Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience

At the end of 1874, Grigoriev was appointed Head of the Ministry's Main Directorate on Print, i.e., the highest censor in the Empire, a post he fulfilled while remaining a professor at St. Petersburg University. He controlled the opening of new publications and the curtailment of existing ones, the process by which they would pass through censorship, and the system of fines for those who trans­gressed. He was involved in various high-profile affairs. He autho­rized the publication of Dostoevsky's controversial A Writer's Diary without preliminary censorship, but the sick and disgraced Nikolai Nekrasov, known for his populist stance, had to plead for leniency on behalf of Grigoriev. When an unhappy journalist visited him in his high office to complain about the prohibition of his newspaper and received cynical treatment, this journalist wrote that he felt like a Kyrgyz whom Grigoriev had left to die in the steppes (Gradovsky 1882: 499). Grigoriev interfered in state policy on the Ukrainian language, which he preferred to call a "little-Russian dialect." In a long note, he explained that the ban he had imposed on Ukrainian publications was a response to the danger of separatism: "To allow the creation of an autonomous folk literature in the Ukrainian dialect would be to promote the separation of Ukraine from the rest of Russia" (Veselovsky 1887: 265). Almost at the same time, in 1876, he chaired the International Congress of Orientalists in St. Petersburg and opened it by giving his speech in French.

Grigoriev's career is broader than Said's concept of orientalism; probably the best concept for it is Saltykov-Shchedrin's term "Tashkent-ness" (see Chapter 1), the Russian version of the imperial­ist boomerang that applied the orientalist habits of rule onto the imperial nation. Moving from the university to the Ministry of Internal Affairs to a provincial administration in the east, and back to the university and to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Grigoriev had an ambitious career as an imperial administrator whose varie­gated duties were based on his orientalist expertise. In St. Petersburg and Orenburg, his knowledge and attitudes were in demand by the highest powers, which was why he succeeded in making a grand career. What, indeed, was not the east in Grigoriev's Russia? The Kyrgyzes were definitely oriental and, thus, were subject to orientalist rule. But so too were Jews, and Ukrainians as well. And also convict prisoners on their way to Siberia. And also university students, who were restless and therefore, subject to Grigoriev's expertise. And of course, the writers in Petersburg and Kiev, who were trembling in front of Grigoriev like the Kyrgyzes in the steppe. For Vladimir Dal, internal colonization led to a positive version of orientalism, a ste­reotyped reasoning that affirmed the moral superiority of the exoti- cized subjects, Russians and Cossacks. For Vasilii Grigoriev, orientalism worked straightforwardly as discrimination and coercion, which, "extremely unfortunately" for him, stopped short of hanging the natives. But he did hang novels.

Through the High Imperial Period, Russia's internal affairs were intrinsically connected to Russian literature. Top officials of the Ministry of Internal Affairs maintained close relations with well- known writers even after the illustrious Lev Perovsky, the man who wanted "Being, not Seeming," had departed from the ministry. Perovsky's successor, Sergei Lanskoi, married the writer Vladimir Odoevskii's sister. Lanskoi's successor, Petr Valuev (who was a prolific author himself), married the writer Petr Viazemsky's daughter. Some famous characters in Lev Tolstoy's novels, such as Ivan Ilich and Karenin, are described as officials of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The realist novel became the genre of nationalism everywhere in the western hemisphere (Anderson 1991). The same was true in Russia, but despite the nationalist motifs of many of its classical pieces,

Russian literature played an integrative rather than a divisive role. More than any other aspect of imperial culture, literature accepted the Shaved Man's Burden and carried it nobly. Throughout the enor­mous space of the Empire, the cult of Pushkin became a belief system for people who shared little or nothing else. In Dostoevsky's Idiot, two unusual friends, an impoverished prince and an Old-Believer merchant, spend time reading "all of Pushkin" together. A Russian rebel, Vladimir Lenin, studied Pushkin in the gymnasium, where his teacher of Russian literature was the father of his arch-rival, Alexander Kerensky; Lenin loved Saltykov-Shchedrin and, unexpectedly, Turgenev (Valentinov 1953). A Zionist rebel, Vladimir (Zeev) Jabotinsky, wrote in his memoirs that he knew "all of Pushkin," as well as Shakespeare in the Russian translation, from the age of 14; but he also wrote extensively about the imperial, chauvinist, and anti-Semitic motifs in Pushkin and other Russian classics (Jabotinsky 1989). A Polish rebel, Apollo Korzeniowski, the father of Joseph Conrad, self-consciously modeled his major play on Griboedov's Woe from Wit. When Russian populists, Zionists, and Muslim activists met in a tsarist prison, or later in the Soviet gulag, they discussed the great Russian writers up to Tolstoy. In the long run, Russian literature proved to be an extremely successful instrument of cultural hege­mony. With its classics, heretics, and critics, it conquered more Russians, non-Russians, and Russian enemies than any other imperial endeavor. Standardizing the language, creating a common pool of meanings, and integrating its multiethnic readership on an enormous scale, this literature was a great asset. The tsars and the censors rarely understood or appreciated it. Thus, the Empire collapsed, but the literature outlived it.

Part IV

Shaved Man's Burden

Philosophy Under Russian Rule

"Grass is needful for the ox, which again is needful for man . . . but then we do not see why it is necessary that men should exist," wrote Kant in The Critique of Judgment. However, casting his thoughts to the north and asking the same question about "the Greenlander, the Lapp, the Samoyed, the Yakut, etc.," Kant gave an answer and it was negative: "[I]t is not clear why people should have to live in there at all. . . .It could only have been the greatest unsociability among men which thus scattered them into such inhospitable regions" (Kant 2007a: 155-61).

The postcolonial philosopher Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak states that while Kant's readers understand his philosophy as universal speculation about humanity, he drew a line between the savages and the people of reason: "The subject as such in Kant is geopolitically differentiated" (Spivak 1994: 26). Indeed, "Why should men exist?" is a different question from "Should men live in Tahiti or in Siberia?" In Kant's logic, living in places like Konigsberg, being sociable, and making use of their reason, men could realize the purpose of their existence. But in places such as Yakutsk, unsociable men could not understand themselves and, therefore, had no purpose. However, people always travel to places like Yakutsk in search of furs, oil, or diamonds. So the next question would be: in these inhospitable but profitable places, which men should live - natives with no purpose, or whites with it, or both, in some sort of hierarchical order?

Konigsberg

In this part of the world, the Middle Ages started fiercely but ended quietly. Founded by a monastic order of Teutonic Crusaders, Konigsberg became the center of hostilities between the Germanic,

Baltic, and Slavonic peoples. But then, the Northern Crusade, the fur trade, and, finally, the Hanseatic league were all exhausted. Throughout the eighteenth century, several northern wars ended in Russian triumphs (Frost 2000; Scott 2001). More than anywhere else, Russians combined military conquest of this area with the absorption of local elites. Starting with Peter I, the Romanovs recruited their spouses and successors from the Baltic coast. In the early years of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which opened in 1725, four out of five of its presidents came from the University of Konigsberg (Kostiushev and Kretinin 1999).

During the Seven Years War (1756-63), the Russian state annexed eastern Prussia. The war followed fervent pan-European negotiations that historians call, with some justification, a "diplomatic revolution" (Kaplan 1968). When the war started, increasingly bizarre events occurred in Konigsberg. In 1757, the Russians came close to its gates but retreated for no apparent reason: the poor health of the Empress, Elizabeth of Russia, was the reason for hesitation, though this was a state secret (Anisimov 1999). While the Prussians celebrated this turn of events, Elizabeth recovered, arrested the top Russian commander, and sent the troops back. Meanwhile, the Prussian king, Frederick the Great, was busy protecting his capital, Berlin. With the Russians near its gates, Konigsberg accepted the same deal as Riga had in 1710: the city became a part of the Russian Empire and escaped massacre. Annexing eastern Prussia, the Russian Empire turned it into its province "forever." On 24 January 1758, the officials of the city took an oath to the Russian Empress.

Winston Churchill called the Seven Years War the very first world war. Its imperial context is well established (Anderson 2000; Schumann and Schweizer 2008). Starting with the attack of the young George Washington on a fort in French Canada, the war extended into the Old World. While England and France were fighting over colonies overseas, other powers were struggling for colonies in Eastern Europe. A true product of the Empire, the Russian army featured many Baltic Germans in its leadership. Its infantry was mostly Russian, and its omnipresent light cavalry included the Kalmyks, Bashkirs, and Cossacks, who fought under their native commanders. Frederick the Great explained the power of the Russian assault by "the number of Tartars, Cossacks, and Kalmyks that they have in their armies" (Wolff 1994: 171). Later, Kant considered the "Kalmuckians" as a separate race along with Negroes and (Native) Americans (2007b: 92), a highly unusual racial classification based on his personal experience with the Kalmyks in Konigsberg.

philosophy under Russian rule

The eighteenth-century military revolution was indecisive in Eastern Europe (Frost 2000); although the Russian Army employed the latest artillery inventions, it still relied on light cavalry and ethnic troops. Even the Russians perceived these oriental regiments as exotic and fearsome. The young officer, Andrei Bolotov was shocked to see the "strange," "half-naked," "horse-eating" troops massacring German villages for the sake of the Russian crown (1986: 124). The Kalmyks were allowed to loot the old Prussian arsenals; armed with medieval helmets and sabers, they probably looked ridiculous. Those were the last years of their service to the Russian Empire; in 1771, the Kalmyks left the Russian steppes for China in a mass exodus (Khodarkovsky 1992: 182). The Cossacks were equally unhappy. In 1773, they started a large anti-imperial mutiny in the Urals, which was led by Emelian Pugachev who fought as a Cossack in eastern Prussia. The general who finally defeated and arrested Pugachev also started his career there in Prussia. Bolotov (1986: 125) saw the summary execu­tion of Prussian non-uniformed combatants who were captured shooting the Russians. Two were hanged publicly; eleven had their fingers cut off by Russian soldiers. Later, Bolotov attended Pugachev's execution in Moscow. For him, orientalizing the part helped to rescue the whole, which was the overall feeling of his and his peers' Europeanness:

Everywhere was devastation, arson, and burglary. . . . The cruelty and barbarism of our Cossacks and Kalmyks was against all the rules of war. . . . Nothing was seen in all these places but fire and smoke and the greatest ferocity and dishonor to the female gender. . . . These actions of our Cossacks and Kalmyks gave us little honor because, having heard of their barbarity, the European nations imagined that all our army was this way. (Bolotov 1986: 123)

The Russian armies and their allies made quick successes against Frederick. Berlin was taken and overrun by Russian and Austrian troops in 1760. Bolotov (1931: 2/34) heard that journalists in Berlin were supposed to run the gauntlet for writing "bold and hurtful things" about Russians, but they received an eleventh-hour reprieve. In any case, Berlin suffered more than Konigsberg; Frederick was on the verge of suicide. Nobody doubted that once the Russian crown had annexed eastern Prussia, it would remain a part of the Empire, and locals would have to adjust to the new order.

The brief colonization of Konigsberg, with its Teutonic glory and enlightened university, was an outstanding event. But the situation changed spectacularly with the death of Empress Elizabeth in January 1762. Her heir, Peter III, adored Frederick the Great and all things Prussian. In no time, Peter pulled Russia out of the Seven Years War and signed a separate peace with Frederick. The scale of the change in St. Petersburg surprised everyone. Officially, Konigsberg became a Prussian city again in August 1762. The Russians were preparing the general withdrawal of troops from Prussia when Peter III was dethroned by a conspiracy that was led by his wife, Catherine. The Russian governor, who was still stationed in the city, issued a decla­mation about his return to power. The story seemed to take yet another turn, but Catherine the Great decided against a new war and withdrew the troops from Prussia. After the long and victorious war, Russia had made no gains. The bloody series of events turned out to be entirely senseless.

Intrigue and Melodrama

Centuries later, Hitler hoped for a repeat of Frederick's miraculous survival when the Soviet troops encircled Berlin. Historians have ceaselessly debated the causes and results of those mid-eighteenth- century events that shaped Europe. The Cambridge historian, Herbert Butterfield, called this series of diplomatic and military events "intrigue and melodrama"; it was more intense than at any other time in European politics, "the last two decades excepted," he wrote in 1955. Butterfield believed that Russia was the main culprit behind the conspiracy against Frederick the Great, but the philosopher-king did not understand this fact even after the war ended, and nor did historians: "The attention of historians suffered a lapse in regard to those things which related to Russia" (Butterfield 1955: 162, 158). In the later writings of the German historian and theorist, Reinhart Koselleck, a sense of shock still surrounds the Seven Years War. Koselleck compared the events at the start of the war with the German-Soviet pact of 1939, but he characterized the events at its end as "historically matchless." Writing in 1968, he used the whole episode to illustrate the role of chance in history (Koselleck 2004: 118, 124). Later historians agree that the chief players all featured an extraordinary "talent for the unexpected" (Schweizer 1989: 179, 217; Palmer 2005: 150). Unknowable factors such as secret diplo­macy, personal chemistry, and rulers' health, played decisive roles in this confrontation of absolutist regimes. For those who observed the war from within Konigsberg, it was stripped of any understandable meaning. If historians are still running out of metaphors when con­fronting these events in Prussia, what could the citizens of Konigsberg, who did not know a fraction of what we today know about their war, think about it and about their ability to understand it?

The Russian occupation of Konigsberg established a colonial regime that was not unique in Europe but was unusual for German lands. From 1757 to 1762, eastern Prussia was a colony of the Russian Empire, as Livonia had been earlier (since 1710) and eastern Poland would be later (since 1772). Nobody in the land could know what we know now, that the Russian regime in Konigsberg would end in less than five years, any more than they could know that it would be re-established centuries later.

One could agree that the Russian occupation of Prussia was not too painful, relatively speaking. The Russian administration there struggled with cultural and political problems that are typical for any colonial regime. Troops were stationed in the city, a Russian governor took over the administration, and Russian currency was introduced. The burgers of Konigsberg became Russian subjects. However, Elizabeth promised to respect their traditional rights, including reli­gious liberty. Wartime taxes were reduced, but the draft of recruits, which was tough under Frederick, was replaced by an additional tax. Only one of the many Lutheran churches of the city was converted to Russian Orthodox. Various projects streamed from St. Petersburg, some of them utopian or, rather, dystopian. By special decree, citizens of eastern Prussia were invited to resettle in Russia, though no results were achieved at that time (Bartlett 1979: 20; Kretinin 1996). This project of inward resettlement, in which the victors invited the defeated to settle on their territory rather than the other way around, was unusual in the history of imperial conquests. In his attempt to play a political strategist for the Russian crown, Denis Diderot propa­gated population transfers and used the Russian-Prussian war as a case in point:

If the Russians had done the right thing when they were in Berlin, they would have taken away the whole capital - men, women and children, workers, manufacturers, furniture - and left behind only the walls. . . . If this transfer of population had been proposed to me, I would have taken care that it should occur in the most orderly way possible. (Diderot 1992: 112)

Diderot wrote this retrospective advice to Catherine II after his return from Russia in 1774, when the Seven Years War had become history but a civil war between the Empire and the colonized peoples of the Southern steppes, led by Pugachev, was under way. The philosopher did not fail to instruct Catherine about what to do with the Cossacks: "What I say of the Prussians, I say too of the Cossacks." What was good for external colonization was good for internal colonization too. In fact, there was not much difference between the two.

The colonization of Konigsberg encountered silent resistance on the part of the natives, who were convinced of their superior culture, complied with Russian rule and rulers, detested them in their quiet way, and responded with a pioneering nationalist movement that had tremendous consequences for European thought. I submit that Russian rule established a "domination without hegemony" (Guha 1997), a typically colonial situation in which the rulers practiced coercion without managing to persuade the natives of their right to do so, or even of their ability to rule. This situation invited deep questions about power, reason, and humanity, some of them for the first time ever. The Russian attempt at colonizing Konigsberg became an entry point into modernity, a prototype of the condition that has been re-enacted myriad times later and often, with reference to those who experienced it then, in Konigsberg.

Kant

In 1755, Kant defended his dissertation and became a university lecturer. His major work of this period, Universal Natural History, began with a dedication to Frederick II, "the mightiest king and master," from his "most humble servant." In the same formula, he promised to serve his king "with the utmost devotion until my dying day." Scholars do not doubt that he was sincere: "Kant's identifica­tion with the king's program has long been recognized" (Zammito 2002: 58). But only two years later, Kant had to take an oath to Frederick's mortal enemy, Elizabeth, promising her that he would be "loyal and true to the Illustrious and All-powerful Empress of all the Russias . . . and to her heir"; moreover, if anything were undertaken against them, not only would he "inform the authorities forthwith, but also try to thwart the deed" (Gulyga 1987: 31). In 1758, Kant submitted to Elizabeth his application for a professorship, calling her, oxymoronically, "the most enlightened, the most autocratic Empress" and signing his letter, "in the deepest humiliation," "the most faithful subject and slave" of Her Imperial Greatness. Separated by three years, these ritual constructions promised perpetual service to two mortal enemies. Later, Kant would call such flip-flopping people, "turnspits." It was precisely this lack of autonomy that was the target of the great critical offensive that Kant later undertook.

The professorship was given to one of Kant's rivals. A Soviet scholar of Kant believed that the reason for his failure was the inter­ference of a Russian officer, Andrei Bolotov (Gulyga 1987: 36). Bolotov, a translator who worked for the Russian governor of Konigsberg, brought a small group of Russian students to lectures at the University. Having discovered philosophy among the other pleas­ures of Konigsberg, Bolotov preferred Pietism to what he perceived as the spoiling, even criminal, influence of the Enlightenment. For many months, he attended lectures on philosophy given at the uni­versity by Kant's rival, Daniel Weymann. On top of the university course, Bolotov took private lessons with Weymann "almost daily." Weymann refused to charge fees for these lessons, but when departing from Konigsberg, Bolotov left his teacher of philosophy "a Kalmyk fur coat," a perfectly Russian present (1986: 382).

