A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

10 Culture and Autocracy

One of the ironies of the reign of Nicholas I is that his unrelenting autocracy presided over the first great age of Russian culture. Nicholas realized to some extent the growing importance of Russian culture and the extremely high level it achieved in a short time, but he was more concerned to direct it in the proper conservative channels than to celebrate it. He abrogated the more tolerant censorship system of Alexander I in favor of one with the emphasis on combating subversion in religion and politics while retaining the paternalistic aspects of the older laws. The new structure remained under the Ministry of Education, but included a greater role for the bureaucracy and the more ominous Third Section. Its head, Alexander von Benckendorff, exercised erratic and arbitrary authority over publications while clumsily trying to encourage the appearance of pro-government material. Even with writers and artists well disposed toward the state, this policy was largely a failure, for Russian society was beginning to grow away from court and state tutelage, a process too fundamental for the actions of the tsar to stop. Some of the changes were even the result of state policy, particularly the support of the universities and the gymnasia, which produced a much larger and educated public, eager for the products of the new Russian culture. Another factor was the growth of commercial capitalism, which gradually brought into being a market for books and journals, concentrated in Petersburg and Moscow but slowly spreading to the provinces as well.

The cultural explosion took place in a number of areas. Painting and the visual arts remained largely bound to the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg and thus indirectly to the court and its network of patronage. The Academy continued to favor large historical, classical, and Biblical canvases over the increasingly popular landscape and genre painting. It continued to supply paintings for official building projects like St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg, or the Church of Christ the Savior in Moscow. Nevertheless the Academy also offered for its students and graduates some possibility of travel and long residence in Italy, and many painters and sculptors took advantage of the opportunity. Karl Briullov, the best of the academy painters, returned from Italy and obtained many contracts for the decoration of churches and palaces as well as acquiring court and aristocratic patrons. Alexander Ivanov, in contrast stayed in Italy to avoid the halls of the Academy and fell under the influence of German romantic painting in its religious guise (the “Nazarenes”). The main result of his Italian years was an enormous painting, “Christ Appearing to the People,” which showed Nazarene influence but rejected the pseudo-medievalism of the Germans to depict the people whom Christ saved rather than a hieratic portrait of the Savior. Ivanov’s innovations seem minor today, but in the world of Nicholas I he had a great impact.

Music, especially opera and ballet, remained to a large extent within the court sphere. Catherine had built an opera theater in 1783 outside the palace to provide public access to the performances, and it quickly became the center of operatic and social life. The court did not let go of the opera, however, for the Ministry of the Court acquired control over all theaters in 1802. Thus the repertory of the Petersburg theaters was the result of the taste of the Ministry’s officials and even of the tsar himself. Originally Alexander I had set up four opera companies – Italian, French, German, and Russian – according to the language of the libretto and the singers, more than the nationality of the composer. The Italian company soon faded out, leaving the French company dominant until 1811, when it was closed in the patriotic atmosphere leading up to the war with Napoleon. The German and Russian companies continued, performing Italian operas as well as German with translated librettos. The Russian opera company could present only a few original works and relied largely on the European repertory.

Instrumental music flourished outside of state sponsorship, as much of Russian musical culture in these years was the product of aristocratic amateurs and private societies. The court banker Alexander Rall helped found the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Society in 1801 and the aristocrat V. V. Engelhardt’s concert hall on Nevskii Prospect provided much needed performance space for a generation. In the salon of the Russian-Polish Counts Mikhail and Matvei Wielhorski, Russian and foreign musicians met, played, and made the personal contacts that took Russian music forward. Count Matvei (1794–1866) was a superb cellist who earned praise from Hector Berlioz, and his brother Mikhail (1788–1856) was not only a gifted performer but a composer as well. Both brothers had studied with Luigi Cherubini in Paris in their youth, returned to Russia and eventually received high positions at the tsar’s court. The Wielhorski house stood on the same square as the palace of Grand Duke Michael, where his wife Elena Pavlovna held her own musical and political salon. The Philharmonic Society and the salons brought most of European music to Russia – Mozart and Beethoven being particular favorites of the Wielhorskis. Count Mikhail even performed Beethoven’s first seven symphonies at his wife’s country estate with an orchestra composed of their own and their neighbors’ serfs. Later on it was Count Matvei who introduced the young Anton Rubinstein to Elena Pavlovna, a meeting that was to bear fruit in later years.

