii studencheskikh obshchestv v russkikh universitetakh (St Petersburg: Pravda Publishers, 1904), 52. In addition, Samuel Kassow in his thorough account of students in the final decades of the century, postulates that student corporate identity emerged only during the period of sudden changes after the tsar’s death. Kassow writes that one indication of students’ increased autonomy was their efforts to oust professors. Students, Professors and the State, 52–4.

182 Notes 57 GARF fond 109, eks. 1, d. 209, ll. 10–13ob. Students’ protests were not at all uncommon. In Moscow in 1827, in fact, a group of students made noise during lectures of an instructor of religious and church studies because ‘he relates disrespectfully to the students.’ RGIA fond 735, op. 10, d. 43. 58 GARF fond 109, eks. 1, d. 209, ll. 10–13ob 59 Ibid. 60 Raisa Kirsanova artfully describes university students’ deportment in the age of Alexander II. See her chapter entitled ‘Moskovskii “Latinkskii” kvartal.’ In Russkii kostum i byt XVIII–XIX, vv. (Moscow: ‘Slovo,’ 2002).

Conclusion 1 This is a process Isabel Hull describes in the context of German-speaking Central Europe in Sexuality, State and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). 2 A. V. Nikitenko, Peterburgskii universitet po dnevniku A. B. Nikitenko, 1826–1828.’ In I. M. Solov’ev, ed. Russskie universitety: v ikh ustavakh i vospominaniiakh sovremennikov tom 1 (St Petersburg, 1913), 111. 3 Alexander Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries: Russian Conservative Thought and Politics in the Reign of Alexander I (Dekalb: Northern Illinois Press, 1997), 15. 4 William Mills Todd, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions and Narratives (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 6. 5 Iurii Lotman, Besedy o russkoi kul’ture: byt i traditsii russkogo dvorianstva (xviiinachalo xix veka (St Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB, 1994), 93; and Todd, Fiction and Society, 18. 6 W. Bruce Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia’s Enlightened Bureaucrats (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1982). 7 Richard S. Wortman, Birth of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 134. 8 This phrase is used by Todd, Fiction and Society, 33. 9 Catriona Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 142. 10 Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), 55. 11 Todd, Fiction and Society, 33. 12 Prominent among the gender theorists relevant here are Denise Riley, Joan Scott and Judith Butler. 13 Laura Engelstein makes this point in her article on civil society in ‘The Dream of Civil Society in Tsarist Russia: Law, State and Religion.’ In Civil Society Before Democracy: Lessons from Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Nancy Borneo and Philip Nord (Lanham, Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, Inc., 2000), 24.

Bibliography Archives Arkhiv gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii muzeia g. Moskvy (GIM), Moscow Natsional’nyi akhiv respubliki Tatarstan (NART), Kazan’ Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA), St Petersburg Rukopisnyi otdel, Rossiiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka (RO, RGB), Moscow Tsentral’nyi istricheskii arkhiv Moskvy (TsIAM), Moscow Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), Moscow Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga (TsGIA SPb), St Petersburg

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Index 1811 law, 118, 123, 178

Dorpat University, 15, 53–63, 70–4, 147 dormitories, 23–4, 56, 97 dress, 3, 7, 31, 33–4, 69 drinking, 39–52, 60, 62, 68, 74, 84, 157, 158–9 dueling, 57, 59, 64–71, 74, 119, 145, 163, 164

Aksakov, Konstantin, 14, 79–81, 86–7 Alexander I, Tsar, 4–5, 11, 15–18, 22, 55, 57–8, 66, 137, 148–9, 165–6 Alexander II, Tsar, 126–7, 130, 132–4 Annenkov, Pavel, 80–1 Bakunin, Mikhail, 169 Baltiki, 58–60, 71 Belinskii, Vissarion, 56, 80–1, 88 Benkendorf, Alexander, 6, 31, 58, 162 Bible Society, the, 17–18 billiards, 42, 47 boarding houses, 24–5 brawling, 44–6, 48, 65, 67 bruderschaft, 58, 63 Burschenschaft, 57–60, 71 Buslaev, F. I., 25, 82–4, 100–16, 170 Byron, Lord, 77–8, 107, 169