We know only that Bolotov liked Kant's enemy, but there is no evidence that Bolotov influenced Kant's promotion case, though he probably could have. Together, Bolotov and Weymann read the works of philosopher-theologians such as Christian August Crusius, whom Frederick II declared his enemy and banned from Prussian universities (Zammito 2002: 272). Under Russian occupation, these right-wing­ers came into vogue again. Bolotov felt that their moralistic, scrip- turalist philosophy helped him to discipline his mind, to live a moral life, and to resist the seduction of gallant balls and commercial sex that were booming under Russian rule (Bolotov 1986: 347). One can understand that he responded better to this instruction than to those exercises in natural history that were Kant's official interest in the time. When Kant called Weymann "a Cyclops" (1992: lvi) and declined to participate in a public debate with him, he probably knew about Weymann's connections in the Russian administration. The long-standing conflict between Kant and Weymann was re-opened by their publications on optimism, a crucial issue in the occupied city. "Why, I ask in all humility, did it please Thee, Eternal Being, to prefer the inferior to the superior?" asked Kant in an essay written in 1759. In response, he reverted not just to Leibniz but much further back, to the Stoics: "To all creatures, who do not make themselves unwor­thy of that name, I cry, 'Happy are we - we exist. And God is well pleased with us' " (Kant 1992: 71, 76). This is indeed optimistic, the source of which is not the wisdom of God but a solidarity with all existing creatures, such as animals or slaves. As for Weymann, Kant was right in being optimistic: the owner of the Kalmyk fur coat was expelled from the university 15 years later (Kuehn 2001: 215).

Kant also had important friends among the pro-Russian wing of the Konigsberg elite. Every biography of Kant describes Countess Caroline von Keyserlingk, a good friend of Kant's; over several decades, he taught her children, frequented her dinners, and called her his "ideal of a woman." However, their views on Russia, and probably on the Russian occupation, were diametrically opposed. It was 30 years later that their mutual friend recorded a dinner conver­sation from Keyserlingk's manor, which showed that Russia was still on their minds:

There was a political discourse in which the officers were very active. Kant, as did I, declared that the Russians were our main enemies. . . . The Countess [was] of a different opinion. . . . "If my husband was still alive, he would certainly have made clear to the king by means of a concrete deduction that his best ally is Russia." . . . I still did not believe that they did not have any interest in Eastern Prussia. . . . The Countess did not change her mind. (Kuehn 2001: 337-8)

Bolotov's memoir leaves no doubt that in 1759-60, von Keyserlingk was a mistress of the Russian governor of Prussia, Baron Nikolai von Korf, and that their liaison was public knowledge in the city (Bolotov 1986: 289). Von Korf was a Baltic-German aristocrat who spoke but did not write in Russian. He was close to the Empress; in Konigsberg, he was so important that Bolotov called him Vice-Roy. After his service in Konigsberg, von Korf was appointed chief of the St. Petersburg and, later, of all Russian police. Once again, the experi­ence in external colonization was deemed interchangeable with the success in internal policing. A rich and flamboyant bachelor, von Korf used every occasion to throw balls or masquerades to honor the Countess von Keyserlingk. Luminaries attended these dazzling events, including Grigorii Orlov, a hero of the Russian-Prussian war who would soon become a powerful favorite of Catherine the Great. It is tantalizing to imagine a conversation between Kant and Orlov, whom one Englishman described as "colossal in stature but totally unim­proved by reading" (Wolff 1994: 234). Kant was then in his "gallant phase," worldly, fashionably dressed, and in demand, if not at balls then at dinner parties. In his writings and lectures from this and slightly later periods, there are signs of his discontent with philosophy and intellectual life, a midlife crisis of a sort (Zammito 2002). Historian Anthony La Vopa discerns "an element of self-caricature, and indeed of self-hatred" in Kant's lectures during the occupation and his writings that followed the withdrawal of Russian troops (La Vopa 2005: 17). Among the explanations for this important though temporary crisis, one comes from the postcolonial tradition. Under a colonial regime, the local intellectuals often registered similar feel­ings of internal splitting, doubling, and self-hatred. Much of twenti­eth-century existential thought came out of these situations, in Algeria and elsewhere. Reinstating Kant in occupied Konigsberg helps us understand his relation to this tradition.

Apart from his teaching at the university, Kant also taught geog­raphy, applied mathematics, and pyrotechnics to the German-speaking Russian officers, people like Orlov or Bolotov (Gulyga 1997: 32). Presumably, he took money for this service. After the Russians left the city, Kant continued to give similar lessons to Prussian officers. Indeed, during those early years Kant was developing a kind of schol­arship that he could teach equally well to the Prussians and the Russians. His published research during the years of occupation was very scant. During the almost five years of Russian rule, he published a few essays that all focused on a rather special theme, earthquakes. Geographically, earthquakes were very distant from the experience of Konigsberg; metaphorically, these inexplicable, senseless disasters were close to Kant's world. Voltaire, who spent part of the war in Berlin, combined the same crucial themes - the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the Seven Years War, and theodicy - in Candide (1759).

Whether the reason was anxiety or trauma, the fact is that the occu­pation created a writing block in Kant. Immediately after the abrupt end of the occupation, in 1762-3, Kant's publications burst forth. "It is striking that Kant should have published so much in so short a time, in light of rather spare publications of the preceding six years," wrote John Zammito (2002: 61). It is no less striking that Zammito and other scholars have failed to attribute this dynamic to the most obvious reason, the Russian occupation and its end. Under Russian rule, Kant was a subaltern and he did not speak. To be more precise, he did not speak publicly about anything but earthquakes.

Bolotov

From Isaiah Berlin to John Zammito, research on Kant is of very high quality. However, these scholars invariably fail to detect the formative impact of Russian rule in Konigsberg on their hero, and neglect an important primary source: the memoir of Andrei Bolotov, which bore almost singular witness to the events. Many biographers of Kant mention Bolotov, though he has not been translated; they know about Bolotov from the only English-language biography of Kant written by a Russian author (Gulyga 1987). A major Soviet philosopher, Arsenii Gulyga, presented the Russian occupation of Konigsberg with a light touch, as an innocent affair with negligible results. Writing about Bolotov, he chose the episodes that showed his power over Kant and not his tortured relations with the Prussians.

Apart from his voluminous writings, which have remained largely unpublished (see Newlin 2001: 4), Bolotov was a typical figure of the Enlightenment: a modest officer, a dilettante naturalist, and a success­ful administrator who later in his life managed many thousands of the crown peasants near Moscow. His father, also an officer, com­manded Russian regiments that were stationed in the occupied Baltic countries. There, Bolotov learned his German, which in Konigsberg sounded native. Mediating between Russians and Germans, collect­ing philosophical books, and drawing aquarelles, Bolotov was eager to become a good European, a feat that few Russian authors pre­sented to their readers. He was in despair when his superior ordered him to return to Russia. Deeply influenced by his tenure in Konigsberg, he imposed some of his new skills and ideas on the peasants that he owned or managed. He created Prussian-style ponds and gardens in central Russia and was one of the first to introduce potatoes as an agricultural product there. Writing about his time in Konigsberg decades after it ended, he recognized the Germans' advantage over Russians in fashions, haircuts, cuisine, bookstores, schools, and much more. These feelings did not prevent him from being a loyal officer abroad and an ordinary master of his serfs at home. Filling many pages with exalted words about the Prussians, about the Russians he wrote with the impersonal brutality of an aristocrat: "the stupidity and the extreme unreasonableness of our mean folk was all-too- well-known to us" (1986: 604). Experimenting on his peasants, he subjected 1,500 of them to electric treatment, the results of which are unrecorded.

Giving us the perspective of a colonizing power, Bolotov's memoirs differ from the Prussian evidence that reveal the hidden transcripts of the colonized (Scott 1990). A major event of the occupation was a fire panic during a service in the Schlosskirche, which was memo­rable because it was mysterious; there was panic but there was no fire. Months earlier, the preacher Daniel Heinrich Arnoldt, who was also a professor of theology, gave a sermon there that the Russians perceived as slandering Empress Elizabeth. He quoted from Micah

Figure 15: Andrei Bolotov's self-portrait. The caption reads, "Precise depiction of the room and place where this book was written in 1789-90."

Source: Zhizn' i prikliucheniia Bolotova, opisannye samim im dlia svoikh potomkov. vol. 2, Moscow-Leningrad 1931

7:8 about the inner light: "Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy: when I fall, I shall arise; when I sit in darkness, the Lord shall be a light unto me." Bolotov remembered though that this pastor spelled out some "indecencies about our Empress." Arnoldt was arrested and spent six months under investigation; Bolotov remembered that he "suffered very greatly" in jail. In order to avoid Siberia, Arnoldt promised to retract. But when he started the assigned sermon, a group of students yelled "Fire!" and created panic, so that he was spared his apology. We know this from Prussian sources (Kuehn 2001: 113; Kuehn and Klemme, n.d.). Bolotov also described a church panic, with "many" citizens wounded or mutilated and one killed when she jumped out of the Gothic windows. Depicting both events contigu­ously - the arrest of the "most beloved" pastor because of his sermon and the fire panic in his church - Bolotov saw them as unrelated. He explained the panic as a result of the little heaters that ladies of Konigsberg used to bring to the service. In his rendering of the episode, he was much concerned about the gunpowder magazines that were located nearby, a detail that led to panic on the Russian side as well (Bolotov 1931: 1/518). "Seeing like the state" meant objectifying the event so that its physical course was depicted cor­rectly, while its meaning and context were ignored. In contrast, the perspective of the colonized emphasized agency and the hidden inten­tion of those involved.

Despite Bolotov's German, he soon learned that the natives did not accept him as their peer. In the governor's office he worked together with the Prussians and felt alien:

I could not even think about engaging these Germans in conversation. Not only these colleagues but, in general, all the best dwellers of Konigsberg felt some kind of disgust towards all of us Russians. . . . Though I was courteous with them in all possible ways so that I would become somehow closer to them, all my efforts were in vain. They were as polite as I was, and that was all that I got. (Bolotov 1986: 221)

Hurt by this attitude and ever interested in the Germans, Bolotov mused upon their rejection of him more than once. With Kantian clarity, he distinguished between his own stereotype of the Germans and their specific response to the Russian occupants:

My surprise disappeared when I learned to know the Prussians and the Konigsbergians better. I did not ascribe their responses to their unsociabil- ity but discerned their general indisposition towards Russians, for whom they expressed respect but, internally, deemed to be their enemies. (Bolotov 1986: 221)

Bolotov spent every Sunday in Prussian cafes and beer gardens, which he loved for their "order, quietness, and decency." Shy and defensive when with his Russian peers, he was never bored in Prussian company. Everything there was "polite," "courteous," and even "timid"; these were all the features of character that Bolotov pre­sented to his readers as his own. He also realized that these cafes and beer gardens, all entirely new to him, worked as the centers of local community life and popular information; some of his observations resemble the idea of the public sphere, which historians articulated, with reference to the same German cafes, some 200 years later.

The Prussians were right to be wary. Desperately wishing to become one of them, Bolotov was forever concerned about Russian interests. He worked hard and, gradually, his cultural skills improved. He was a good spy.

At first, the Prussian gentlemen shunned and avoided me as a Russian officer, but as soon as I talked to them in German with all tenderness, they treated me as a natural German and became totally tender. They eagerly brought me into their company and entered into various specu­lations with me, even political conversations sometimes. And as I eagerly allowed them to be deceived and to think that I was a German, and sometimes purposefully encouraged them in this error, so it hap­pened not rarely that I learned much of what one could not find out and learn otherwise, particularly in those matters that concerned the current military events. They were all very well informed in those matters, which greatly surprised me; . . . often I learned things from them two or three weeks before the newspapers wrote about them. (Bolotov 1931: 1/462)

Once, the governor asked Bolotov to arrest a Prussian aristocrat who had been denounced by his servant because of his anti-Russian sentiment. Armed with his knowledge of German and a team of Cossacks, Bolotov accomplished the mission. The count had to go to a trial in St. Petersburg together with his denouncer (Bolotov 1986: 370). At the same time, Bolotov frequented a bookstore in Konigsberg, maybe the same one in which Herder started to work a little later. Bolotov loved German books and believed that they improved his character:

By reading novels, I formed an idea about the customs and mores of various peoples and about everything that they have there, good and bad. . . . I developed an understanding of the life of different classes, from the masters of the earth to the very lowest. . . . I started to look at all events in the world through different, nobler eyes. (1986: 280)

Bolotov believed that personal aggression was a character flaw. He did not like to see it manifested either in himself or in others; his boss, Governor von Korf, was particularly aggressive and Bolotov detested his explosions. After reading novels, Bolotov became more reserved and felt he had mastered himself. Now, he could control his response even when a servant stole his money. With pride, he attrib­uted this civilizing process to his reading of German novels and philosophy: "I tried to observe those very rules that were prescribed in my books and I should say that I succeeded in refashioning myself during that one summer so much that I ceased to look like myself and many were truly surprised about that" (1986: 304).

This refashioning under the influence of the culture that Bolotov was supposed to control is still surprising. It was an essential fact of his life; having acknowledged it during that summer in Prussia, Bolotov did not fail to mention it many decades later back on his Russian estate, when he wrote his memoirs. While exercising political power over the Prussians, he found himself to be deeply dependent on them. Domination was his; hegemony was theirs. Both sides were out of balance.

Camera Obscura and Fireworks

In an occupied Prussian village, Bolotov saw an optical instrument that was essentially a box with a little hole. The light reflected on the internal side of the box and produced a picture, which was upside down. This instrument was also called a perspective box or, more poetically, camera obscura. Bolotov was enchanted:

I just loved this perspective box and could not stop thinking about it and I would give I do not know what for such a box. . . . Prisms and other optical instruments excited me enormously, but my fascination with the camera obscura was such that I cannot describe it. (1986: 208)

He made a camera obscura for himself; it was portable, so that he could take it with him wherever he went with his regiment. It allowed to him to project "natural pictures" onto the canvas and then to paint them. He used this device for looking at Konigsberg. He also could project pictures into the box and show them to his friends, Russian officers, who came in large groups to enjoy the new amusement. These pictures "represented the best street views of Venice and other noblest European cities" (Bolotov 1986: 212). With the help of this magic lantern, Bolotov took his Europe back to Russia. Decades later, when he was writing his memoir at his estate, his camera was still with him, as "a kind of monument for a time bygone." Buying a camera, making another one, improving them, showing them to his friends - these stories mark the happiest pages of Bolotov's memoir.

Neither his promotion nor his wedding nor, to be sure, going home made him as happy. It was his pleasure and his enlightenment, the camera that showed Europe upside down.

Discovered by Johannes Kepler in the early seventeenth century, the camera obscura was a common reference for Enlightenment thinkers. Hume often compared cognition to the dark room, partially and suddenly illuminated; to Locke, the camera obscura seemed to be the best metaphor for the mind (Abrams 1953: 57). The Pietist idea of the inner light, which brings truth into the soul without further mediation, matched the simple design of these obscure cameras. Within them, the Enlightenment became private, even idio­syncratic. At the same time that he was reinventing the camera obscura, Bolotov had to master the Cameralism system of govern­ance. He was commissioned to work as a translator in the office, Kammer, that the Russian governor inherited from the Prussian administration and used for collecting taxes and fees from the prov­ince. Remarkably, Bolotov used one and the same non-Russian word, kamera or kamora, for both operations that he learned in Konigsberg: the optical device and the administrative system. Although he did not comment on the analogy or contrast between the two cameras, his description of the physical space where he was working suggest it strongly:

I had to sit alone and entirely solitary in a huge and dark camera, that was illuminated only by two smoky windows, with metal grids, and to sit not near the windows but at a distance from them, - sit like a bird in a cage, and spend the nesting time of spring there. (1931: 1/370)

Like many eighteenth-century Russians, Bolotov was a great fan of fireworks. In 1759, the Russian governor of Konigsberg, with the help of his Italian assistant, created an elaborate fireworks perform­ance on the bank of the Pregel River to celebrate the Russian conquest of the city. Bolotov had never seen such a thing. Nor had the Prussians, who came in "countless numbers" and experienced "very great pleas­ure." Even when observing their Orthodox rituals, Russians in Konigsberg fired canons, which "all the dwellers watched with par­ticular pleasure" (Bolotov 1931: 5/48). In 1763, Bolotov was present at the grand fireworks on the Neva in St. Petersburg, when Peter III was celebrating Russia's reconciliation with Prussia. Again, all the banks of the spacious river were crowded, and the fireworks were "blinding" (1986: 299; 1931: 2/149). Long before the era of televi­sion, fireworks were the closest analogues to the state-sponsored visual propaganda. Having his camera obscura for private pleasure, the dark Kammer for public service, and fireworks for mass com­munication, Bolotov entered the world of modernity.

Herder

Kant's early student, Johann Gottfried von Herder, was the first to use the term "nationalism" and to explore its peaceful, humanist aspects (Berlin 1996, 2000). A native of a Prussian village that was occupied by the Russians, Herder received unusual help from their surgeon, who operated on his eye and then financed his education in Konigsberg. This Russian surgeon wanted him to study medicine, but in August 1762, with the announcement of Russia's withdrawal from Konigsberg, Herder started his studies with Kant. One of his first pieces of poetry was his ode to Peter III, who brought the occupation to an end (Ergang 1966: 60-3). In the treatise that Herder wrote in Riga for Catherine II in 1764, "Do we still have the public and Fatherland of Yore?" he glorified the German spirit but ended with an ode to the Russian Empress, who was also German after all:

Yes, fatherland, you, mother, to whom the wise

Will sacrifice the spirit's firstborn fruit . . .

Yours is this house in Catherine's shadow . . .

Here Russia's blessing, and there the sun's embrace. (Herder 1992: 64)

As Isaiah Berlin stated clearly, Herder's form of nationalism "remained unaltered" during his active life, which stretched from the Seven Years War to the Napoleonic wars (Berlin 2000: 180). However, Berlin, a great scholar of Russian thought and a native of Riga, did not focus on Herder's experience under Russian occupation, which was clearly important for his nationalism. It was there that Herder discovered the value of community and its autonomy from the state. For him, philosophy became a genre of public discourse, a way for people to understand themselves, like poetry or politics. There had to be as many philosophies as there were peoples. But when nations were at war or one people oppressed another, there could be no common understanding between them.