With no professional conservatory yet in existence in Russia, musicians relied on private teachers and trips to Europe for their training. Out of this semi-amateur musical world came Russia’s first major composer, Mikhail Glinka (1804–1857). After some training in Italy, Glinka wrote a patriotic and very monarchist opera, A Life for the Tsar, first performed in 1836. The story was the suggestion of the poet Zhukovskii, who also found a librettist in Baron G. F. Rosen, a Baltic German turned Russian writer who also tutored the heir to the throne, the future Alexander II. The Wielhorskis and other aristocratic patrons of the arts provided rehearsal space. There was some quibbling from the director of the imperial theaters, but the support of Zhukovskii and the Counts Wielhorski, given their positions at the court, meant that any objections were ultimately irrelevant. The opera’s premiere enjoyed an authentic success. Glinka’s success did not, however, inaugurate a new age for Russian opera, for in 1843 Nicholas I was entranced and delighted by a traveling Italian company. He immediately hired them as a permanent troupe and gave them the facilities of the Russian opera company, which moved to Moscow. The result was two decades of brilliant performances of Bellini, Rossini, Donizetti, and their lesser contemporaries in St. Petersburg while Russian opera languished.

If music and theater remained tied to the court, Russian literature began to emancipate itself with the spectacular brilliance of the first wave of Russian writers, Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, and the critic Vissarion Belinskii as well as numerous lesser but still highly skilled writers and critics. Emancipation from the court coincided with the emergence of Russian literature as a mature and original literature, the first contribution of Russia to the culture of the world. The emergence of Russian literature also brought to the fore the old issue of Russia and the West in a new form. This issue had lain dormant in the eighteenth century, when Russia’s cultural products were heavily imitative of Western models in form and content. Now a vibrant and original Russian literature, even as it followed Western trends and used them, had created a peculiarly Russian culture, one that was part of Western literature but not identical with it. The old question of Russia and the West now had a major cultural component.

Such a spectacular debut could not have been easily predicted in 1820, so closely had Russian literature continued to follow its European models. It was competent, occasionally inspired, but ultimately modest in achievement. In the early years of the nineteenth century the leading figures were Nikolai Karamzin, who had turned his attention to Russian history after 1803, and Vasilii Zhukovskii. Zhukovskii had a marvelous way with language, and his poetry remains to this day part of the heritage of Russian verse, but his best works were translations of the German and English poetry popular in the Romantic era – Goethe and Gottfried Bürger, Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Campbell. Through Zhukovskii European Romanticism came to Russia. To be sure, Karamzin and Zhukovskii were creating an audience for Russian literature that began to spread beyond the court and the capital cities, but it was an uphill battle. The Russian nobility, especially after the founding of the universities and gymnasia under Alexander, was much better educated than before, but it also knew French even better than before and often better than Russian. The main reading matter of many gentry families was French novels, and the latest fashionable novel in Paris was widely read in St. Petersburg in a few weeks. The numbers of the educated public were still small, and thus Karamzin’s and Zhukovskii’s journals, with their selection of new Russian poetry and prose among articles on history or occasionally politics, were thin small-format volumes with a circulation that rarely went much beyond a thousand copies. In this situation writers needed the patronage of court and state to survive. Much verse circulated in aristocratic drawing rooms, in the notebooks of young men and women, and only in manuscript, even when it had no political content. Zhukovskii came to play a key role. Already the most prominent poet of the age, he took up a position at the court teaching Russian to Nicholas I’s Prussian wife Alexandra and then in 1819 became the principal tutor to Nicholas’s son Alexander, the future Tsar Alexander II. For the next two decades Zhukovskii continued to live in the Winter Palace and served as the main patron for Russian literature and art.

Zhukovskii spotted Pushkin’s talents as early as 1815, when the young poet was still a pupil at the Tsarskoe Selo Lycée. On leaving the Lycée in 1817, Pushkin took a very junior position in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Though he came from an ancient noble family (his ancestors had served in the boyar duma of the Moscow princes in the fourteenth century), his fortune was limited and the tradition of government service meant that he, like other writers of his generation, started out as an official. He also spent much of his time carousing in the demi-monde of St. Petersburg with his old Lycée comrades, and participating in a number of literary societies (including Green Lamp and Arzamas). All of these groups included many future Decembrists, though none of them thought he was the type to be recruited for their revolutionary activities. To be sure Pushkin was sympathetic to many of the political goals of his friends, and occasionally wrote poems expressing these views, which circulated in manuscript. These came to the attention of the Special Section of the Ministry of the Interior early in 1820, and Pushkin was sent into exile to the south, first to Kishinev and then to Odessa. A few weeks later his first major poem appeared in print, a fairy tale called “Ruslan and Liudmila”.