Elizabeth, Empress, 22, 54 Enlightenment, 8, 10, 148 Eshevskii, Stepan Vasilevich, 108, 110–11, 114–15 fatherhood, 99, 101–3, 108–9, 112–13, 119–24 femininity, 2, 102–5, 175–6 fencing, 33–5, 60, 70, 164–5 Fet, A. A., 81–2, 106–7, 112 fist fights, 44–6, 48, 65, 67 Foucault, Michel, 96 fraternities, 53–67, 71–4, 128

cadet corps, 5, 8–9, 34–6, 146–7 Carr, E. H., 94–5 Catherine the Great, 4, 15, 54–5 civilizing mission, 4–5, 31, 33, 137 Chicherin, Boris, 25, 39–40, 84–5, 109–10, 161, 169 church, 45–6, 50, 58 cholera, 23 civil society, 3, 10–11, 41 cleanliness, 29, 33, 36 comment (student customary rites), 59–62, 64, 68, 72–3 Crimean War, 126 curator, 16–21, 30, 36, 48, 60, 71, 117, 120, 123–4 curriculum, 12, 19–20, 33, 79–80, 98, 126 Custine, Marquis de, 5–6

gardens, 108–9 Georgievskii, Alexander, 100–1, 108–9 German students, 57–62, 67–8, 74, 144 Granovskii, Timofei, 79–80, 84–5, 132 Grigor’ev, Apollon, 81–2, 106–7 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 78–9, 168 Herzen, Alexander, 25, 56, 76–7, 80, 85–7, 91–5, 99–100, 108, 124, 135–6 Herzen, Natalie, 94–5 Holy Alliance, 16 Holy Synod, 17 homosexuality, 31–2, 95–8, 166–7, 172–3 honor, 53–4, 62–70, 145

dancing, 33–4, 56, 64 Decembrists, 4–5 domesticity, 2, 101–6, 174–5 193

194

Index

honor court, 64–5, 68 Hull, Isabel, 3 Ianeshevskii, E. P., 111–12 inspector of students, 14, 17–19, 24–39, 32, 35–7, 56, 76, 83, 92, 97–8, 125, 128–30, 152–3 Kazan’ University, 1, 15, 17–19, 23, 36–7, 45–8, 55, 73, 97–8, 111, 114–15, 117, 122, 152 korporatsiia, 53–66, 71–4, 128 Kostenetskii, Ia., 74–5, 151 kruzhok, 10, 55–7, 85–93, 170 Landsmanschaft, 57–9 Lange, inspector, 36–7, 128–9 Library for Reading (Biblioteka dlia chteniia), 6–8, 146 literary societies, 54–6, 160, 168–9 Lotman, Iurii, 139–40 Magnitskii, M. L., 17–18, 149 Malov affair, 135–6, 181 manly love, 70, 76–8, 92, 95 marriage, 24, 47–8, 102–5, 110 matrikul’, 21, 130–1, 134 May Rules of 1861, 20–1, 130–1 mentorship, 49–51 Mikhail Pavlovich, Grand Duke, 8–9 military, 8–9 Ministry of Education, 13, 15, 17–20, 28, 46, 58–9, 71, 74, 90, 135 Ministry of Spiritual Affairs, 17 Moscow University, 1, 15, 22–3, 32, 44–5, 54–9, 71, 75, 79–81, 91, 99–101, 109–10, 114, 117, 120–1, 131 motherhood, 101, 103, 109–16, 120–4 Nakhimov, Stepan Platonovich, 49–52, 74, 142, 159 Napoleonic Wars, 16–17 nationalism, 19–20 Neverov, Ianuarii, 82–4, 88–91, 107–8, 112, 116 Nicholas I, 2, 4–20, 21–37, 51, 56, 66, 73–4, 77, 96–7, 101–3, 114, 125–7, 137, 142, 145 Nikitenko, Alexander, 138–9