While distancing himself from Kant, Herder nevertheless shared with his teacher the great theme of self-determination. Though schol­ars derive this theme from Kant's and Herder's common spiritual tradition, Pietism, their experience under Russian rule was also important. For those who believed in self-reliance and an inner light, it was difficult to live under foreign rule. Hidden transcripts evolved into philosophy. The basis of the state - Russian and Prussian alike - is conquest; all wars are civil wars; the state robs men of themselves: in these inspired formulas Herder articulated a vision that was cul­tural, not political (Berlin 2000; Swift 2005). Though empires had "feet of clay," he worshiped the first and foremost Russian Emperor, Peter the Great, "the man and the marvel of our century," and Catherine the Great who finally stopped the war (Herder 1992: 62). Russian rule in Konigsberg and Riga did not tolerate political opposi­tion but negotiated cultural dissidence. This decoupling of culture and politics explains why it did not instill in Herder a hatred of Russians. Later in life, he wrote sublime words about the beautiful fate of the Slavs in the world to come (Gesemann 1965).[7] More importantly, he called for the exploration of Slavic folklore, "the archive of the people." Herder's ideal of the right life was about people living in communities that are united by culture and organ­izing their own affairs independently of the state. One could speculate that Herder based this idea on his observations of Slavic village life, in Prussia or in Livonia. He was very popular among the Romantic, early nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals, some of whom held surprisingly high positions in the imperial administration (Maiofis 2008). Focused on the Slavs, Herder's idea of anthropology competed with the Kantian, more scientific, and more orientalist ethnology that Schlozer and his colleagues developed at Gottingen (Knight 1998: 120). Later, these two projects collided with spectacular results. Herder's distant follower, Lucian Malinowski, a professor of Slavic who studied the folklore of northern Poland, was the father of Bronislaw Malinowski, a great anthropologist who went to the Pacific with the ideas of East European romanticism (Gellner 1998: 130).

The explosion of intellectual life, poetry, and philosophy is a common feature of postcolonial moments. The circle of Kant and Herder in Konigsberg experienced it for the first time ever. Observing the dramatic, unaccountable events that were caused by human will but which changed their lives like earthquakes, local intellectuals came to a new and revolutionary understanding of rationality, auton­omy, and history. Two figures of their circle add to my argument,

Hamann and Abbt. Both were important for the young Herder while he was distancing himself from Kant (Zammito 2002: 164) and both were seriously involved in the Prussian-Russian conflict. Johann Georg Hamann, a philosopher from Konigsberg, lived in Riga, under Russian rule, and worked for the major merchants of the area, the brothers Berens. Riga was the center of wartime efforts; the Russian headquarters were stationed there. Trading hemp and timber, the Berens had every reason to be concerned about the turn of European politics that put Russia and England at war. One of the brothers, Reinhold, left a memoir in which he mentions Hamann and Kant as friends of the family. After the Seven Years War ended, Reinhold Berens served in Russia as a military doctor, took part in the suppres­sion of the Pugachev rebellion, and traveled as far as the Altai Mountains; he was so Russified that in his memoir he called his venerable schoolteacher Nestor (Berens 1812: 10).

In 1756, the Berens brothers sent Hamann to London with a "political as well as commercial" mission (Berlin 2000: 262; Betz 2008: 30). This secret mission started and finished with Hamann's visit to the Russian Ambassador in London, Aleksandr Golitsyn. Hamann handed over a proposal from the Berens brothers, which the Ambassador rejected outright. Later, during Catherine's coup, Golitsyn acted like a turnspit, so counting on his support was prob­ably not wise. Isaiah Berlin suggested that the Berens brothers con­templated a secession of German Baltic lands from the Russian Empire; if so, it is difficult to explain why they would send their messenger to the Russian Ambassador in London. It is equally pos­sible that they were struggling to preserve the Anglo-Russian alliance, which was profitable for their commerce. Whatever the message was, Hamann's failure to persuade the Ambassador changed his life. Somehow it led to his Christian reawakening, which triggered his new career as a bitter critic of the Enlightenment. From London, he returned to Konigsberg, where he taught English to Herder and com­peted with Kant for influence over young minds.

The German public sphere was emerging during the Seven Years War; since Herder, a poem by Thomas Abbt, On Death for the Fatherland (1761), has been credited as a reflection on this process (La Vopa 1995; Redekop 1997). This poem responded to the Prussian defeat at the major battle of Kunersdorf, near Frankfurt (Oder), by calling the Germans to heroic resistance against the invaders. In 1760, Abbt became a professor of philosophy at Frankfurt during the Russian occupation of the city. After the war ended, in 1765, he left his professorship for a post at the court of Count Wilhelm von

Schaumburg-Lippe, one of the most successful Prussian commanders of the Seven Years War. Abbt contributed to the debate on theodicy, or the nature of evil:

He formulated a grim parable for the human condition in terms of an army finding itself in hostile territory with no sense of what it has been sent to accomplish, so that each soldier had to make his separate peace with the situation. (Zammito 2002: 169)

Having recovered this wonderful tale from an old journal, Zammito failed to notice that for Abbt, the author of On Death for the Fatherland, this hapless army was the Russian army in Prussia and the pathetic soldier was someone like Bolotov.

Conjectural History

A century and half later, in August 1914, Russian troops were approaching Konigsberg again. "The Cossacks are coming," was the cry in the city. Surrounded by a panicky crowd, the very young Hannah Arendt fled Konigsberg with her mother. But in Berlin, Hannah suffered from homesickness, so they returned to the city 10 weeks later, after German troops had defeated Russian forces at the battle of Tannenberg. Hannah developed a recurrent ailment, a fever that occurred every time she had to leave Konigsberg (Young-Bruehl 1982: 23). One can only speculate that this early experience of unset- tledness had an effect on her later ideas; Ernest Gellner was right in seeing this situation as a philosophical parable (1987: 76). Kant aspired to worldly, universal knowledge without leaving his city, though this was the city that changed hands between the Prussians and the Russians. Arendt traversed the world haunted by stateless- ness, the banality of evil, and the German-Russian symmetry in totalitarianism. Though we do not know what would have happened to these philosophers in a different place, we can feel that their ideas, general as they are, were anchored in the history of Konigsberg. But the meaning of the Konigsberg parable went further than a dialectics of the particular and the universal. Built to colonize, but intermit­tently colonized, this failed imperial center proved to be a fertile ground for critical thinking about modernity.

After the Russian retreat from Konigsberg, Kant recovered from his subaltern silence. Among his famous Critiques, he wrote a project of perpetual peace (1795), a utopian construction of the future federation of states, close and distant, which would be based on the prohibition against any state appropriating another state. This forward-looking idea had become popular in early-nineteenth- century Russia. In 1813, Sergei Uvarov, the future Minister of the Enlightenment, rewrote Kant's utopia as a project for the post-Napo­leonic arrangement of Europe that would be led by the Russian Empire (Maiofis 2008: 74). Despite Uvarov's clout, his treatise did not gain much success in the Russian court or among international allies. Indeed, Kant stated clearly that the future federation would become possible only when every state became a republic. A European peace was realistic if it was based not on a utopian federation but on the balance of power, a British principle that Russian rulers mostly disliked.

With the advent of modernity, power became dependent not only on the size and resources of the state, but also on the knowledge and creativity of the people. In 1786, Kant published an essay, "Conjectural Beginnings of Human History," which provided a reading of Genesis but which actually outlined Kant's thinking about war and his polem­ics with Herder. Closer to the end of the essay, Kant broke the code and acknowledged that he was talking not only about Adam, but also about the events of today: "For the danger of war is also still today the sole thing that moderates despotism, because wealth is required for a state to be a might, but without freedom, no enterprise that could produce wealth will take place" (Kant 2007c: 172).

This is a strong form of liberalism that connects sovereignty to military power and this power to freedom. Despots need industrious- ness among their peoples and, because of that, have to restrict their despotism. This is where despots find their nemesis, from among the best smiths of their best weapons, who have enjoyed an exclusive freedom and wish to share it with others. This speculation would work particularly well during the twentieth century's Cold War. Arendt, who was passionate about Soviet dissidents and lived long enough to learn the news about Andrei Sakharov, would probably agree with this scheme of things. In earlier centuries, the Prussian Frederick and the Russian Catherine were such despots, who sup­ported both gauntlets and sciences because they needed them for their survival. As usual, Kant tried to look at both sides from some kind of philosophical middle ground. In his biblical essay, the nomadic herdsmen, who were "sworn enemies of all landed property," attack peaceful farmers and urban dwellers. "There was continual war between them, or at least the continual threat of war, and both peoples were at least able to enjoy the priceless good of internal freedom." He continues the tale, twisting it unexpectedly: "With time the increasing luxury of the town dwellers, but chiefly the art of pleasing, in which the town women eclipsed the dingy maids of the deserts, must have been a mighty lure for those shepherds" (Kant 2007c: 172). Responding to this lure of the town women, the herds­men enter into relations with them, which brings "the end of all danger of war" and with it, "the end of all freedom."

Whether Kant was thinking about Countess von Keyserlingk, his "ideal of a woman," and Baron von Korf, or whether the romance between the wild invader and the local beauty was taken solely from the Bible, the lesson is astonishingly modern. The greatest troubles come from wars and from war efforts. But if there were no threat of war, says Kant, people would not enjoy even the freedom that they have, because this threat is the only factor that forces rulers to respect freedom. In the current state of culture, he says, perpetual peace cannot be attained. At this stage, war, not peace, facilitates progress. Grass is needful for the ox and freedom is needful for man, and therefore war, the state, and even evil, should exist.

Sects and Revolution

On April 16, 1861, in provincial Kazan, Professor Afanasii Shchapov proffered a theory that would inspire several generations of Russian socialists. An expert in religious history, Shchapov spoke at a requiem service to commemorate the lives of the peasants who were shot by troops at a village meeting, after they questioned the announced Emancipation. Shchapov called these victims "Christs" and presented their genealogy: "In Russia, for the past century and a half . . . among you, peasants - your own Christs have appeared" (Shchapov 1923: 409; Field 1976: 98). Shchapov ended his eulogy by saying that the peasants lost their lives for the cause of "the Soviet of the people." Combining the Christs with the Soviets, this rhetoric was pregnant with meaning. In his academic works as well as in his eulogy, Shchapov proposed the twofold argument, that participants in Russian peasant revolts were usually non-Orthodox in religious matters, and that members of Schismatic groups usually opposed state power. As a historian, Shchapov knew that some of these groups called their leaders Christs. As a prophet, he predicted the Soviet terminology of the Russian future.

Peasant Christs

The Emancipation of serfs was announced in newspapers for those who were literate, and in churches for those who were not. One of many responses was the peasant unrest in Bezdna, in the Kazan province. Surrounded by thousands of peasants, Anton Petrov inter­preted the tome containing the Emancipation legislation as if it were the Scriptures. He was literate, or so peasants believed, and he inter-

Figure 16: Afanasii Shchapov in 1872.

Source: Shchapov, Afanasii 1906. Sochineniia. St. Petersburg

preted the sign "%," which was scattered throughout the text, as the Holy Cross, and all the zeroes as symbols of liberation without redemption payments (Krylov 1892: 616). He so agitated the peas­ants that they refused to disperse even under fire from a military regiment, which killed or wounded several hundred people, including Petrov himself (Field 1976; Freeze 1988). The name of the place where it all happened added to its horror: Bezdna means "abyss."

Although historians are very familiar with these events, they have not elaborated on the explanation that was developed by Shchapov: that Anton Petrov and the peasant crowd were religious dissenters. In speaking about the periodic appearance of peasant "Christs," Shchapov identified Petrov as a leader of the Russian sect Khlysty. These sectarians believed in multiple reincarnations of Jesus Christ; in addition, they believed that Christ visited every worthy member of the community as he or she reached the apogee of religious ecstasy.

They called themselves "Khristy" (Christs), but hostile Orthodox observers distorted it into "Khlysty" (the Whips). The sect entered history with this negative designation, a fate that it shared with such groups as the Shakers and Quakers. The first observer to endow these sectarians with a romantic aura was the Prussian visitor August von Haxthausen. In the 1840s, he found among the Russian sects "the firm and stable organization of these rude masses . . . a remarkably powerful spirit of association, and unparalleled communal institu­tions" (Haxthausen 1856: 1/254). After describing sectarian mani­festations of mystical orgies, self-mutilation, and, most importantly, collective property, Haxthausen introduced his story of the bloody ritual performed by the Khlysty. In this narrative, singing, whirling, and flagellating sectarians cut off the breast of a naked virgin. After her breast had been collectively eaten, the community of sectarians engaged in group intercourse. The young woman with one breast was called Mother of God and became a leader of the community. Her spiritual partner was called Christ. Haxthausen's rhetoric, an accom­plishment of romantic orientalism, contained the potential for ambiv­alent, and even positive, readings. To eat a human breast is certainly barbaric. Still, the ritual empowered a woman to lead her community. As Haxthausen wrote, some French intellectuals "went to Egypt to discover the free woman; had they gone to Russia they would perhaps have returned better satisfied" (Haxthausen 1856: 1/44). The hidden truth of the Russian commune was not only economic and legal, but also spiritual and sexual.

Russian ethnographers trustfully retold the startling story of the eaten breast (Kelsiev 1867; Melnikov-Pechersky 1869). This racy ritual of the Khlysty became a common plotline for many stories whose ambition was to uncover the hidden life of the Russian prov­inces. Count Vladimir Sollogub, a rich socialite and writer, served in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and inspected the Tver province in 1836. One of his tasks was to investigate the crimes of the local sectarians. In his memoir, he retold the picturesque, Gothic story of the Khlysty ritual service that he himself allegedly saw through a peephole. A Kalmyk guardsman, whose tongue had been cut out by the sectarians, betrayed them and brought Sollogub into the under­ground temple. Surrounded by a mysterious crowd, an elder led into the dark room "an entirely naked beauty," 16 years of age and "astonishingly handsome." After some "Cabbalistic gestures," the elder and everyone else beat her with a whip until she was nearly dead; at this moment though, the gendarmes arrived and arrested everyone present. Sollogub, who had never had a legal education or practice, led the investigation (1998: 133). Written much later, this memoir was most probably inspired by Haxthausen or some of his Russian readers; there is no doubt that this was a story that men liked to share. One can find similarly pleasant scenes, also from the life of Russian sects, in the major texts of writers as different as Leopold Sacher-Masoch and Maksim Gorky (Etkind 1998). For the radical readers of Haxthausen, the sectarian ritual complemented his discov­ery of the Russian commune with the striking image of its collective body, identified with God in ecstatic unity.

Cannibalism, flagellation, and group sex among the Khlysty were never confirmed. In actual fact, they practiced a ritual whirling dance that resembled the dances of American Shakers. In ecstasy, they spoke in tongues, made prophecies, and healed the sick. Largely forgotten today, the Khlysty deserve a place among other phenomena of the Eurasian religious tradition (Siniavsky 1991; Etkind 1998; Clay 2001; Zhuk 2004). But as political agents, they were neutral, non­violent, or just passive. There were only two cases of mass unrest attributed to the Khlysty and related sects. The first of these took place in 1861 when, according to Shchapov, "democratic, purported Christs" organized the rebellion in Bezdna. The second, in 1901, took place in the village of Pavlovki in Kharkov province, when a crowd vandalized the local church and some experts attributed the event to the Khlysty (Gamfield 1990). Though the statistics were notoriously unreliable, by the beginning of the twentieth century estimations of the number of Khlysty were still as high as 100,000 (Klibanov 1982). Many communities split from the Khlysty or simply resembled them; they preferred to call themselves by other, usually exotic names. Many of these movements shared broadly millennial beliefs, which were common to the natives of other colonized regions of the world (Curtin 2000). By identifying with the early Christians in their strug­gle against the Romans, they articulated their feelings toward modern empires. Most of these "sectarians," as they were officially called in Russia, were illiterate, but there were educated, including self-edu­cated, people among them. To characterize their religious movements as "cargo cults" is entirely wrong. The nineteenth-century history of these communities feature permanent interactions between high and low cultures, which culminated in the synthesis that was achieved by Lev Tolstoy, an admirer and correspondent of several sectarian com­munities, and his fellow Tolstovians who claimed leadership in the world of sects.

The path-breaking historian of Russian radicalism, Franco Venturi, claimed that those activists who famously "went to the People" in the 1870s were guided, "above all," by the ethnographers (1982: 270). Being different from urbane society and unknown to it, the people (as Russian peasants were called) were intelligible only through the lens of the exoticizing "science" of ethnography. An amalgam of socialist activism and lay ethnography, the populist movement saw the peasantry as silent, dispossessed, obscure, exotic, virtuous - in short, different. Whatever the people did or thought was known to the intelligentsia through authors who were themselves part of that same intelligentsia (Frierson 1993; Offord 2010). The colonial past, argued Gayatri Spivak, is incommunicable. The subaltern does not speak; when he or she speaks to us, her speech is not authentic, and her language is already contaminated by western meanings. To put it in postcolonial terms, the people were the subaltern. The emerging Russian science of ethnography confronted the same paradox in the nineteenth century that the scholars of subalternity in India noted in the twentieth century (Prakash 1994; Spivak 1994). Dominant dis­courses presented the superstitious peasant as a figure beyond the realm of reason, outside the authorized categories of rationality and progress. However, these discourses claimed that this subaltern figure was knowable and actually known; he was believed to be reachable and transparent for the specialized methods of scholarship. This paradox proved to be fruitful for several fields of Russian scholarship, from ethnography to history to literary studies. Its internationally acclaimed achievements developed as offspring of the studies of sec­tarian and peasant folk life. Vladimir Propp's structuralist analysis of folk tales has become famous. It is less known that Viktor Shklovsky's formalist theory of estrangement started with his analysis of the songs of the Khlysty (Etkind 1998: 153).

The Politicization of the Schism

The requiem in Kazan was arguably the first public commemoration of victims of the Russian monarchy. Church authorities wanted to incarcerate Shchapov in a monastery, but Alexander II considered him a layperson and instead ordered his arrest. In February 1862, on the first anniversary of the emancipation of the serfs, the Tsar par­doned Shchapov. In a sensational turn of events, the disgraced profes­sor was then appointed to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. His new position was in the "Committee for Schismatics, Skoptsy and other Especially Dangerous Sects," which was responsible for dealing with religious dissidents by the means of police. Shchapov held this posi­tion for a few months until, in another sensational development, the Minister of Internal Affairs dismissed him. The Minister of Enlightenment proposed sending him to eastern Siberia for ethno­graphic studies, but instead Alexander II sent him into exile there under police surveillance.

Shchapov's short governmental service radicalized his thought. In a series of essays published in populist journals, he reappraised the whole variety of Russian sectarian experience, providing it with a new combination of nationalistic and utopian meanings. Describing an exceptionally rich range of cases, Shchapov saw a common element in all of them: anti-governmental protest. He blurred the traditional distinction between "Old-Believers" and "sectarians," which favored Old-Believers as the lesser evil, though nobody could clearly explicate their difference. He disregarded those Schismatics, and there were many, who were solely concerned with eternal salvation and who turned their backs upon the political world. To be sure, there was a great variety of beliefs and modes of behavior among different creeds of non-Orthodox Russians.[8] Still, according to the formulations of Shchapov, all Russian sectarians and Old-Believers disguised social protest under religious masks, uniting themselves into the "demo­cratic party of the Schismatics" (1906: 1/451-505). Shchapov's col­lection of Russian sects followed along with the better-known achievements of Russian ethnography, such as Vladimir Dal's diction­ary of the Russian language, the surveys of peasant rites and mores organized by Nikolai Nadezhdin, the collection of historical legends by Pavel Rybnikov, and the collection of fairytales by Alexander Afanasiev. Ethnography, "the science of the people," became an instrument of national self-fashioning (Slezkine 1994; Gellner 1998). Alluding to the pure virtues and mystical practices of the people, ethnography demonstrated their spectacular difference from the life of cynical, commercialized, urban civilization.