In the next decade, one of the most remarkable in the history of Russian culture, Pushkin published poem and after poem: “The Prisoner of the Caucasus” from the events of the Caucasian Wars, “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai” with its Crimean background, “The Gypsies,” “Poltava” from Ukrainian history in the time of Peter the Great, and others. From his reading of Shakespeare he was moved to write a verse drama, “Boris Godunov,” a tragedy of ambition and power that served as the basis for Modest Mussorgskii’s later opera. Pushkin’s masterpiece was the novel in verse Evgenii Onegin. On the surface the story of a bored young nobleman’s flirtation with Tatiana, a country girl brought up on French novels, it provided a portrait of Russian gentry society. Onegin emerges as a man with no purpose in life, neither a career nor an absorbing occupation, well educated in European culture but contributing nothing to the Russia around him. In contrast Tatiana, for all her girlish naivité, is the deeper and stronger character, the prototype of many of the women in Russian literature. The book had phenomenal success and later Tchaikovsky was to turn it into his own greatest opera. The echoes of European Romanticism were apparent in almost all these works, but Pushkin was no imitator, alongside the echoes from his reading was a powerful melody all his own.

Pushkin’s astonishing creativity was not alone. The decade saw an explosion of Russian poetry and a gradual transformation of the audience. Normal commercial publication was still barely profitable, but innovative booksellers found a new genre, the almanach. Small format volumes with fancy bindings and paper, they were designed as New Year’s presents, especially for young ladies. They normally included only Russian authors with few translations, all of them new. Poets competed to be published in them, and they were guaranteed an audience, for part of the appeal of the format was that they could be easily carried in a lady’s purse. In aristocratic drawing rooms the French novel now had a competitor.

In 1824 Pushkin received permission to return to his estate near Pskov, south of St. Petersburg, but not to the capitals. The Decembrist revolt complicated his attempts to restore his position, and the newly founded Third Section sent agents to observe him. They were particularly concerned to discover if he talked to the peasantry, and about what. Their findings were meager: the worst they could discover was that he wore a straw hat and a Russian traditional shirt with a pink sash around it. The point was that his dress could be construed as an attempt to mix with the people to stir up revolution, but his neighbors reported that he never talked about politics or even went out much. Finally Pushkin, with encouragement from Zhukovskii, appealed directly to tsar Nicholas, who granted him an interview in Moscow in 1826. After a long conversation, Nicholas agreed to end the exile, to allow Pushkin back to St. Petersburg, and to help him with his problems with the censorship. Henceforth his censor would be the tsar himself.

Pushkin returned to the capital still closely observed by the authorities, but also with the court title of kammerjunker and a direct relationship to the tsar and to the head of the Third Section, Benckendorf himself. Pushkin chafed at Benckendorf’s philistinism, but he admired Nicholas and remained loyal to the monarchy, if critical of its officials and many of its policies. He received an official appointment as historian and wrote a history of the Pugachev rebellion as well as a novella on the same subject, The Captain’s Daughter. Pushkin even borrowed money through the Third Section, and eventually received permission to found a journal, The Contemporary. This was in part a commercial venture, for the economic circumstances of literature were rapidly changing. In 1834 the Polish conservative turned Russian writer Osip Senkovskii founded the Library for Reading, which quickly outsold any other Russian journal with its thick issues that contained a mixture of light fiction, serious literature, non-fiction, and much chitchat from the editor himself. Pushkin was hoping to move into this market while offering more sophisticated material for the reader when fate intervened.