Northern Bee (Severnaia pchela), 6 nvary, 14, 26–7, 30–6, 54–5, 73–4 Nye, Robert, 53–4 Official Nationality policy, 18–19, 57, 78, 167 Ogarev, Nicholas, 76–7, 80, 91–5 patriarchy, 100–3, 105, 112, 117 peasantry, 21–2 Peter the Great, 2–3, 15, 33, 140–1, 148, 149 Petrashevtsy, 55, 125 philosophy, 20, 79–81, 84, 88, 92, 126–7 Pogodin, Mikhail, 75, 101–2 pokornost’, 19, 31–2 Polish students, 37, 72–4 polite society, 4, 20, 33, 41, 43–5 Polonskii, I. P., 106 poriadok, 19–20, 32–3, 64 portraits, 110–11 prison-room (kartser), 12, 20, 28–30, 33, 42, 46, 48–9, 51, 127, 135 professors, 12, 50, 79–85 prostitution, 31, 153 protests, 20–1 Pushkin, Alexander, 67, 87 Raeff, Marc, 100 raznochintsy, 15, 24, 118 rector, 13, 16, 37, 74 religion, 17–18, 20 respectability, 21, 26, 29, 31–2, 33, 35–6 revolutions of 1848, 20, 31, 36, 79 Romanticism, 4, 75, 77–9, 103–4, 167–9 Russian Orthodoxy, 17–18, 20, 104, 139 Ruteniia, 58–62, 65, 69, 71 Rzhevskii, Vladimir, 82–3, 89, 107 Sand, George, 94–5 Schiller, 79–81, 107, 168–9 Severnaia pehela, 146 Shevyrev, S. P., 84 Shishkov, Admiral Alexander, 18 sodomy, 31, 95–9, 173 Sparrow Hills, 76–7

Index St Petersburg University, 15, 21, 23, 28, 30, 53, 56–60, 71, 79, 84, 112, 118, 126, 162, 179 Speranskii, Mikhail, 15 Stankevich, Nicholas, 81, 86–91, 169, 171 studenthood, 128 superintendent, 16–21, 30, 36, 48, 60, 71, 117, 120, 123–4 surveillance, 20, 26, 30, 37, 27–8, 126–7 Table of Ranks, 16, 26, 28 tavern, 12, 39–50, 156 Tennyson, Lord Alfred, 77–8 Third Section, 5, 6, 31, 46, 56, 55, 58, 71–4, 152, 162 Todd, William Mills, 141–2 Tolstoy, Lev, 89 Tuchkeva-Ogarev, Natalie, 94–5 Turgenev, Ivan, 84, 99–100 tutors, 85 uniforms, 31, 33–4, 59–60, 154 University Council, 16–17, 19, 28

195

University Statute of 1804, 15–18, 20, 23, 55, 135 University Statute of 1835, 14, 18–21, 23, 31, 36, 96–7, 134, 150 University Statute of 1863, 20–1, 127–8, 133–5, 181 Uvarov, Sergei Count, 18–19, 30–1, 58, 66, 71–4, 125–6, 149, 142, 167 Varykina, M. I., 110–16 Victorian culture, 77–8, 103–5, 174 Vilna University, 73, 165 Von Haxthausen, Baron, 105–6 Warsaw University, 73, 165 Wilde, Oscar, 172–3 women, 31, 42, 44–5, 64–6, 70, 77, 81–3, 100, 102–5, 133–4, 181 Wortman, Richard, 5–6, 79, 102, 140 youth, 39, 42, 47, 53, 64–5, 67, 76–8, 85–6, 92, 101, 108

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