External and internal factors cooperated in the nineteenth-century discovery of Russian sects. They were constructed as uniquely Russian, whereas the terms and genres of this discursive formation were pre­dominantly European. Frequent dialogue with western travelers, hungry for social wonders and oriental exotica, played a defining role in the burgeoning discourse about Russian sects. For many decades, European authors like August von Haxthausen, Alexander Dumas- pere, William H. Dixon, Leopold Sacher-Masoch, and Rene Fulop- Miller referred to Russian sects while projecting onto Russia their favorite ideas, such as deep spirituality, free eroticism, love of suffer­ing, and collective property. Russian intellectuals knew too well that these curiosities were absent in their own circles. In order to give an affirmative response to the western projections, they produced imagi­nary constructions of their own. The sectarians were real but inac­cessible to the profane gaze, which provided experts with an excellent chance to manipulate the political vision of their readers.

In the rich history of Russian ethnography of sectarian movements, we observe the three stages that Miroslav Hroch (1985) described in his classical study of East European nationalisms. First, scholars produce and disseminate knowledge about minority groups. Second, activists seek to access and employ these groups for the project of the future nation, which would be radically different from the existing one. Third, a mass movement is formed, which shapes itself into a different form from the one projected by early enthusiasts. At the crucial second stage, lay ethnographers used two strategies to radical­ize their debate about Russian sects. They emphasized sectarian eccentricities by appropriating Orthodox missionaries' accusations against them, changing the tone of these narratives from the hostile to the romanticized and even the utopian. As an aspect of this modernizing effort, they used comparisons between Russian and American sects, such as Shakers, Mormons, and the Bible Communists (for details, see Etkind 2001b). Lay ethnographers also conflated dif­ferent religious groups, thereby producing mammoth numbers that encompassed total statistics rather than specific numbers for indi­vidual sects. In 1861, a proclamation estimated the number of "Russian sectarians who do not honor the Tsar" at nine million (Shelgunov and Mikhailov 1958: 96). In 1867, a political emigre, Nikolai Ogarev, wrote that "almost half of our population" are Schismatics (1952: 773). In 1924, Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich wrote in the newspaper Pravda that 35 million, "no less than one-third of the population of the country," are "sectarians and Old-Believers." What was decisive was the combination of the inflated statistics, which included all of these variegated groups, and the vivid descriptions of radical communities that were purposefully taken for typical portraits of all of them.

sects and revolution The Militant Pilgrims

At the same time that the Ministry of Internal Affairs was employing Shchapov for police purposes, the political emigre Vasilii Kelsiev was employing Shchapov's essays for subversive politics. An orientalist by training and a revolutionary by profession, Kelsiev described his reading experience in a mixture of romantic, oriental, and sectarian symbols, including the most salient one - the New Man:

I almost went berserk. My life literally split in two, and I became a new man. . . . It seemed to me while reading that I was entering a supernatu­ral, secret world, the world of Hoffman, Edgar Allan Poe or The Thousand and One Nights. Suddenly, in one night, there was revealed to me the Skoptsy (Castrates) with their mystic rites . . . ; the Khlysty with their strange beliefs; . . . the intrigues of the leaders of Old- Believers. . . . Sect followed sect, images passed before me one after the other, as in a magic lantern. (Kelsiev 1941: 285)

In the light of this lantern, Kelsiev directed his revolutionary activities from London to the sectarian communities on the southern Russian frontier. Through them, he hoped to organize the smuggling of arms via Odessa and the distribution of propaganda literature in the Volga region. In 1862, he illegally re-entered Russia with a Turkish pass­port, presenting himself as an academic researcher on the Russian Schism. Thirty-two individuals were tried in court for having had contact with this self-proclaimed ethnographer. Shchapov, subpoe­naed, denied meeting Kelsiev, but there was evidence of earlier cor­respondence, which resulted in Shchapov's exile to Siberia. In 1863, Kelsiev moved to Constantinople to make contact with the local Schismatics of Russian origin there, who served the Sultan and from time to time took part in military actions against Russia. The Turkish administration appointed Kelsiev "chief and protector of all Russians before the local authorities." Then, Kelsiev once more returned to Russia, surrendered to the police, wrote his "Confession" in prison, earned a pardon, and ended his days in quiet disgrace. The exciting saga of Kelsiev was fully covered in the literature of the time. Before his return to Russia, he served as a prototype of Rakhmetov in Chernyshevsky's novel What is to be Done? After his return, he served as a prototype of Shatov in Dostoevsky's The Possessed (Etkind 2001b: 83). In this novel, a conspiratorial group aims to spread among the people a subversive legend "that would surpass even that of the Skoptsy" (Castrates). The failure of his project leads its fic­tional participants to a murder and a suicide.

As for Shchapov, he never returned from Siberia, where he is cred­ited for promoting Siberian separatism. Echoing him, the famous anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, declared in 1862 that the Schism was a political protest against the Russian government and that the sects were a resource for the future revolution (Dragomanov 1896: 75). Looking to the Radical Reformation as a model for the Russian revo­lution, Bakunin said that socialism was the way peasants had led their lives from the beginning of time. He specifically referred to two eth­nographic discoveries, the land commune and the Schism, to which he added "bandits." Following Shchapov, Bakunin chose the Beguny (Runners) sect as his favorite idiom of revolution. A splinter group of the Khlysty, the Beguny rejected not only the family, but also the home and any connections whatsoever to the state. They forbade money, printed books, and the use of their own names. The sect was discovered in 1849 on the northern Volga by an expedition of the Ministry of Internal Affairs with Ivan Aksakov as the leading expert. Relying on his evidence, Shchapov claimed that in the sectarian "capital" Sopelki, on the Volga river, the Beguny annually summoned "Federal Land Councils," which gathered "representatives" who came on foot from all over Russia, from the Carpathians to Siberia. The intrepid Beguny and their periodic Soviets were supposed to resolve the irresolvable question of populism: integration between the local communes (1906: 1/505-80).

Reading Shchapov in their adolescence, his best readers put his lessons into practice as adults. In the summer of 1874, the populists fanned out across the villages of Russia. The "Going to the People" movement had begun, "the most genuinely original social movement of modern Russian history" (Billington 1966: 204). In Kiev, Ivan Fesenko gathered around him 15 students, each of whom had to choose a sect according to his taste and then live among them. The sectarians would proselytize the radicals and the radicals would pro­pagandize the sectarians. As a result, their ideas would draw closer to each other and the number of adherents would grow. Using Shchapov's essay of 1862 as a guidebook, most of Fesenko's followers went to the lower reaches of the Volga to locate the Beguny, but none succeeded in finding a single member of the sect. Another group went to the Molokane (the Milk-Drinkers), and several others chose to go to the Shtundisty (the Protestant-like sect influenced by German Mennonites). Fesenko himself went to a southern community of sectarians who whirled like the Khlysty. A participant in these events reported:

As a former seminarian . . . Fesenko spouted quotes and freely inter­preted texts. His listeners were amazed . . . his appearance strongly resembled that of a prophet. Towards the end of the session, Fesenko exalted these impressionable sectarians to such a degree that many of them were brought to a state of religious ecstasy. And then something totally improbable happened . . . the sectarians, having surrounded Fesenko in a tight circle, picked him up and started whirling about in ritual manner, joyously exclaiming, "He has come! He is here! He is with us!" (Deich 1923: 220)

Fesenko was ready to take on his new role, but the police would not allow him to be a village Christ for long. Vladimir Bonch- Bruevich, a future Bolshevik leader, claimed that he used the same method. According to his account, the ecstatic community of the Beguny thought that he was the Prophet Elijah, and the bespectacled Bonch-Bruevich, "as a representative of God, participated in their rituals which were accompanied by songs, hopping around, and what was almost an orgy" (Iordanskaia 1994: 208). Dmitrii Rogachev traveled along the Volga region, hiring himself out as a barge hauler. Reading the Psalms to illiterate sectarians, he was able to insert pro­paganda without their noticing it (Itenberg 1960: 48). In 1874, Katerina Breshko-Breshkovskaia, who was later nicknamed "the grandmother of the Russian Revolution," conducted propaganda work among the Shtundisty. Settling among the sectarians, she studied the Gospels for days, preparing herself for debates. After her first attempt, the leader of the community threatened her with the police, forcing her to flee (Breshkovskaia 1931: 51). More successful was Sofiia Subbotina, who resettled from Switzerland in 1873 to her estate in Kursk province to practice the healing arts and to politicize the local Skoptsy (Field 1987). The terrorist Mikhail Frolenko remem­bered that "in 1875, while we were spending time with the peaceful Shtundists, nobody even thought about taking up arms" (1932: 2/94). However, like other leaders of the movement, Frolenko became bitterly disillusioned with the sectarians and, as a result, turned to terror tactics. Ivan Kovalsky worked with a sectarian community in southern Russia, but all he succeeded in doing was, in his own words, "convince the elders not to fall down in ecstasy during prayer." Still, he presented his case as if the sects were a united movement and the author their leader:

The Kherson and Kiev regions will surrender to the Shtundisty, and in the Poltava and Ekaterinoslav regions the Shaloputy are sprouting like mushrooms, and Novorossiia . . . was long ago made into a gathering place of the Molokane and Dukhobory. . . . The city of Nikolaev . . . has become a kind of massive laboratory in which various sects remake and perfect themselves. (Kovalsky 1878)

In August 1878, Kovalsky was executed for armed resistance against the police. In 1881, two student radicals made a pilgrimage to a sect of Sutaevtsy, in the Tver province. Founded in 1874 by Vasilii Sutaev, who argued that holding property was sinful, this small community was adopted by Lev Tolstoy and, later, by the Tolstovian movement, as their spiritual model. Inspired by their fieldwork with the Sutaevtsy, the students founded the "Christian Brotherhood," whose aim was to integrate student activism and peasant sectarianism under a common socialist ideal. When they were arrested, they reported to the police that they learned about this communist sect from a literary journal (Volk 1966: 377). According to one of these inspiring publica­tions, a community of the southern Khlysty integrated a dozen vil­lages in an efficient arrangement, a task that peasant communes usually failed to accomplish. Allegedly, the religious enthusiasm of sectarians helped them create a hierarchical, state-like structure while avoiding authoritarianism (Uimovich-Ponomarev and Ponomarev 1886; Saiapin 1915).

The Russian Luther

The idea of proselytizing among sects was specifically included in the first 1876 program of the revolutionary organization "Land and Liberty." The program recognized "a mass of great and small move­ments, sects of a religious-revolutionary character, and sometimes, gangs of bandits, who express the active protest of the Russian people." Therefore, the program called for revolutionaries "to merge with already existing People's organizations that have a revolutionary character" (Arkhiv 1932: 56-7). Aleksandr Mikhailov, the most pow­erful figure in this movement, traveled to the Volga Schismatics. He recalled: "I had to literally become an Old Believer. Those who know Old Believers know what this means. For an educated man, that means to carry out ten thousand Chinese ceremonies" (1906: 163-5). Mikhailov's task among the peaceful, hard-working Spasovtsy (the Savior's people) was to find the connection to the mythical sects of Beguny, but he failed in this project. The young Georgii Plekhanov, the future leader of Russian Marxism, accompanied Mikhailov during this trip. Plekhanov (1925) recalled a public debate in a church between Mikhailov, who was performing as a Schismatic preacher, and two Orthodox priests. Mikhailov stammered but still argued with great force; that, at least, was Plekhanov's view. The subject of debate was the Apocalypse, a relevant theme for Mikhailov, who disguised his revolutionary project under a religious mask, but in this double masquerade also shaped a way to realize his religious craving. Coming back to St. Petersburg in 1878 and joining terrorist activities, Mikhailov continued to prepare himself "for his future role as the Schism's Reformer," as Plekhanov put it. In practice, that meant that Mikhailov and his fellow guerrillas visited the public library to study the literature on the Schism, which mainly followed in Shchapov's footsteps. But they also prepared a sophisticated plan for a terrorist assassination of the tsar.[9]

In March 1881, Mikhailov's group murdered Alexander II, though Mikhailov was arrested several months before his triumph. The assas­sination created a new situation for the movement. Populists returned from the countryside to the capitals, changing their roles from pro­pagandists to terrorists and their means from ethnographic tourism to armed guerilla warfare. Explosions of external aggression were accompanied by an epidemic of suicides (Paperno 1997). Marxist scholars have attributed this transition, from populism to terrorism, to the class-based disappointment of activists with the peasantry, thus paving the way to the later enchantment with the proletariat. Class analysis, however, has obscured more specific explications of the events (Hardy 1987). The populists' disillusionment with the sectar­ians provides a more precise explanation of the movement's crisis.

Neglected by historians, this explanation was known to the par­ticipants. Having fled from the Russian police to England, Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinskii explained that the "Going to the People" was a religious rather than political movement. He compared the populist propagandists to the early Christians, their collective journey to the Russian heartland to a "crusade," and their efforts to settle among peasants to "the colonies." When these "colonies" failed, the crusad­ers became terrorists. Two Jewish activists, Osip Aptekman and Lev Deich, began their political careers as propagandists among the Molokane (Haberer 1995: 102-5). Aptekman later illuminated the intellectual roots of the populist drama:

Many of us, without any impetus from the government, ran without a backward glance from the countryside: the countryside, obviously, was more offensive than the government itself. . . . Shchapov, and then Kelsiev and others, had carelessly let it be known beyond any doubt that the Schism was a hidden reserve force for the Revolution. . . . Many gatherings of young people came together and read verbose essays about Schismatics. (Aptekman 1924: 434-6)

Fascination with texts led to fascination with sects; disillusionment with sects led to violence. Among the most faithful, these acts repeated in cycles. In 1874, the peasants of Chernigov converted Nikolai Tchaikovsky, the organizer of an important group of student radicals in St. Petersburg, to the Khlysty (Lavrov 1974: 1/147). After his return to the capital, Tchaikovsky preached non-violence and tried to transform his group into a religious commune. His friends had already become terrorists, and so Tchaikovsky left for America to join the peaceful Shakers. After some years, he returned to Europe to take part in revolutionary activities. In 1907, he made another trip to the sectarian regions of the Volga and was arrested. In 1918, President Wilson consulted with Tchaikovsky during the Versailles negotiations; the Bolsheviks condemned Tchaikovsky to death in absentia. As his biography aptly demonstrates, Tchaikovsky did not really choose between revolutionary activism and sectarian mysti­cism, but rather synthesized these two options (Hecht 1947; Etkind 2001b). Though extraordinary, his itinerary was not unique. Viktor Danilov, a nobleman and terrorist from Ukraine, was exiled to Siberia from whence he fled to Europe, but he returned illegally to Russia to undertake numerous pilgrimages to the Khlysty, whom he described in a series of amateurish essays. He was again exiled to Yakutia, where he married a native and called himself an ethnographer. At the start of his fascinating career, Danilov was first arrested in the Caucasus among the Dukhobory (Spirit-Wrestlers) in 1874. At the end of his career, in 1911, the Russian Prime Minister Petr Stolypin consulted with Danilov on his expertise about the Khlysty (Etkind 1998: 641).

In 1898, in a provincial library near Tambov, Viktor Chernov read an old review of Shchapov's work (Subbotin 1867) and was so inspired that he revealed in the local community of Molokane a ready-made clandestine organization with a subversive program (Chernov 1922: 1/302). Having found his way to the people in the library, Chernov then established a new library among the Molokane. On its shelves, books by Shchapov stood next to those by western utopian writers such as Charles Fourier and Edward Bellamy. Working with the Molokane, Chernov found that these people, as well as many others, were ready for "the Russian Luther." He hoped to play this role himself. It was the Russian way of doing politics, Chernov believed, to converge the Revolution with "our native Reformation, which is far too belated" (Chernov 1922: 1/275). The young Chernov was a future celebrity, the founder of the Socialist-Revolutionary party and a leader of the February 1917 Revolution. In his tragic life, he presided over decades of the terrorist politics of the Socialist- Revolutionaries and led this party from victory to victory, until they lost to the even more radical Social Democrats, the future Communists.

Founded by Georgii Plekhanov after his return from a pilgrimage to the Spasovtsy on the Volga, the Social Democrats changed the perspective of the Russian revolutionary movement. The agnostic proletariat, rather than the religious peasantry, would be the bulwark of revolution. Two big issues were at stake, the people and the state. The early enthusiasts, Shchapov and Bakunin, believed in the secret wisdom of the common people, which would manifest itself if they were freed from interference from the state. The professional revolu­tionaries, Plekhanov and Lenin, found this unacceptable: it was pre­cisely the state, understood as the apparatus of violence, which they singled out as their tool. For them, that traditional hope of Russian socialists, the commune, was a feature and creation of Russia's "ori­ental society", an outdated institution that had to be overcome (Baron 1958).

The populists exaggerated their cultural distance from the peas­antry precisely in those instances when they wished to overcome that distance. Among the people, they imagined harems and cannibalism, compared their experience to Arabic tales, and spoke about Chinese ceremonies. Disappointed with popular sects or, rather, the historical account of these sects, they reverted to terrorism, which launched a vicious cycle of violence that led to the Revolution. Worshipping the heroic past of revolutionary terrorism, they repressed a part of its historical legacy that connected it to the Russian sects. Nevertheless, even the Social Democrats continued working with the sects. The young Leon Trotsky began his revolutionary career with propaganda among urban sectarians (Trotsky 1990: 1/130).