Pushkin had married a woman of great beauty, limited intelligence and depth, and great social ambitions. Her life centered on the houses of the great aristocracy, the court and its entertainments, its balls and intimate gatherings, which she attended as lady-in-waiting to the empress. There she met Georges-Charles D’Anthès, a young Alsatian-French nobleman serving in the Russian guards, a monarchist refugee from the French revolution of 1830. Adopted as a son by the Dutch ambassador Baron van Heeckeren, he revolved in the highest society and was utterly unscrupulous. He began a flirtation with Natalia Pushkina (how serious it was remains unclear to this day), and in November 1836, Pushkin received an anonymous letter that asserted the flirtation to be a real affair. He challenged D’Anthès to a duel, but Zhukovskii and others managed to patch up the quarrel. It erupted again a few months later and on January 27, 1837, it ended in a duel. In the snow on the outskirts of St. Petersburg the two opponents faced each other and D’Anthès fired first. Fatally wounded and bleeding profusely, Pushkin raised himself on his elbow and fired, but only inflicted a slight wound. His second brought him home where Zhukovskii got the best doctors in the city, those who treated the tsar, but they could do nothing. Pushkin sent a message to Nicholas, asking him for forgiveness (dueling was a crime) and Nicholas granted it, but advised him to take the last rites like a Christian, and promised to take care of his family. Count Mikhail Wielhorski, the poet Prince Peter Viazemskii, and Zhukovskii visited and stayed with him until he died. D’Anthes was expelled from Russia, and went on to a long career in his native France. Nicholas paid Pushkin’s debts and took care of his family and Natalia soon remarried.

Pushkin’s death was a huge event in the history of Russian culture, soon mythologized into martyrdom at the hands of an unfeeling aristocracy and court, but his death was the result of his deep roots in precisely that milieu. Though most of the later Russian writers were still noblemen, none were as much part of the court circle as was Pushkin. The closest to Pushkin’s social position was the poet Mikhail Lermontov, also a nobleman but without distinguished ancestors like Pushkin’s. His political views were not really radical, but his poetic reaction to Pushkin’s death earned him a transfer to the Caucasus, the scene of his greatest work, A Hero of Our Time. An interconnected series of stories, the book’s hero Pechorin is a sort of Onegin, this time serving in the army in the Caucasus but again placed between European education and the limits of Russian reality. On Lermontov’s return to St. Petersburg in 1838 he, too, frequented aristocratic salons if not the court, and as if repeating Pushkin’s fate, got into a duel over a woman with the son of the French ambassador. The duel ended in reconciliation, but Lermontov was sent back to the Caucasus. There he met his end in yet another duel in July 1841.

Pushkin and Lermontov were typical of the writers of their age though far more talented. Both noblemen, with many friends and relatives in the court, the government, and the army, they lived as did the men of their social rank. They were present at the great social events of the capital and spent much of their time playing cards, drinking, hunting, and occasionally visiting their country estates. The next generation of writers, though also noblemen, lacked the connections at court and experienced St. Petersburg less as the home of the court than as a great modern city.

The first of this new generation to emerge was Nikolai Gogol’. Gogol’ was the son of a provincial Ukrainian landowner, and on his father’s side even the noble ancestry was rather recent. He attended the lycée in nearby Nezhin, an institution of the highest educational quality but lacking the connections with the court and the high aristocracy of Pushkin’s school in Tsarskoe Selo. On graduation the young Gogol’ found a position in St. Petersburg at a school for the daughters of military officers. His livelihood came from the school and soon from his writings after his first great success, a series of comic stories from Ukrainian life, Evenings on a Farm near Dikan’ka. Gogol’ eventually met Pushkin, who published some of his stories, and Zhukovskii, who appreciated his talent but never played the role of patron with Gogol’ that he had in other cases. Gogol’ was something of a loner, and at first he did not need Zhukovskii’s patronage. There was already enough variety of outlets for his work and they paid enough to keep him going. Nevertheless, the Russian market was still too narrow to provide more than a modest living and Gogol’s poor health left him vulnerable. The solution found by Zhukovskii and others of his friends after 1840 was a series of direct grants from the tsar himself, one of the last examples of court patronage of literature. Nicholas I liked most of the work done by Gogol’, and the grants came regularly until the writer’s death.

Gogol’ brought new themes into Russian literature. His stories of St. Petersburg, often fantastic and grotesque, introduced an urban theme into Russian literature that was previously absent. The capital was growing, both because of the expansion of the central bureaucracy and because of the city’s role as a port and an industrial center. The St. Petersburg that Gogol’ knew was the city of the impoverished clerk and the lonely wanderer in a vast and cold mass of huge buildings, not the city of glittering balls and brilliant salons. The heroes of these stories were such little people as the clerk in “The Overcoat,” but St. Petersburg also inspired the fantastic strain in his writing, with stories such as “The Nose,” in which the nose of a minor bureaucrat leaves his face and roams around the city in a carriage wearing an official uniform.