The Exemplary Farm

The emphasis on the religious underpinnings of the Russian revolu­tion has become popular in more recent literature (Etkind 1998, 2003; Manchester 1998, 2008; Rowley 1999; Halfin 2000; Malia 2006; see also fictional accounts: Sharov 2003; Meek 2005). Indeed, religion and revolution were allied in the minds of the two pre-rev- olutionary generations, but the specific mechanisms of their interac­tion were complex and sometimes deceitful. Revolutionary leaders proclaimed their atheism, and there is no reason to distrust them. Most of them were, indeed, secular intellectuals. But the revolutions they produced, or planned to produce, were not necessarily secular. An heir and revisionist of the populist tradition, Lenin suggested a combination of the "progressive vanguard" and the "backward peas­antry" as the route to Russian revolution. Leading peasantry to the civilization of the future was a radically new version of that internal colonization that Lenin perceptively found in Russian provinces (see Chapter 2). This project was dependent on the perception of the peasantry as a disguised, non-self-conscious world of religious dissent and political protest. The Orthodox clergy remained faithful to the monarchy, but the peasantry was religious in a different way. To capture the leadership over the selected groups of the dissenting peasantry and to exploit them for political purposes meant a chance for revolution in Russia. The deep hybridization between religion and politics manifested itself in varied, unstable versions.

Aware of the cultural gap that separated them from the peasants, radicals hoped to use religious symbols to communicate their political aims. Many of the populists were children of priests. Those who graduated from church schools and seminaries knew the Orthodox rhetoric, but were typically discontent with church practices. Others were noblemen with university degrees who pursued highly individu­alized versions of religious-political synthesis. Populists were fasci­nated with the social structures of sects, which they identified with the primordial socialism. They interpreted the sects' apocalyptic expectations as a promise of the coming revolution. Though the task of the young socialists was to turn themselves into the leaders of mystical communities and, then, to bring them to the goals that were entirely foreign for these communities, not all these propagandists were cynical manipulators, like Kurtz from Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The whole spectrum from the most pragmatic cynicism to the most naive enthusiasm was tested. In this spiritual domain, the enthusiasts were more successful than the manipulators.

Academic scholarship, political activism, and religious fervor were often indistinguishable for these intellectuals. While the academic aspects of their activism shaped public display, the religious ones remained in the private imagery, which left its traces mainly in per­sonal diaries or memoirs. Within the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries that was led by Chernov, the leading expert on the Schism was Aleksandr Prugavin, an ethnographer who, like many of his Russian colleagues, acquired his profession in political exile; he believed in the approaching union of sectarianism and socialism until the day he died in a Bolshevik prison (Prugavin 1881, 1904, 1917). Within the Party of Social Democrats that was led by Lenin, Vladimir Bonch- Bruevich provided the ethnographic expertise (Etkind 1996, 1998; Engelstein 1999). Leading the double life of a terrorist networker and a sectarian aficionado, he visited many sectarian communities, but

Figure 17: Lenin and Bonch-Bruevich, October 16, 1918. Moscow, Kremlin.

found his ideal in the emigre Dukhobory (Spirit-Strugglers) villages in Canada. Bonch-Bruevich's book about them is the ode to mystical socialism, perhaps the most mesmerizing portrait of "the people" ever written in Russian. Ironically, this people had already moved to Canada, while the author moved to the Kremlin (Bonch-Bruevich 1918).

The commandant of the Smolny headquarters of the Bolsheviks in 1917 and the chief-of-staff in the first Lenin government, in 1921 Bonch-Bruevich organized the exemplary sovkhoz (Soviet farm) near Moscow, on an estate that earlier belonged to Savva Morozov. He resettled there a community of the Khlysty from St. Petersburg, who called themselves the Chemreki, with their leader Pavel Legkobytov. Relying on their efficiency in dairy farming and trusting their honesty in accounting, Bonch-Bruevich hoped to establish an example of practical communism that other Russian communes and communities would follow. In 1922, together with a number of agricultural offi­cials, he signed the "Call to Sectarians and Old-Ritualists in Russia and Abroad." This document praised sectarians for their "millennial experience" with collective agriculture and invited them to emerge from their underground and to return from emigration. An analogue to Catherine's Manifesto of 1763 (see Chapter 7), this document promised the sectarian communities the land that was confiscated from the noble landowners, thereby presenting the sectarians as beneficiaries of the Revolution. Also like Catherine, the People's Comissariat of Agriculture established a governmental body to oversee the new resettlement, the "Committee for the Settlement of Sectarians and Old-Ritualists in State Farms, Free Lands, and the Former Estates." During the Civil War in 1919, the Lenin admin­istration gave sectarians an exemption from military service, a sign of their favored but passive status. As much as the Bolsheviks admired the non-acquisitive character of sectarian economies, they detested the non-violence that was preached and practiced by them (Etkind 1998).

Never fulfilled, promises of popular support led Bonch-Bruevich to the summit of very real power. From 1917 to 1920, hundreds of the top governmental orders were signed with two names, Lenin's and Bonch-Bruevich's. The long-standing friendship between the two shows that the fascination with sectarians remained a respected pre­occupation among revolutionary leaders. After Lenin's death, Bonch- Bruevich focused on creating the Lenin cult and, in this context, initiated a new discussion on the affinity between the sectarians and the Bolsheviks at the Thirteenth Party Congress in 1924. Outliving his academic subjects and political opponents, Bonch-Bruevich died in 1955, while serving as director of the academic Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism that was, meaningfully, located in a cathedral. In this museum, he himself was the most unique exhibit.

While the Russian revolutionaries were abandoning their belief in the political potential of sects, the Russian literati were developing their interest in the subject. The most important writers of the early twentieth century, such as Lev Tolstoy and Andrei Bely, depicted sectarians in their writings (Vroon 1994). Tolstoy favored the Dukhobory, but he was also interested in the Khlysty and he corre­sponded with the Skoptsy (Tolstoy 1908; Heier 1970; Fodor 1989). Sects and revolution were central subjects for Andrei Platonov in Chevengur, Boris Pil'niak in The Naked Year, Maksim Gorky in Klim Samgin, and Vsevolod Ivanov in his underappreciated Kremlin. Lev Trotsky had a point when he accused fellow-travelers of the Revolution of having a "half-Khlystovian perspective on events"; the true Bolsheviks shave themselves, added Trotsky (1991: 68). Mystical populism constituted an important part of the governing ideology of the years that preceded and followed the Revolution, and sectarian­ism was at the center of Russian public debate (Etkind 1998). But in the real politics of revolutionary Russia, there was nothing akin to the sectarian mobilization found in the English revolution of the seventeenth century, in antebellum America, or in nineteenth-century England (Nordhoff 1875; Hobsbawm 1959; Walzer 1965; Taves 1999).

The most important case of direct political action by members of Russian religious dissent in the early twentieth century was the finan­cial contributions made by some Moscow Old-Believer merchants to extremist parties, including the Bolsheviks. The most important, Savva Morozov (1862-1905), was a descendant of the radical com­munity of Old-Believers who taught about the imminent coming of the Anti-Christ. Reportedly because of his youthful fascination with fireworks, he studied chemistry at Cambridge. He later owned major textile enterprises and breweries near Moscow and in the Urals. A major philanthropist, he financed the Moscow Artistic Theater and was close to its actress, the wife of Maksim Gorky. Through Gorky, he also financed the underground Bolshevik newspaper and some terrorist activities. He told Gorky about the experiments of Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge; they also discussed Nietzsche, whose phi­losophy Morozov compared to pyrotechnics. After Morozov's suicide, Gorky's wife received a big sum of money and passed it to the Social- Democratic underground. Morozov was buried at an Old-Believers' cemetery; many were convinced that the Bolsheviks killed him (Felshtinsky 2009). Other Old-Believer merchants, however, contrib­uted to moderate parties (Williams 1986; West 1991). Many of them were secularized to an extent that makes it difficult to speculate about the religious sources of their politics.

The only figure of national significance who could arguably be considered a sectarian was Grigorii Rasputin, a radical in his own way, but hardly a revolutionary. The controversial and well-publi­cized evidence of his sectarianism did nothing to hinder his success at the court of the Romanovs. On the contrary, his populist perfor­mance determined his success at court and with the Synod. After 50 years of glorification of Russian sects by the Left, the regime of Nicholas II boasted a live sectarian who symbolized popular support for the crown (Jonge 1982; Etkind 1998). This deal was not an easy one; resistance to Rasputin's ascendance to cultural power raged furiously.

As the dynasty went native, the imperial period was approaching its end. Lev Tolstoy told a British guest that he had a sectarian peasant as his "spiritual father" and that he, Count Tolstoy, was nothing but "the interpreter to the world at large of what the Russian peas­ants have always known" (Stead 1888: 440). This manner of self- presentation did not hamper Tostoy's popularity but instead boosted it to new heights. After the 1905 Revolution, the famous Vekhi anthology warned the intelligentsia of its future destruction by the people. But the leading authors of the Vekhi, such as Nikolai Berdiaev, remained infatuated with the Khlysty and other sects (Berdiaev 1916, 1989). As happened earlier in Europe, many Russian intellectuals felt that "modernity impoverishes" and that religious enthusiasm "compensate[s] for modernity's costs" (Klein and La Vopa 1998: 3). Feeling a keen interest in Russian sects, Max Weber was hesitant to extend his analysis of the Protestant ethics to their variety (Weber 1995: 64, 161; Radkau 2009: 246; also Gerschenkron 1970). In keeping with his famous thesis on the Protestant ethic, some sociolo­gists have speculated that the success of religious reformation would have facilitated capitalist development in Russia. In fact, the very same populists and socialists who talked about the Russian Luther wished to prevent the development of capitalism in Russia. Partially due to their activities, the failure of the reformation led to an anti- capitalist revolution. Even though one could argue that Weber's thesis was proven in the negative, the variety of the sectarian experience in Russia, the political aims of intellectual pilgrimages to the sectarian communities, and the massive disillusionment that the intellectuals found there are all very different from the universe of The Protestant Ethic. A different kind of sociology is needed in this case and I argue that this sociology is Emil Durkheim's. He helps to appreciate the deep affinity between the rituals of popular Russian sects, such as the Khlysty, and the theories of nineteenth-century socialists.

Whirling together in an ecstatic ritual and inviting God to inhabit their collective body, the Khlysty worshipped the Durkheimian "society writ large," an organic, cohesive community that was higher, stronger, and more real than the individuals who compose it. This image matched the aspirations that many Russian socialists projected onto their society of the future. The alleged indifference of the Khlysty to property, their abstinence from marital sex, and rumors about the ritual orgies in their communities all added to the charms that many populists, some socialists, and even a few Bolsheviks could not resist. They imagined themselves leading the enthusiastic masses of Russian sectarians, colonizing them from within and directing them towards the "scientific" goals that they believed to be not much different from the ideals of the sectarians. The religious nature of sectarian worship differed from the technocratic imagination of the faithful Marxists, but the overlap was in communitarian ideas that the activists hoped to expand and exploit. The notion of a Russian historical affinity with communism also satisfied nationalist sentiment, which the fantasy of world revolution never managed to suppress.

With the collectivization of 1928, the sectarian diversions of Russian socialists were forgotten in Russia and remained unknown abroad. However, some critics still used them to understand the nature of the new Bolshevik society. Having visited Moscow in the 1920s, the Austrian writer and Freud's editor, Rene Fulop-Miller alleged that the Bolsheviks borrowed some of their ideas and rituals from the Khlysty (1927: 71). An author of books on Dostoevsky and Rasputin, Fulop-Miller illustrated his point by yet another scene of sectarian sex, "the most wild and unbridled orgies, in which complete promiscuity is the rule" (1927: 82).

Having little to do with the historical reality of Bolshevik rule, this narrative matched the literary convention of anti-utopian writing. When Aldous Huxley wrote his Brave New World (1932) with its memorable Solidarity Service, he took inspiration from Fulop-Miller's book, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism, which he reviewed while he was working on the novel (Huxley 1958: 191; Etkind 2004). As it happened, Huxley based his frightening scene of the compulsory group sex of the future on the mid-nineteenth-century fantasy of the mythical orgy of the Khlysty.

Re-Enchanting the Darkness

In the late nineteenth century, two writers composed a novella each that was set in oddly similar settings. In both novels, on the deck of a freshwater vessel, one of the passengers entertains the others by telling stories of his distant adventures. In the story by Joseph Conrad, a ship is anchored in the Thames. In the story by Nikolai Leskov, a passenger vessel sails on the lake of Ladoga. Although the passengers listen, question, and express doubts in similar ways, the storytellers are vastly different and so are their relations with their public. The English storyteller, Marlow, a commercial seaman who has traveled to the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, describes a freshwater trip into the heart of Africa that was even more exotic than his travels on the high seas. The Russian storyteller, Fliagin, a horse groom who pre­tends to be a monk, tells the passengers the tales of his travels, by foot and on horseback, across Eurasia. Russian literature has focused on ground transportation as much as English literature has on the sea. But the two novellas in question, Leskov's The Enchanted Pilgrim (1873) and Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899), are both stories told on river vessels. These works have become highly popular in their respective traditions - national, imperial, and postcolonial. Read together, they provide an exciting perspective on their deep, unac­knowledged peculiarities. In this chapter, I will re-read these novellas together with two lesser-known non-fiction texts by the same authors that present helpful self-commentaries to the better-known ones.

Darkness Was Here

Observing the Thames, Conrad's Marlow imagines a Roman colony on its banks:

Darkness was here yesterday. . . . The very end of the world, a sea the color of lead, a sky the color of smoke. . . . Sandbanks, marshes, forests, savages. . . . Here and there a military camp lost in a wilderness like a needle in a bundle of hay - cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death. (p. 9)[10]

Marlow is not an intellectual but an adventurer. However, he intro­duces his story of the modern colonizer, Kurtz, by outlining his ancient genealogy. Such a long-term historical perspective is surpris­ing not only for Marlow the sailor, but even for Conrad the writer; he probably received it from a particular kind of romanticized Hegelian historicism that was popular in the Poland of his youth (Niland 2010). Looking at the Thames and thinking about the Congo, Marlow describes a Roman who came to England "in the train of some prefect, or tax-gatherer, or trader even, to mend his fortunes." Whatever he traded in England, though it was certainly not ivory, Marlow sees two differences between the ancient and the modern. "What saves us is efficiency," he says with irony. "What redeems it is the idea." Apart from these two ambiguous phrases, he describes the ancient colonizer in a way that is strikingly similar to his modern counterpart:

Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery. . . . There's no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detest­able. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination - you know. (pp. 9-10)

Here on the Thames, the colonized have become the colonizers. At length, Marlow recounts his attempt to rescue the fabulously efficient Kurtz, an agent who "collected, bartered, swindled, or stole more ivory than all the other agents together," but who got sick or went mad at his Central Station. Though the story centers on ivory, there is no mention of elephants. Kurtz did not hunt; he delivered the "fossil" ivory that the "niggers" had hunted and stored beforehand. Kurtz's secret was to make the natives dig up the product and deliver it in an organized, ritual manner. The natives "adored him"; he approached them "with thunder and lightning. . . . He could be very terrible. . . . The chiefs came every day to see him. They would crawl" (pp. 56-8). Organizing these commercial miracles, Kurtz also raided one tribe with the help of another. Marlow observed heads drying on the stakes near Kurtz's dwelling.

For Marlow and also for Conrad, this hybridized kind of terror, which imitated wilderness by means of civilization, was worse than the wilderness itself. Kurtz made his business by digging into the belief system of the natives and making them adore him as their god. "The wilderness . . . loved him" and he loved the wilderness, with the result that this alliance manifested "the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation." He "presided at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites" and these rites led to swindling the ivory from the natives. From Marlow's common-sense perspective, these "unspeakable rites" felt "more intolerable than those heads drying on the stakes under Mr. Kurtz's windows" (p. 58) As a result, he did not learn much about these improvised rituals. We know only that Kurtz developed "the power to charm or frighten rudimentary souls into an aggravated witch-dance in his honor" and that part of the same business was "aggravated murder on a great scale." The rites and raids worked together to create a profit.

The reader might be disappointed in Marlow's anthropological skills, but Kurtz's were officially recognized. A member of the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, Kurtz argued in his report to this learned society that the whites must neces­sarily appear to the savages "in the nature of supernatural beings." At the end of this "beautiful piece of writing," Marlow found "a kind of note . . . scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand . . . : 'Exterminate all the brutes!' " (p. 50). Marlow sees these two aspects of Kurtz's business plan as intimately connected. The re-enchantment of the world by the enlightened colonizers for the sake of "the idea" ignites violence and is impossible without it.

Erebus and Terror

In 1870, a Polish boy, Jozef, became addicted to map-gazing (Conrad 1921: 19). He studied in a high school in Krakow and his favorite subject was geography. It was there that he fell in love with multi­colored maps, a passion Marlow also feels in The Heart of Darkness. Jozef's family consisted of Russian subjects who lived and worked in a complex colonial situation. His grandfather and father managed leaseholds on land estates in Western Ukraine, which became part of the Russian Empire after the second partition of Poland. Jozef was born in these colonized lands, in the Ukrainian-Jewish town of Berdyczow. His father, Apollo Korzeniowski, received his education at the St. Petersburg Imperial University, in the Department of Oriental Studies, which was chaired by Osip Senkovsky, the Pole who estab­lished academic orientalism in Russia. Korzeniowski was also a poet and playwright whose work developed under the obvious influence of his Russian predecessors. After having lost his fortune on lease­holds, he turned to underground politics and became a hero of the anti-imperial struggle. He led an underground movement in the Ukrainian city of ZZytomierz and later in Warsaw with the goal of emancipating Poland, along with its ancient domains in Ukraine, from the Russian rule. He was arrested in October 1861 when, in anticipation of the Polish rebellion, the Russians introduced martial law.

In the Austrian-Polish Krakov, Jozef was an orphan and he was stateless. His parents died after being exiled by the Russian Empire to Vologda. Together with Jozef, they had traveled thousands of miles by foot and by horse carriage. Not quite as far as the Arctic, Vologda was nevertheless cold and dangerous enough to justify Jozef's obses­sion with Arctic maps and the lonely heroes who had died on their way through the ice. At school, Jozef wrote an essay on the subject and, decades later, remembered it as "an erudite performance." But his professors were "persons with no romantic sense for the real" and were not interested in the Arctic (Conrad 1921: 17).

In his late memoirs, Conrad was still coming to terms with events from the distant past. He revisited, more than once, the scene of his sick mother's return from Vologda to Poland for a few months before she went back through the cold, despotic Russia to rejoin her husband. With some irony, Conrad later related the stories that he had heard in his youth from his Polish relatives. An uncle, an officer of the Napoleonic army that invaded Russia, was hiding from the Cossacks in a peasant hut when a dog betrayed him by barking. In response, the uncle cut off the dog's head and devoured the little body. "He had eaten him to appease his hunger, no doubt, but also for the sake of an unappeasable and patriotic desire," wrote Conrad (1919: 78).

John A. McClure was right to state that "Conrad lived both as a native of a colonized country and as a member of a colonizing com­munity." His father was a colonial manager and a victim of foreign imperialism. As a Polish subject of the Russian Empire, he was a victim of external colonization; as a Polish manager of the Ukrainian peasants, he was a colonizer. This double experience was unique among British writers: "Conrad achieved what . . . some, like Kipling, tried: a view from the other side of the compound wall" (McClure 1981: 92; Fleishman 1967). The multilayered experience of Russian colonialism, in which the roles of the colonizer and the colonized repeatedly flipped, provided Conrad with this stereoscopic ability. In Conrad's Eastern Europe, the very idea of progress, with its double effects, was experienced as a colonial conquest: "Progress leaves its dead by the way, for progress is only a great adventure . . . a march into an undiscovered country; and in such an enterprise victims do not count" (Conrad 1921: 156).

The young Jozef's hero was Sir John Franklin, the commander of an Arctic expedition undertaken by two British ships, the Erebus and the Terror. The expedition departed in 1845 to search for the Northwest Passage between Greenland and North America. When the ships disappeared, several attempts were made to find them. In 1859, Sir Leopold McClintock led another expedition that was orga­nized by Franklin's widow, Lady Jane. On an island, McClintock discovered a note that was left by Franklin's expedition, which read: "All well." A second message, written a year later on the margins of the same sheet of paper, reported that the Erebus and the Terror were trapped in the ice and that the crew had abandoned the ships (Conrad 1926: 15-16). The Inuits later said that they saw the sailors eating their dead. These reports of cannibalism among the dying Brits have been confirmed by the later findings of their remains (Keenleyside et al. 1997).

McClintock's book describing the search for Franklin in the Arctic seas was the favorite reading of the young Jozef. "I have read the work many times since," Conrad later wrote; "the realities of the story sent me off on the romantic explorations of the inner self; to the discovery of the taste for poring over maps." This essay, "Geography and Some Explorers," juxtaposed those voyages that were driven by "an acquisitive spirit, the idea of lucre" and those that were "free from any taint of that sort." Examples of the first type were travelers who went south; examples of the second type were polar explorers such as Franklin, "whose aims were as pure as the air of those high latitudes." Even though Conrad's maturation meant a shift of his interests from the north to the south and from purity to lucre, he claimed, "it must not be supposed that I gave up my interest in the polar regions" (1926: 14, 17, 21). In Heart of Darkness Marlow repeated after his creator: "Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. . . . At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth. . . . The North Pole was one of these places, I remember. Well, I haven't been there yet, and shall not try now. The glamour's off" (p. 11).

Marlow's tropical narrative starts with a reference to John Franklin and his ships, the Erebus and the Terror, which had also departed from the Thames (p. 8). These two names foreshadow Marlow's story. The Greek god Erebus, the son of Chaos, is the personification of darkness. Terror culminates in the last words of Kurtz: "The Horror! The Horror!" Marlow's rescue expedition works in contrast to the extraordinary saga of McClintock's search for Franklin. Marlow lied to Kurtz's fiancee; McClintock did tell the truth to Franklin's wife, by then a widow. Marlow's suspicion of cannibalism amongst black Africans, which has infuriated some of Conrad's critics (Achebe 2001), was also inspired by Franklin's saga.

Heart of Darkness mentions the Thames where the story is told but not once does it name the Congo where the action takes place. Usually a precise geographer, Conrad situates Marlow's travel by using the most general terms - the river, darkness, earth:

Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world. . . . There were moments when one's past came back to one. . . . And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect. (p. 35)

With all the difference between the frost and the heat, there is none­theless an uncanny resemblance between Conrad's depictions of the Congo under Leopold II and Russia under Nicolas II:

The snow covered the endless forests, the frozen rivers, the plains of an immense country, obliterating the landmarks, the accidents of the ground, levelling everything under its uniform whiteness, like a mon­strous blank page awaiting the record of an inconceivable history. (Conrad 2001: 25)

There is no doubt that the story about Kurtz was situated in the Congo. However, the fact is that Conrad did not locate the heart of darkness in any specific place but, rather, gave a summary image of the imperial conquest. There were such places on the map "in every sort of latitude" and every time in history; Conrad, like Marlow, had visited some of them. For Locke, "in the beginning all the world was America." For Conrad, at its roots, all the world was Poland.

The Thick Description of Kurtz

The central protagonist, Kurtz, is almost mute in Conrad's novel. The first, unnamed narrator learns about Kurtz from the second narrator, Marlow, who learned about Kurtz from the third narrator, who knew him well. This third source was a Russian. To meet a Russian in the heart of Africa was a surprise of course; Marlow is "lost in astonish­ment." The son of a priest of the provincial Russian town of Tambov, this self-employed ivory trader stayed, traveled, and traded with Kurtz. He nursed Kurtz during his illness like a civilized man, but adored him and supplied him with ivory like a native. We do not know the name of this Russian. He is a bizarre fellow but, strangely enough, Marlow takes his words at face value:

There he was before me, in motley, as though he had absconded from a troupe of mimes, enthusiastic, fabulous. His very existence was improbable, inexplicable, and altogether bewildering. He was an insol­uble problem. . . . His clothes had been made of some stuff that was brown holland probably, but it was covered with patches all over, with bright patches, blue, red, and yellow. (pp. 53-4)

Marlow likes the strange son of Tambov and solves at least one of his problems. His bizarre outfit "reminded me of something I had seen - something funny I had seen somewhere," he says. At the start of his story, he describes a map that he had seen in the office of the company that hired him. It was a "large shining map, marked with all the colors of a rainbow. There was a vast amount of red - good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch" (p. 13). Conrad could base this colorful map on Cecil Rhodes's aphorism, "I contend that we are the first race in the world. . . . If there be God, I think that what he would like me to do is to paint as much of the map of Africa British red as possible" (quoted in Spivak 1999: 13). There was no color to repre­sent Russia on the map of Africa; Russia did not have colonies there. Instead, the colonial colors were all "painted" on a Russian adventur­ist, who represented for Conrad a personal symbol of imperialism (GoGwilt 1995) and nothingness (Said 1966: 146).

Creating his harlequin to embody the colorful darkness of the colonial endeavor, Conrad smuggled into the tragedy of the European colonization of Africa the trauma of the Russian colonization of Poland. Tambov is even further from the Arctic Circle than Vologda, but the temper of this Russian matched those selfless souls of Arctic explorers whom Conrad adored in his youth:

He surely wanted nothing from the wilderness but space to breathe in and to push on through. . . . If the absolutely pure, uncalculating, unpractical spirit of adventure had ever ruled a human being, it ruled this bepatched youth. I almost envied him the possession of this modest and clear flame. (p. 55)

These are almost the same words that Marlow had used at the start of his story, when he contrasted the greedy travelers to the south with the pure explorers of the north, "whose aims were as pure as the air of those high latitudes." This Russian's purity was connected to his glamor, a word that Marlow used with some insistence. "Well, I haven't been there [to the North Pole] yet, and shall not try now. The glamour's off," Marlow said at the start of his story. It is the same northern glamor that he found in his new Russian acquaintance. "Glamour urged him on, glamour kept him unscathed" (p. 55).

As Marlow approaches the Central Station, he makes "an extraor­dinary find" in an abandoned hut: a technical book, An Inquiry Into Some Points of Seamanship. The copy is 60 years old, published about the time of John Franklin's travels. In the margins, there are penciled notes that refer to the text. These notes are in a cipher that Marlow cannot read. He sees it as "an extravagant mystery," but when he meets the motley-dressed Russian he realizes that the notes were written in Cyrillic. The whole episode reads out of context, as a kind of textual cipher in itself. It is strange, of course, to meet a Russian adventurist in Central Congo; but, given that fact, there can be nothing mysterious about his annotating a book in his own lan­guage. In a text bursting with meaning, what is the meaning of these Cyrillic notes?

Post factum notes play significant roles in the Heart of Darkness and "Geography and Some Explorers," Conrad's self-commentary on Heart of Darkness. Kurtz's note, "Exterminate all the brutes!" changed the meaning of his anthropological report. Added to their previous message, "All is well," the dying sailors' note reported John Franklin's death. In both cases, Kurtz's and Franklin's, the texts were untrue but the later comments revealed the truth. Conrad's later essay, "Geography and Some Explorers," plays exactly this same role, partly explanatory and party deconstructive, in relation to The Heart of Darkness. The unread comments in the margins of the British book of seamanship play the same role.

Almost all that Marlow learned, and that we know, about Kurtz, came from the Russian (Brooks 1996: 70). This is particularly true of the most interesting part of Kurtz's story, his methods of treating the natives: "[T]his amazing tale that was not so much told as sug­gested to me in desolate exclamations . . . in interrupted phrases . . . in hints" of the Russian (p. 56). Marlow could not verify this interpreta­tion of Kurtz's activities because, when he finally reaches Kurtz, he is about to die. But this interpretation made sense for Marlow; he did not question it, his interlocutors did not question it, and we the readers rarely do so, either. However, Marlow says that this Russian harlequin crawled before Kurtz "as much as the veriest savage of them all" (p. 58), which makes the Russian a little bit too involved for an observer.

Interpretation is important; it is terribly important if it is the only source of evidence, raw or processed. Told in Africa by the Tambovian to the Londoner, the story of Kurtz is very Russian indeed. Kurtz did not just go native (Rothberg 2009: 83). Like his Russian friend, he also became more savage than the savages, installing himself into the native system of beliefs with an amazing "efficiency." Combining charismatic leadership with violent coercion, Kurtz reformed the natives with the sole purpose of enriching himself in a way that was foreign to them. He did not act as a missionary, struggling to replace the belief system of the natives with his own. He worked, rather, as a virus, entrenching himself in the center of the native spiritual system and forcing this system to offer sacrifices to him. It was an internal colonization of a sort.

Imperialism was at its worst not when it acted by pure force but when it sought a project of hegemony on top of the usual domination, a religious or ideological faith in its activities that would be felt by the exploited population. Reading about the fictional colonizer, Kurtz, in the Heart of Darkness, we find a composite of various sources, from the inherited knowledge of Polish methods of leasehold management in Ukraine, to memories of Russian massacres in Poland, to British massacres in India, to Conrad's feelings about his own visit to the Congo, to his vague expectations for the Russian and colonial revolutions that would, he knew, create new kinds of darkness. Going to the people, inhabiting their religion and forcing them to work for his own "idea," Kurtz did what two generations of Russian radicals did before and after him. Though these Russian populists were driven not by the lure of profit but, rather, by their utopian ideals, Conrad saw their methods as similar. On top of the violent capability of his firearms, Kurtz's particular sort of "efficiency" needed social sciences and humanities. This is why Conrad made his brutal, greedy charac­ter a scholar who was respected by learned societies. In the late nineteenth century, sociology and anthropology opened new vistas for understanding the people and, also, for trying to change them. In the transformationist spirit of the time, some enthusiastic experts called this process "God-building."[11] Reading Durkheim and Marx together, these radical intellectuals asked themselves: If rituals instill values, why not create new rituals? If gods replace one another like tsars, why not enthrone new gods? Since Russia did not feature a rational proletariat but, rather, a mystical peasantry, would it be not the disenchanting enlightenment but, instead, the re-enchantment of the world that would launch the Russian revolution? This process of purposeful, pre-planned God-building would absorb the beliefs among the common folk and direct them toward revolution. Since only the experts - ethnographers, historians, and sociologists - could claim knowledge of these beliefs, these experts became essential for the social revolution (see Chapter 10). In fact, these sons of priests and connoisseurs of sectarian communities, some of them profes­sional revolutionaries and convinced God-builders, looked and sounded like Conrad's harlequin, though they chose to go to the Volga rather than to the Congo. Working among the exotic sectarians with the aim of becoming their leaders and exploiting them for the revolution, these intellectuals would emulate Kurtz in his "unspeak­able" inventions. I can imagine finding the note, "Exterminate all the brutes!" in the vast archive of Anatolii Lunacharsky, a prominent God-builder. It would be "an extraordinary finding" but it would not change history as we know it. After studying philosophy in Zurich, writing plays about Faust and Cromwell, and recanting his God- building teachings, the pan-European Lunacharsky became the first People's Commissar of the Enlightenment.

Product of Nature

Nikolai Leskov was the prolific author of novels and essays on many aspects of Russian imperial life. He wrote about peasant recruits, forensic medicine, the alcoholism of the lower classes, and other social questions. On top of that, he was interested in religion, both high and popular. He started his career as a small official in the pro­vincial courts in Kiev and later became a local representative for the military draft. But then, his British relative, Alexander Scott, who was married to his aunt, changed Leskov's life. Scott managed the enormous estate of the Minister of Internal Affairs, Lev Perovsky (see Chapter 8), and owned the commercial company Scott and Wilkins, which sold British agricultural equipment to Russian landlords. In 1857, the young Leskov left governmental service to work for Scott. An entrepreneurial Brit, Scott failed in his Russian business despite his high connections. He turned into a bitter old man who, looking at a collection of unused, top-end machinery, addressed to his nephew, the future writer, the classical complaint of an unsuccessful imperial­ist: "Machines do not work in Russia. . . . Nothing good works here because the people living here are wild and vicious." Leskov thought that his uncle was joking, but he was not. Much later, in 1893, Leskov remembered the amazing words of his British relative:

You are Russian and you do not want to hear it, but I am foreign and I can judge: these people are vicious, but this is not the worst. What is the worst is that these people are deceived. They are led to believe that what is bad is good, and what is good, bad. Remember my words: the retribution will come when you least expect it! (p. 368)[12]

Under Scott's supervision, Perovsky's estate "exploited everything the land could provide," which first and foremost was the peasants. At the start of his new career, Leskov had to oversee the resettling of serfs, whom Perovsky bought from small owners in two central prov­inces, Orel and Kursk, and transferred to his estates in the southern steppes. The count had died a few months earlier and passed his estate to one of his brothers; the manager, Scott, used the opportunity to populate the land in anticipation of the coming Emancipation of 1861. There was nothing unusual in this operation. In previous trans­fers, Perovsky's peasants were moved thousands of miles by horse carts, so that about half of them fled or died on the way. This time, Scott hired barges to carry the serfs, whom he called "a product of nature," down the great rivers, the Oka and the Volga. He commis-

Figure 18: Nikolai Leskov, by Ilia Repin, 1888.

sioned his nephew to oversee the action in an improvised regime of indirect rule. "Be a tsar, not a ruler," Scott instructed his nephew. The ruler was a strong man, Piotr, whom Scott called, in a colonial manner, 'Pizarro' after the sixteenth-century conqueror of Peru. Writing about the horror of this type of resettlement, which was formative for the Russian Empire, Leskov presented it in a way that suggested the transportation of the black Africans across the Atlantic. Reimagining Piotr-Pizarro many decades later, Leskov described everything in him - his eyes, hair, beard, and more - as black. All the white men in the story - the dead Perovsky, the British Scott, the feeble Leskov, and the self-proclaimed policeman - were absent, weak, or fake. The only strong man was this black-colored leader of the peasants' Middle-Passage.

When Leskov and Pizarro loaded the peasants on barges, they asked the police for help. Otherwise, they were left with three barges and several hundred peasant families, on the long trip down the great rivers. According to Leskov, the peasants did not look unusually desolated:

They were sitting on the barges barefoot, half-dressed, as pathetic and unfortunate as they usually appear in the Russian village. Then I still believed that everywhere peasants had to be in the same condition as we were accustomed to seeing them in Russia. They were as humble as they usually were. (p. 345)

During the trip, everyone was busy with one kind of entertainment, called "searching." The peasants combed their bodies looking for lice; there was no way to get rid of them. They could not start a fire on the barge to treat the clothing and they did not swim in the river because they believed that the water was bad for people and good for lice. They suffered immensely and eagerly demonstrated their horrible scratches. Leskov tried to help, but in vain. When he expressed his concern to Pizarro, he received the response: "He who has pity for the people should not be in charge of them." Leskov felt it was true; however, he prevented Pizarro from flogging the peasants on board. Once, the peasants spotted a bathhouse on the bank and begged Leskov to let them go to it. They swore that they would return right away; how could they not return, leaving their wives and chil­dren on the barge? Leskov allowed 40 of the men to go. Reaching the bank of the river, they did not go to the bathhouse but ran home, which was hundreds of miles away. Leskov had to call the police; three Cossacks caught and flogged these 40 men. While the peasants were being punished, the head of the local police (later he turned out to be an impostor) invited Leskov to his home, and locked him in so that he would not be a nuisance. Trapped there, Leskov browsed the books from his library, which included texts by the illustrious Russian democrats Herzen and Granovsky. Then, everyone returned to the barge:

It was nighttime but I saw how they led them. It rained before and the clay was slippery and it was funny and pitiful to see how they splashed through the mud and their feet shuffled and slid over the wet clay, and if the front pair slid and fell down all the rest did the same, as if it was a Cotillion. (p. 351)

As a salesman in his uncle's company, Leskov traveled across the Russian provinces. He published compassionate novels about the people and satirical essays about the intelligentsia, which made him a controversial figure. But always a practical man, he loved a quota­tion that he attributed to Heinrich Heine: "He who loves the people should take them to the bathhouse."

Horse Trading

Marlow talked to his colleagues on the deck of the yawl as a peer to peers. He was telling them about those who were unequal to them, the blacks in the ivory country, and about the European superman there, Kurtz. His story is unusual but his interlocutors and we, the readers, believe Marlow. With Fliagin, the narrator of Leskov's novella, The Enchanted Wanderer (1873), it is different. As he tells his long story, the random group of passengers becomes increasingly critical toward him and his message. However, they are uniformly curious, indeed more curious about him than he was about the natives among whom he lived. Scholars also perceive him in various ways, which range from "the Russian superman" (McLean 1977: 241) to "the Russian Everyman" (Franklin 2004: 108). On deck, Fliagin looks like a monk, though actually he is a groom; the enchanted passengers gradually recognize an impostor, similar to that fake monk whom Vladimir Dal recognized by his accent (see Chapter 8). Beginning as an exchange among peers, the situation turns into a cultural encounter between Europeans and a noble savage.