Gogol’ remained all his life the product of the Ukrainian provinces, deeply religious, nationalistic, and conservative in his political views. He took the conservative ideal for Russia seriously and realized that the reality was different. His first play, “The Inspector General” of 1836, was a scathing satire of provincial life and official corruption. Poorly performed at first, it was not a success until much later, though it showed the direction in which he was heading. Nicholas I liked it, as he saw himself struggling with the corruption and incompetence of the Russian bureaucracy, and found an echo of that effort in the play. His greatest work, the novel Dead Souls (1842), was a picaresque account of the adventures of a swindler traveling through provincial Russia. Again Gogol’ saw Russia’s shortcomings from the point of view of a conservative ideal of autocracy and Orthodoxy, but it was a sign of the times that reaction to the novel divided very much along ideological lines. The pro-government conservatives Bulgarin and Senkovskii hated it. More independent conservatives, the Slavophiles, and the Westernizer Vissarion Belinskii loved it, but for different reasons. The Slavophiles saw it as an apotheosis of Russia and its mystical future, while Belinskii praised it for its unvarnished portrayal of Russia’s present.

The debate over Dead Souls was a harbinger of the future: literature was fast becoming a battleground of political and cultural ideology. It was changing in other respects, for Zhukovskii left for Europe in 1842 in search of better health and never returned to Russia. He had no replacement at the court, and Russian literature no longer had a patron with the ear of the tsar himself. By the 1840s the “fat journals” pioneered by Senkovskii and Pushkin fought lively and vituperative battles over Gogol’, Lermontov, Goethe, and Georges Sand. The most powerful of the younger writers was Fyodor Dostoevskii, whose early works took up the thread of Gogol’ in his Petersburg stories, with his own tales of impoverished seamstresses and other little people of the great metropolis. The commanding figure of the decade in criticism was the critic Vissarion Belinskii, the main spokesman of the Westernizers.

Belinskii came to be seen in Russia as the archetypical “committed” critic who judged works of art by largely utilitarian standards and by their significance for the reformation of Russian society. This judgment placed him in the straightjacket of the conceptions of a later generation, for Belinskii’s view of art was essentially historical, a view derived from his Hegelian youth. Belinskii got from Hegel the idea that art was one of the many manifestations of the Idea in history, alongside philosophy or the development of the state. Art was, in his words, “thinking in images,” and thus was the equivalent of political or social thought in another form. Since the development of the Idea in society was the progress of freedom, art in Russia should reflect the movement of the country toward that ideal. Art that did not was condemned to ultimate insignificance and was considered bad art to boot. This theoretical framework gave him a basis for his total rejection of older Russian culture, his qualified approval of the eighteenth century, and his enthusiastic approval of Pushkin, Lermontov and particularly Gogol’. In Gogol’ he saw a relentless critic of the existing order of Russian society, the satirist of nobility and state alike. His appreciation of Gogol’ was only partly correct, for Gogol’s satire came from a conservative position with a religious basis, the idea that Russia was not yet living up to its potential to create a society profoundly different from the West. Here Belinskii parted company with Gogol’ entirely, for the critic was a firm Westernizer. To him Russian society was only acceptable insofar as it approached the standard of an idealized West, a West that itself needed to be transformed by the French utopian socialism that became Belinskii’s credo.

The discussion of literature was to a large extent a discussion of political and social issues that could not otherwise be aired in print. Eventually they broke out into the open, or partly so. Gogol’s publication of his conservative manifesto, Selections from Correspondence with Friends, in 1847 created huge controversies, muffled by censorship, for he seemed to be not just supporting the existing state and church but losing faith in literature itself. Belinskii’s response, the letter to Gogol’ in 1847, became a classic example of liberal and radical thought in Russia for the next two generations. “The public…looks upon Russian writers as its only leaders, defenders, and saviors from the darkness of autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationality.” In Belinskii’s mind, “Russia sees her salvation not in mysticism…but in the successes of civilization, enlightenment, and humanity.” The Russia of his day needed to start with the abolition of serfdom and corporal punishment and the establishment of legal order. Belinskii’s life was perhaps as important as his views, for he was the first important example of the Russian intelligentsia, the educated stratum of society that took Russian culture out of the hands of the nobility. Himself the grandson of a priest and the son of a military doctor, he was only technically a noble because of his father’s promotion in the army. He survived, and survived very poorly on his income from his articles and editiorial work in the journals where he published, most importantly The Contemporary, originally Pushkin’s journal and a publication that would have a remarkable future.