Fliagin tells his life story on board a ship that is carrying pilgrims and supplies to the island monasteries on the lake of Ladoga. They are about a day-trip's distance from St. Petersburg, north of the source of the Neva. The way to the heart of Russia goes through this ancient land. Like the Thames, the Neva has had its moments of darkness, light, and flickering. Like England, Russia was a colonized and a colonizing country. The Romans never reached these banks, but Finns, Russians, Swedes, and Germans came and left, some of them more than once. If Rurik did come from his Scandinavia, he would have sailed there, through the Neva and Ladoga to Novgorod. The medieval fur trade went in the opposite direction. Now, Fliagin narrates on this great lake the story of his nomadic life, which carried him across Eurasia, from the Russian heartlands to the Central Asian deserts and the Caucasus and, then, to the lakes and islands of the north. For Marlow, going from England to Europe and then to Africa meant crossing high seas and political borders. Fliagin's adventures all happened within Russia. Crossing steppes, deserts, and moun­tains, finding himself among strange and hostile peoples, Fliagin never left what he believed was his "land." Marlow is a critical, self-conscious imperialist, one of those who took part in the colonial­ist endeavors and also in decolonizing the world. Epically strong and competent, Fliagin is destitute of curiosity and critical ability.

Unavoidably, the reader finds himself closer to the passengers of the ship than to Fliagin, an eloquent but impenetrable narrator. His exotic dwellings, incredible survivals, hyper-masculine physicality, bizarre religiosity, immoral hubris, deep contact with animals, and lack of human touch and connection all make him an impossible target for identification. If he is a Superman, he is depicted with a healthy dose of irony.

Sadness

Born into the poor family of a priest in provincial Orel, Leskov fin­ished two classes at the local school and learned everything else as an autodidact. He matured into a sophisticated ironist, British-style liberal, and soul-seeker who became a follower of one of the greatest dissidents of all times, Lev Tolstoy. Misunderstood by Walter Benjamin (1968) as an exemplary storyteller who was still close to the "imme­diate" oral tradition, Leskov was prone to narrative games and mocking experiments with his characters and readers.

Leskov started his novella with a brief visit by passengers to a small coastal town, Korela, on the lake of Ladoga. "This poor, though extremely ancient, Russian town was so sad that it was hard to imagine a place on earth that was more sad than this one." Founded by a Finnish tribe, Korela was colonized by Novgorod in 1310, taken by the Swedes in 1580, by the Muscovites in 1595, by the Swedes in 1617, by the Russians in 1710; it became a part of Finland in 1920, and was taken by the USSR in 1940. Having changed its name four times and now known as Priozersk, the town has survived as a hub of dacha-style resorts on the lake of Ladoga. Many times colonized and never liberated, the town had no reason to cheer, but its record- winning sadness is perhaps an overstatement. In Fliagin's narrative, sadness is projected onto the deserts, where natives enslaved and mutilated him; onto his native province of central Russia, where his life was all about whipping; and onto the imperial capital, where he played the devil on the stage of a theater. But for Leskov, the heart of sadness was Korela, a town like myriad others. Leskov did not specify what exactly was so sad in Korela, but in another story he described another Russian town, Penza, where he lived for a while and where Fliagin also spent some time:

Penza was one of the darkest. . . . Everything there was instituted the other way around. . . . The streets were like swamps and the sidewalks were made of boards; nails slid away and a pedestrian fell down in the cesspit. . . . The police robbed people on the square; the marshal's dogs tore people apart . . . in front of the city officials; the governor whipped people on the street with his own hands; there were terrible but true rumors about violence toward the women, who were invited to parties in the homes of the nobility. (Leskov 1958: 9/369)

Fliagin emerges out of this environment very organically. Leskov gave him a narrative gift, merged it with a muscular, destructive character, and reserved the irony for himself. Born as a serf, Fliagin grew up in a stable and fled from his master after being whipped for cutting the tail of a cat. He wandered with the Gypsies before taking part in a Tartar competition, in which the rivals whipped each other, "as in a duel among nobles." Having mastered this "Asian practice," Fliagin whipped his rival Tartar to death. His prize was a beautiful horse, but he had to flee again. Far out in the desert, he was captured by an Asian tribe, which mutilated him by cutting his heels and putting bristles into the cuts. He lived among these "Tartars" for 11 years, learned their language, healed them with herbs and magic, married their women, and fathered many children. He combined his success among the natives with an entire lack of interest toward them. Nothing among the "Tartars" was of any value, with the only excep­tion being horses. In the desert, he met Russian missionaries. "An Asian should be brought to God by fear, so that he would be trem­bling with awe," believes Fliagin; but the missionaries preached a humble Christ and were killed by the natives.

Then British spies came to the desert from India by way of Khiva. In this variant of Kipling's Kim, fantasized from the other side of the Himalayas, the Brits are preparing for a war with Russia and want to buy horses from the natives somewhere in Central Asia. When Fliagin destroys this trade, the Brits frighten the tribe with fireworks, steal the horses, and disappear. Fliagin used the remaining fireworks to baptize the tribe with lightening and thunder. After he turns himself into their god, they let him flee across the desert. The Russians return him to his old master, who diligently flogs him for running away.

Fliagin resumes his horse trade, with Asians as before. For a while, he trades on behalf of a prince who entrusts Fliagin with his money, horses, and women. But both of them then fall in love with a Gypsy beauty, Grusha. Selflessly, Fliagin buys Grusha for his patron and secures their romance. When the prince gets tired of the pregnant Grusha, she begs Fliagin to kill her. Because of his love for her, he throws her into the river, thereby creating another sacrificial plotline with a female offering (see Chapter 12). Fliagin then flees again to serve in the standing army in the Caucasus. After heroic service and other adventures, he finds his ultimate destination as a horse groom in a northern monastery. The ghosts of Grusha and the others whom he killed chase him, but he repels them by fasting and bowing to the ground.

After Fliagin tells the passengers about the murder of Grusha, something happens to his storytelling. His rich, creative narrative becomes an inarticulate sermon. There is no end to his story; it dete­riorates into wordy, meaningless speculation. Grusha's ghost is still with him, despite his bows and chanting.

What Conrad calls darkness, Leskov calls sadness. Three stories unfold on boats that have made freshwater tours, with "pilgrims" on board. The Heart of Darkness and The Enchanted Pilgrim are both shaped as first-person narratives installed within a third-person frame. Both stories create a superhuman image only to demolish it. Having unusual gifts like Kurtz, Fliagin failed to realize them. A true hero of the empire, he knew animals, not humans. His life was punctuated by murders. He loved a woman and killed her: it is a sad story indeed. Fliagin "is magnificent and appalling," writes one historian (Franklin 2004: 109); it is instructive to note the similarity of this perception to Marlow's words with which he concluded his story of the Roman colonizer of England: "The fascination of the abomination - you know" (Conrad 1988: 9-10).

Sitting on the deck and telling the story of his wonders and wan­derings in distant lands, Fliagin is both a witness to and an agent of colonialism, Marlow and Kurtz in one person, a narrative position that is less analytical but more enchanting than Marlow's. Fliagin is also a native informer, a third position that is conspicuously absent in The Heart of Darkness, where subalterns do not speak. In contrast to Fliagin, Marlow and Kurtz have never been whipped; in contrast to the black victims of Kurtz, Fliagin is able to tell his story. Marlow's is also not a nice story, but he feels compelled to tell it because he is doing so for others who cannot speak. In Russia, the natives were colonized and colonizing, and they did speak. And so does Fliagin.

Sacrificial Plotlines

In 1850, a rich nobleman, Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin, who divided his time between translating Hegel and womanizing in high quarters, got rid of his French mistress. He brought her from Paris to Moscow, lived with her for a number of years and was reasonably attached to her, but at this point he had other liaisons. The French woman was found on the road, beaten by an iron bar and with her throat slashed. Although Sukhovo-Kobylin blamed his servants and bribed the police, the authorities suspected him. The investigation lasted for seven years, after which all suspects, including the master and his serfs, were acquit­ted. To this day, this story has attracted scholars, who have been invariably divided in their judgments as to who is to blame (Murav 1998; Seleznev and Selezneva 2002). Under police investigation Sukhovo-Kobylin began writing comedies; he worked on his trilogy, which made him famous, for 30 years. In the first comedy, a rich bride is seduced by a rogue and barely survives. In the second, her father sells his wealth in order to save her from the police, and dies. In the third, a police officer plays a werewolf, imitating death and resurrec­tion. From the 1850s to the 1880s, the female character stepped back from the cycle, allowing the corrupted, entirely irrational men around her to annihilate themselves without any help from her. With a dark irony, the epigraph to the trilogy is taken from Hegel: "If you look rationally at this world it will look rationally at you."

In novelistic fiction as opposed to historical non-fiction, the rela­tionship between the Empire and the people was intrinsically con­nected with the relationship between men and women. Two romantic and colonial themes, the Russian woman as tragic sacrifice and the Russian peasant as noble savage, became crucial elements for the national imagery. Great writers developed these themes, or rather these themes made great writers. Almost invariably, Russian literature depicted men and women, on the one hand, and those from high culture and those from the people, on another hand, as creatures of a fundamentally different nature.

The Contact Zone of the Novel

In her comparative study of travel writings, Mary Louise Pratt intro­duced a helpful concept of the contact zone, "the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict" (1992: 6). I argue that the classical Russian novel was such a contact zone, where historically and culturally separated men and women played out their conflictual relations. In his treatment of the historical poetics of the novel, Mikhail Bakhtin identified, among other "per­sistent" chronotopes, the chronotope of the road. In Bakhtin's clas­sification there are two lines of development in the travel novel: in the first, the road takes the hero "through his own native country, and not some exotic alien world"; in the second, "an 'alien world,' separated from the native country by sea and distance . . . has an analogous function to that of the road" (Bakhtin 1975: 392-4). In both cases, Bakhtin argued, the hero is aware of the exotic nature of what is taking place, but in the first type of novel this is a "social exotic," whereas in the second it is a natural or ethnographic exotic associated with overseas travel.

The first, internal type of novel is represented by Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, the second, external by Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. All the Russian examples given by Bakhtin, from Radishchev to Nekrasov, belong to the internal type. The travel in social space, between classes, is as fruitful for the novel as the travel in geographical space, between continents. The road takes on the capacity of estrangement. It makes the everyday feel exotic and the boring, foreign and interesting. These ideas are connected to another of Bakhtin's typological innovations, the "idyllic chronotope." Utopia is located in distant islands; the idyll is located in local depths. Literature, Bakhtin wrote in 1937, has created idylls "from the time of Antiquity right up until recent times"; literary scholars, however, had failed to understand or evaluate this fact, "as a result of which all perspectives on the history of the novel are distorted." Bakhtin briefly surveyed the "sublimation of the idyll" in Rousseau, the "return of the idyll" in Tolstoy, and the "demise of the idyll" in Flaubert, arguing that "in Russian literature the chrono­logical boundaries of this phenomenon are of course shifted to the second half of the nineteenth century." At this time, the novel was overwhelmed by "the idyllic complex" and Bakhtin concentrates on its chief character: "The 'man of the people' in the novel is often of idyllic provenance" (1975: 384).

Developing Bakhtin's argument somewhat further, I observe that in the Russian novel, the Man of the People is usually counterpoised to the Man of Culture. Each lives, by definition, in a different milieu, but they encounter one another in the idyllic chronotope - the contact zone of the novel. They are brought together by their occupa­tion or by chance, but most often by "the road." In the plots of the novel, these two character-types, the Man of Culture and the Man of the People, engage in multiple relations, from mortal rivalry to redeeming brotherhood. One character-type is historical, another idyllic. Usually, the Man of Culture firmly belongs to his own time; in contrast, the Man of the People has transhistorical but national features. Endowed with the capacity and desire to move through cultural space, the Man of Culture penetrates the atemporal space of the Man of the People. And there, more often than not, he remains forever.

Love between man and woman is the eternal subject of the novel. However, the French-American literary theorist Rene Girard (1965), who was, like Bakhtin, initially inspired by Dostoevsky, argues that in the novel, erotic desire requires a mediator. To tell the story of love, the novel usually depicts three characters rather than two. The competition between two men for a woman gives rise to a paradoxi­cal effect of mediation. They wish to get rid of one another, but instead they create mutual dependencies that sometimes make the reader suspect that the object of their passion, the woman, does not matter at all. This relationship between the rivals is interpreted in different texts as mystical, political, or even erotic. Girard explains this triangular structure in general terms, but I am mostly interested in its specific modification in the Russian nineteenth-century novel.

In Rene Girard's theory (1965, 1995), if a society is unable to achieve peace through law and the courts, it falls back on ancient mechanisms of sacrifice, as collective participation in an act of vio­lence. Historical societies progressed by substituting human sacrifices with animal sacrifices and, then, actual sacrifices with symbolic ones. What happens in a secular society where religious rites are increas­ingly irrelevant but the court system is still underdeveloped? One can expect an uncontrollable growth of violence and development of various means of its symbolic substitution. Making another step, we can speculate about the novel itself as a mechanism of substitutional sacrifice. Here, it is not humans who die for the sake of the collective, but their representations. Along with drama and opera, which used similar mechanisms, the novel was the nineteenth-century method of choice for sacrificial matters. In the next century, the cinema would take this place. To be sure, not every novel ends with a corpse, but many do. And corpses had gender.

"The Man of the People appears in the novel as a bearer of a wise attitude towards life and death, which has been lost by the ruling classes," wrote Bakhtin (1975: 384). More often than not, this char­acter is the enigmatic one who possesses a mystical and threatening, God-like power. In such narratives, Eve is a classless but national object of desire. Sometimes she is passive, but often she is endowed with the power of choice between the rivals for her affections. Gender structure intersects with class structure and both are contained within a national space, which is symbolized by the woman character-type, the Russian Beauty. Relations between these character-types are based on the story from Genesis. The Man of Culture, a descendant of the sinful Adam, argues with the Man of the People about the possession of the Russian Eve.

In its interactions with historical situations, this triangular plot produced the variety of Romantic literature, Russian style. This is a reductive reading, of course. There are many stories that have little to do with this plotline, and in those novels that generally comply with this scheme, there are many characters and many branches of the story that do not fit into the triangle. However, I will argue that in its multiple versions, this narrative structure replicates the intrica­cies of internal colonization in rich, diverging narratives. At the close of these stories we can often discern the ancient motif of sacrifice, which resolves what Girard describes as a "sacrificial crisis." Depending on which of them the novel sacrifices - the Man of the People, the Man of Culture, or the Russian Beauty - we can identify different types of this triangular narrative. Throughout the nineteenth century, male characters largely replaced female characters as objects of novelistic sacrifice.

Exchange and Mercy

In 1882, the French historian Ernest Renan grounded his definition of "nation" on the common experience of suffering and sacrifice.

"Suffering in common unifies more than joy does. . . .A nation is a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices" (1996: 53). Renan was referring to wars and revolutions, but the fictional life of culture plays out these constitutive, sacrificial narra­tives without actually spilling blood. Forty years earlier, a character of a Russian novel contemplated: "We are no longer capable of great sacrifices for the good of mankind nor even for our very own happi­ness, for we realize its impossibility." This was Pechorin from Mikhail Lermontov's novel A Hero of Our Time (1840). There are at least four violent deaths in this story, but most of them are women; for Pechorin's idea of a "great sacrifice," women do not count. In his poem "Demon," Lermontov portrayed a fallen angel in love with a woman from the Caucuses. Ruined by his sublime desire, she dies after a kiss. A demon flies away in sorrow. Nothing more occurred; just another colonial woman was killed. If it had been the other way round - that the male demon, contaminated by the filth of flesh, had died or decomposed - we could expect an overthrow of hell and heavens, a revolution of a sort. But this, in the course of Russian literature, was not to happen until somewhat later. A sacrificial death was clearly important for Romantic fiction. No less important was the choice of the sacrificial object: was it a man or a woman? The gender of sacrifice was a historically changing variable, and it was crucial for the function of the narrative.

Pushkin constructed a triangular structure in his novella The Captain's Daughter (1836), with a Cossack rebel Pugachev as Man of the People, the young officer of the imperial army, Grinev, as the Man of Culture, and Mashenka as the Russian Beauty. On the side of the people, there are horrifying depths, undeclared strength, and untold wisdom; behind the state there is poor discipline and alien rationality. Pugachev, a Cossack, Old-Believer, and romantic rebel, fascinates even the loyal member of the imperial hierarchy, Grinev. The story is played out between St. Petersburg and Orenburg - the center of the Empire, located on the periphery, and a distant province in its geographical center. Ethnically and culturally, the mixture of Cossacks, Bashkirs, and runaway serfs who rebelled in the Orenburg steppe was not much different from the irregular troops who repre­sented the Empire. The struggle belongs to the history of colonial uprisings, but both sides fought against their own kind. Many char­acters in this historical novel - the rebels like Pugachev and the impe­rial officers - started their careers in the Russian-Prussian war that occurred two decades earlier (Kretinin 1996); Grinev is close to the historical Bolotov (see Chapter 9). Rebels have Russian beards and wear Eastern-style pantaloons, Pugachev in the Tartar style, his lieutenant in the Kyrgyz style. Pushkin depicted the rebels with a mixture of orientalist prejudice and human respect; those occidentals who personified imperial power in the steppe are described with much irony.

The Captain's Daughter should be read in the comparative context of such events as the Sepoy mutiny in British India in 1857, now remembered as the First War of Independence. In British narratives of the mutiny, common motifs include the executions and rapes of the English by the insurgents (Sharpe 1991). Pushkin's story is much the same, but there is one exception: the captain's daughter, who is captured by Pugachev, remains unharmed. Against the background of the oriental brutality that Pushkin describes in a straightforward manner, the absence of violence toward the object of all the charac­ters' desire is a kind of negative device. The honor of the heroine is of critical importance not only for the characters of the story, but also for its entire colonial construction. By saving Mashenka, Pushkin allows her to recount her unlikely adventure to the Empress, appeal­ing to her - and to the reader - for mercy toward those who rose up and perished. The narrative is full of migrations in the cultural space, but the most unlikely of these - going at first to the very depths of a rebellious people, then to the very heights of the imperial order - is accomplished by a woman. Her salvation halts the vicious circle of violence, symbolizes the renewal of the civil peace, and promises the viability of the colonial order. The reader who was aware of the reality of peasant uprisings would notice the unusualness of this plotline, and would therefore be able to apprehend its ideological significance.