Belinskii’s literary tastes and views pointed to the future in other ways. One of his early friendships was with Ivan Turgenev, again a writer of noble origins and some wealth. Turgenev had come to Moscow from his provincial estate and made acquaintance with the Stankevich circle that included Herzen and Bakunin, whom Turgenev came to know better when he studied in Berlin. On his return to Russia in 1841 Turgenev became close friends with Belinskii, a friendship that lasted until the critic’s death in 1848. Turgenev shared Belinskii’s support of Western culture and his critical view of Russia, if not the critic’s radicalism. The great event of Turgenev’s youth was his meeting with the Spanish opera singer Pauline Garcia-Viardot in 1843, who came to St. Petersburg as one of the stars of the Italian company that was to have a major effect on Russian opera. The passion seems to have been mainly on Turgenev’s side, but it unlocked his creative powers. In his middle thirties he found his voice, first in his play “A Month in the Country,” and then in his series of stories of rural life, A Hunter’s Sketches (1847–1852). The Sketches, with their portraits of eccentric and domineering nobles and their very human (but unsentimentalized) serfs, caused a sensation. Turgenev’s were the not the first attempts to describe the life of the peasantry, but they were both the most effective by far and under their mild surface they conveyed the poverty and humiliation in which the great mass of the Russian people, the peasants, lived. The son of a despotic and sadistic mother who mistreated her serfs as well as her children, Turgenev knew what it meant to live under arbitrary power. The publication of such work in the darkest period of the reign of Nicholas was a major act of civil courage, but ironically it was not the Sketches that earned him his first brush with the authorities.

In 1852, just as the publication of the Hunter’s Sketches was proceeding, Gogol’ died. Turgenev had been acquainted with Gogol’ but was not a close friend. As a fellow writer, however, he admired him intensely, and was so moved by his death that he quickly wrote a short essay about Gogol’ and his significance for Russia and its literature. In St. Petersburg the publisher was afraid it would not pass censorship for there were many conservative officials who did not share the tsar’s approval of Gogol’. Turgenev sent the essay to Moscow, where it was approved and appeared in print. Turgenev was then arrested for violating the censorship rules, a charge that was legally dubious, but convincingly presented to Nicholas by the Third Section. The punishment was a month in prison followed by exile to his estate, time that he used to write another novella. The incident only confirmed Turgenev’s oppositional attitude to the autocracy.

Turgenev was extremely sensitive to the trends of Russian society and thought and his stories of peasant life prefigured by only a few years the great debate over serfdom that erupted after the Crimean War. He was also aware of another trend in Russian culture, the turn away from philosophy, German or otherwise, toward a fascination with the natural sciences, a trend that would also come to the surface only after Crimea. This fascination did not grow in sterile soil, for the universities founded under Alexander I were fully equipped with faculties of the natural sciences. Until the middle of the nineteenth century they competently taught the achievements of European science adding nothing of importance to that body of learning, with one enormous exception: mathematics. In 1829–30, the same years as the publication of Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin, Nikolai Lobachevskii inaugurated a revolution in geometry in a series of articles in the official journal of the University of Kazan’, where he taught and eventually became rector. Lobachevskii’s idea was very simple: all geometry since the time of Euclid had included the assumption that two parallel lines do not meet. Suppose you reverse the assumption: what sort of geometry would you construct? This Lobachevskii proceeded to do, a discovery so bizarre that it earned him no recognition in his lifetime. Europeans with similar ideas, Christian Gauss and the young Hungarian Janos Bolyai, had never developed them, for Gauss thought them too odd to publish. He did not want to risk his own reputation and discouraged Bolyai from taking steps to make his suggestions better known. It was left to Lobachevskii, in the obscurity of provincial Russia, to work out the notion. Unknown to almost everyone, Russia had its first major scientific discovery, but Russian science would not come into its own until the 1860s, and it would be Turgenev who would bring science and its implications to the public for the first time. The new fascination with the natural sciences also brought a new current of thought into Russian radical politics.