Impervious to imperial power, the province obeys its own rules of exchange, in wealth and violence alike. Throughout The Captain's Daughter, the native rites of gift-giving interact with the rationalism and unforgiving justice of the imperial state. Pushkin's analysis reveals these two conflicting principles and tries to find a balance between them. It is in this middle ground that the hope of maintaining the colonial situation resides. The first gift in this novel is, appropriately, one of fur. Grinev gives Pugachev a hare fur coat: "The tramp was extraordinarily pleased with my gift." Just as in Marcel Mauss's anthropological studies of the Maoris, so too with Pushkin's literary studies of the Cossacks: the gift obliges the recipient to repay it, not because of some external law, but rather because the thing in itself - here, the fur coat - carries with it something of its former owner that must be returned. The two authors, Mauss and Pushkin, were equally ambivalent in their attitudes toward the customs described: which is better, justice and the settling of accounts, or mercy and giving? In native rites, each successive gift is greater than the previous one. In return for the fur coat, Pugachev gives Grinev a sheepskin, a horse, and life. Pugachev begins another chain of giving by preserving Mashenka's honor and gifting her to Grinev. In return, Grinev "pas­sionately" wants to save Pugachev's neck, and he and Mashenka will pray for the salvation of his soul. In Mauss's formulation, the gift is thus a way of "buying the world," the very same world that in "civi­lized" conditions is protected by the state (Mauss 2002; Bethea 1998). When Grinev returns from the rebellious people to the civi­lized world and goes on trial, Mashenka circumvents the state and returns to the world of the gift, asking Catherine II for "mercy, and not justice." She receives not only mercy, but also, according to the rules of ritual giving, her dowry. Pushkin's compromise has worked. Many generations of readers will be captivated not only by the black- bearded and inscrutable Pugachev, but also by that extra-legal mercy of the Empress. The novel ends, however, with Pugachev's execution on the scaffold. The Captain's Daughter was the first work to embody the horror of Russian rebellion, and the first to reify the equally familiar "charm" of the Russian people that even in the twentieth century many felt to be irresistible (Tsvetaeva 2006).

The Gender of Sacrifice

Fyodor Dostoevsky's writings fit neatly between two major sacrificial events, his own mock execution along with other members of an early revolutionary circle in 1849 and the assassination of the Tsar in 1881. In his works, Dostoevsky shows one murder after another, and most of them had women as their victims. In Crime and Punishment, a male student murders two females, a pawnbroker and her sister. One can speculate that a premeditated murder evokes more guilt when directed against a woman, and the doubling-up of killed females reinforces this guilt. In this narrative, however, a theme of female suffering is illustrated by another female character, the prostitute. The prostitute, a victim of social abuse, is the opposite of the victim of murder, the pawnbroker. One suffers, another is killed, but both are females. The story of Idiot (1868) elevates these themes by merging them. The novel culminates in the murder of Nastasia Filippovna, who carries two features of Russian heroines, beauty and suffering, to the possible limits.

There are three main characters: prince Myshkin, the Man of Culture, merchant Rogozhin, the Man of the People, and Nastasia, the Russian Beauty. The action takes place in St. Petersburg, to where the prince comes from Switzerland and the merchant, from the depths of Russian mysticism, with a family connection to the sect of Skoptsy (Castrates). The strange dynamics of the relationship between Myshkin and Rogozhin reflect, as in a laboratory experiment, the structure of internal colonization. At the same time, the friendship and rivalry between these two men, united by their desire toward Nastasia, is a definitive example of the mediation of desire in Girard's sense. The plotline displays the characteristic drive towards the reduc­tion of cultural distance and foreshadows the catastrophic conse­quences of such 'fraternization'.

Many men loved Nastasia; she kept running from one to another, and finally she preferred Rogozhin. Why did he kill Nastasia instead of marrying her? Trying to understand it in terms of common sense leads nowhere. However, prince Myshkin, with his ability to under­stand people, did understand Rogozhin. Why did he not prevent the murder or seek revenge for it? Why did he collaborate in concealing the murder? Why did he spend that night together with the corpse of his loved one and with her murderer? Of course, this experience was hugely important for him; afterwards, he went insane. Because we feel that Myshkin understood Rogozhin's reasons, why do we not know these reasons, either from Rogozhin himself or from Myshkin? Why do Rogozhin and Myshkin not talk about it? Actually, we are deprived of any possibility of understanding these events from the inside. In this particular situation, neither the characters nor the nar­rator perform a dialogue. In many preceding scenes, we heard their voices. They performed that very exchange between the internal posi­tions of the actors, different but communicable, in which Bakhtin found the key to Dostoevsky. Rather than being a part and an outcome of human dialogue, the murder of Nastasia is presented as something that just happened. It permits only external observation. This is how sacrifice works, and this is where Girard complements Bakhtin.

Sharing the object of their passions, these two men who loved Nastasia became increasingly close. They were endowed with every possible difference: they came from two different estates, the old nobility and the rising capitalists; they belonged to different religious backgrounds, one to high Orthodoxy, another to a mysterious cult; they had opposite temperaments. But, united by their love for Nastasia and by their interest in each other, they become as close as twins.

They exchange crosses, performing a ritual of acquired brotherhood, and they read together "all of Pushkin." As a result of their friend­ship, competition, and mutual influence, they outgrow their personal limits. Relations between them are dialogical and ideological, and reading Bakhtin helps a lot to understand their substance. However, these relations cannot be explained without reference to the third person, whom both of them love. This process is explicable by an important concept of Girard, the concept of mimetic, or triangular, desire. As Girard insists, mimetic desire merges two components, a longing for the object and a competition with the rival, in such a way that one cannot tell what is primary and what is secondary. While passions develop, both parts become progressively dependent upon each other as mediators of their desires. As Girard says, mimetic desire is contagious, and an epidemic of it can be resolved only by a sacrifice. Mimetic brothers Rogozhin and Myshkin, who compete and collaborate in their desire for Nastasia, have their female coun­terparts in the mimetic sisters, Nastasia and Aglaia, whose passions are addressed to Myshkin. Nastasia, who is at the center of this mimetic network, logically becomes the sacrificial victim. Importantly, there is no word in The Idiot to suggest that Nastasia deserved her fate, from anyone's point of view. Sacrifice is neither punishment nor revenge; actually, the least guilty are the better victims for a true sacrifice.

The irrationality of this relationship is created in equal measure by all three protagonists. We never understand why Myshkin attempts to marry Nastasia, why she runs out from underneath the wedding wreath, why Rogozhin murders her, or why Myshkin forgives him. Scholars have suggested many partial explanations: the homoerotic attraction between the male heroes; class struggle between old nobil­ity and the new bourgeoisie; a confessional debate that ends in Nastasia's initiation as a member of the Skoptsy sect. Without wishing to suggest one more such explanation, I will attempt to re-read Myshkin's speeches.

There is a wonderful episode in the novel, which involves Myshkin, St. Petersburg society, and a Chinese vase. Rogozhin is absent, although Myshkin constantly speaks about him. A society gathering is composed of a German-born general, an anglophile noble, a Russian poet, etc. The anglophile recounts with displeasure "certain outbreaks of disorder on the landed estates" and refers with sympathy to a relative who has converted to Catholicism. Myshkin replies that Catholicism is an unchristian faith and gives rise to socialism. He argues that "our Christ must shine forth in rejection of the West" and also that "he who has no roots beneath his feet has no God." In this speech, Russia is a country of the authentic east and God is, by definition, "our God." Just as in totemic cults, what is not our God is not God at all. Religion is thus inseparable from politics; both relate to geography, and all three are locked together in the national idea. Myshkin also says that "the most educated of our people have stooped so low as to become the Khlysty," a popular sect. Referring to Rogozhin, Myshkin sends his audience the message of internal orientalism: "Reveal to the yearning and feverish companions of Columbus the 'New World', reveal to the Russian the 'world' of Russia, let him find the gold, the treasure hidden from him on earth!" (Dostoevsky 1996: 511). The main colonial event - the discovery of America - is turned inwards on Russia: the interior provinces where Myshkin has recently traveled are, for him, the New World. The depths of these regions must be discovered in order to resurrect Russia and the world. But St. Petersburg society prevents genuinely Russian people from accom­plishing their transfiguration. As Myshkin says:

I'm afraid for you, for all of you, for all of us together. I am a prince myself, of ancient family, and I am sitting with princes. I speak to save us all, that our class [the gentry estate] may not vanish in vain, in dark­ness, without realizing anything, abusing everything, and losing every­thing. (Dostoevsky 1996: 518)

The class of internal colonization, Myshkin warns, has lost the game. This class can only be saved, he thinks, by pilgrimage to the country of the east, to the interior regions of Russia. And soon, in 1874, many would indeed take this journey, "going to the people," which, more precisely, meant the Khlysty and other sects (see Chapter 10).

The positive orientalism of the imperial elite is characteristic of the later stages of colonization and coincides with the advent of national­ist movements in the colonies. From Rousseau to Levi-Strauss, the romanticization of the distant and noble savage has been an impor­tant element of the western tradition. Russia has also made its con­tribution to this, a contribution that is, as always, centripetal. Myshkin wishes to be the Russian Columbus, while Rogozhin guards his trea­sure like Montezuma, in that he is ready to give it up to whoever asks properly for it, and with similar consequences. Meanwhile, the society of the capital, blind to the genuine idyll of the interior, wor­ships false idols like the "enormous, beautiful Chinese vase, standing on its pedestal." External orientalism can be smashed with a single gesture, thus revealing the treasures within; this is exactly what

Myshkin does at the peak of his ecstasy. The east is doubled; one version is embodied in the Chinese vase, the other in Myshkin's speech.

The Idiot, as has long been realized, is an ideological novel. One of the aspects of the bizarre union between Myshkin and Rogozhin is their ideological exchange. The prince has read "all" of Pushkin to the merchant, while the merchant has told the prince of the unity of God and soil. None of this explains, however, why it was necessary to kill Nastasia Fillipovna. This act resolves the triangular structure in the gravest of ways. The sacrifice of an innocent woman is the most malignant of all possible outcomes of the ritual action. As we see in the story, Myshkin and Rogozhin, who constitute the sacrificial community, are destroyed along with their victim. The novel's terrible conclusion is proof that its author did not believe in the resurrection of mankind through "the Russian idea, the Russian God," a belief he puts in the words of caricatured murderers. Such belief leads to terrible evil, and is entirely exposed in the process. Myshkin was not the Christ - and Dostoevsky not the idiot - they are made to look like in some interpretations.

The Real Day

If the social sciences rely on statistical criteria to demonstrate the significance of observed differences, the humanities rely on the read­er's memory and the age-long work of selection that it does. When readers think about the Russian novel or drama of the 1860-70s, they remember the deaths of female characters: Ostrovsky's Thunderstorm, suicide; Dostoevsky's Idiot, murder; Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, suicide . . . too many Ophelias, too few Hamlets. Before and sometimes after the murder of Nastasia, violent deaths in Russian literature were predominantly those of women. A scholar of European opera observes a similar plotline of "undoing women" in the major masterpieces that were widely influential throughout the nineteenth century (Clement 1988).

Contemporaneous criticism was well aware of the special role that Russian stories, and Russian history, attributed to women. Reviewing Ostrovsky's play, Thunderstorm, which ended with the suicide of the central heroine, the radical critic Nikolai Dobroliubov speculated that two human conditions, males' "sovereign stupidity" and females' "wholesome decisiveness," interact in such a way that the only outcome is the death of the woman. Foreshadowing Joseph Conrad's metaphor of the heart of darkness, Dobroliubov wrote that provincial Russia was the tsardom of darkness. A suicidal woman was the only beam of light: the public was "glad to watch the escape of Katerina, even though through death" (1962: 6/362). Rather than giving a "realistic analysis of social issues," which was believed to be the task of literature, Ostrovsky's play, Dobroliubov's essay, and Dostoevsky's novel all produced simple, memorable symbols of human suffering. On the threshold of the 1861 Emancipation of the serfs, the public was in need of gestures of self-accusation, as strong as possible. Seeing female suffering and death, the public felt guilty. They hoped that men in power would change their ways. When they did not, the public, including men in power, read about even more female deaths in books, or watched them at the theatre. Collective participation in sacrificial rites, which were performed by high culture, enacted these men's guilt.

But the most radical men had further thoughts. In his famous review, "When Will the Real Day Come?," Dobroliubov attacked Turgenev's novel On the Eve (1860) for showing another beautiful and suffering Russian woman. She was in love with a revolutionary, but he was foreign. This Bulgarian nationalist brought Elena to his country and she died on the road. The Russian critic envies the Bulgarian character who lives and fights in an alliance with all groups of his society, because they all have a common enemy, the Turks. "Russian life has no such monotony; every estate, every little group lives its own life, has its particular goals," which confront each other. The real day will come, prophesized the critic, when a Russian revo­lutionary will come to struggle with "with our internal enemies." But his task will be challenging. In a memorable metaphor, Dobroliubov compares society to an empty box, which is easy to flip from the outside but impossible to overthrow for someone who sits inside of it. It is easier to be a nationalist who fights with a foreign oppressor than to fight one's own oppressors inside the same space:

A Russian hero . . .is connected by blood with all those that he rebels against. He is in a position of, say, a son of a Turkish sultan who would decide to emancipate Bulgaria from the Turks. . . . This is horribly dif­ficult; such a decision demands a very different development from the one that the son of a Turkish sultan usually gets. (Dobroliubov 1962: 6/163)

For this critic of the 1860s, internal colonization was already con­nected with gender. The oppression of Russian women correlated with the internal colonization of Russian men. Women in Russia were like Bulgaria under the Turks: external colonization made things clear and heroism possible. "The real day" would come when Russian men would, like this son of the Turkish sultan, rebel against themselves.

Catechism of a Revolutionary, a programmatic document of Russian political terrorism that was composed by Sergei Nechaev in 1869, called for new sacrifices: "The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no pity for the state . . . and expects no pity for himself. . . . Every day he must be prepared for death. . . . Day and night he must have one single purpose: merciless destruction" (Nechaev 1997: 244). There was no gender ambivalence in this text. Both parts of the sac­rificial act, executors and victims, were imagined to be men.

The sacrifice of the Man of the People restored the political balance and, therefore, promised the preservation of the colonial order. From the point of view of the characters, the author, and many readers, Pushkin's Pugachev was a criminal and was executed by a legal court. The sacrifice of an innocent woman raised the narrative to the level of a final, apocalyptic catastrophe. The sacrifice of the Man of Culture represents the victory of the colonized people, which the metropolitan elite cannot, indeed does not want to, resist. Possessed by a sense of historical guilt, the elite oversees its own destruction, organizes its own sacrifice. A good example is Andrei Bely's Silver Dove (1909), in which we observe, once again, a familiar triangular structure. Darialsky is a poet-symbolist and typical intellectual of late populism. The idyll that attracts him is as irrepressible as it is nonsensical; as usual for idylls, it combines three vectors - the mystical, the political, and the erotic. The Wise Man of the People, Kudeiarov is described in more expressive terms than either Pugachev or Rogozhin. But Matrena, a subject of fatal attraction for Darialsky, is faceless. Her only secret is the nature of her relationship to Kudeiarov: is she a mistress? a daughter? a spiritual sister?

The new resolution of the triangular narrative - the sacrifice of the Man of Culture - sends a different message. Like Myshkin before him, Darialsky descends "into the depths" of the mystical sectarians. His sectarian guru, Kudeiarov, is close to the Khlysty and the author describes their rituals with many ethnographical details. Along with his Russian contemporaries, the erudite Andrei Bely was aware of Durkheim's writings on religion and many volumes by the nineteenth- century classicists who depicted the redeeming effects of pagan sac­rifices. But the collective murder of Darialsky is entirely senseless; the purposelessness of this sacrifice is emphasized throughout the entire plot. Neither the victim, who did not expect to be killed, nor the murderers, who experience no redemption afterwards, invest any meaning in the sacrifice. In attempting to grasp and accept the faith of the people, Darialsky ends up being ritually murdered because of his desperate search for a popular tradition. Constructing this story, Bely used the living memory of the populists' journeys to the coun­tryside and the rich ethnography of the Russian sects (see Chapter 10). In performing for revolution, the intelligentsia - a group whose existence is justified by its civilizing mission in relation to the people - attempts to find some religious or political meaning in its own self- sacrifice. Aware of the consequences, Bely has deconstructed the idea of sacrifice itself. The murder of Darialsky is presented as an evil deed, behind which there is the contact of two systems of belief that have nothing in common with one another, those of the people and those of the populists.

Darialsky and his murderer, Kudeiarov, are distinct from one another in every possible way, except in race and gender. Once again, we see the paradoxical situation of internal colonization, which makes it so suitable for literary development. In this contact zone, the colonies were as close to the metropolitan center as suburbs, and utterly different people had the same skin color. The meaning of The Silver Dove could be clarified by comparing it with Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, which Bely probably read (Lavrov 2004). Like Darialsky, Kurtz had his own local woman, but all the natives in Conrad's text are nameless, and we do not see a single witch-doctor here, let alone any rival to Kurtz. By way of contrast, Bely showed Darialsky in the detailed context of the rituals of the Khlysty sect; their leader Kudeiarov's spiritual hegemony over the intellectual Darialsky is clear from the story. In contrast to Darialsky's, Kurtz's religious innovations were "efficient": his rituals allowed him to extract more ivory than his colleagues. Colonial power does not require the eradication of local customs, but rather their reconstruc­tion from within and their exploitation by Men of Culture. In pursu­ing their colonial projects, Darialsky failed where Kurtz succeeded. But as both stories teach us, these projects were equally doomed.

The Double

Carried to its extreme, the situation of internal colonization brings us back to Girard's concepts of the "crisis of difference" and "the monstrous double." In mythology and literature, doubles and mon­sters are often the same, writes Girard. Nobody understood their dynamics better than Dostoevsky, he states, though he does not explain how Dostoevsky managed to reach an understanding that others, from Sophocles on, have not (1995: 160-1). A re-reading of Dostoevsky's crucial text, The Double (1846), helps to grasp the historical sources of his inspiration.

As in Gogol's "The Nose," a low-level St. Petersburgclerk, Goliadkin, has met his double. This clone carries his name, works in the same position, and is one day a friend, another day a foe. Worst of all, the double is always quicker, smarter, and more beloved than the original. Goliadkin is insane, of course, but he does not know it. He feels the apparition of the double as a personal and a cultural catastrophe, an overthrow in the heart of the social order; he is amazed that others do not share his sentiment. The story develops within a narrow social space, which is defined by an inverted pyramid of power, from the undifferentiated crowd of Goliadkin's superiors to his servant, Petrusha. The only horizontal relationship that Goliadkin seems to have ever had is the one with his clone. He is unhappy with himself and his place in the world. He always pretends to be someone else, to take someone's role, to be "an impostor." He rents a carriage that is appropriate to a higher rank and drives around the city with no purpose; he bargains for expensive purchases that he does not need, promises to come and pay, and never does. Pretending to be someone else, he is punished by someone else who pretends to be him, his double.

A St. Petersburgdweller, Goliadkin was born "elsewhere" and this birthplace made him alien to his fellow officials. Still, he is a gentle­man who owns his apartment, hires a servant, and has savings. His ninth rank in the Table of Ranks was the first that, according to the law of 1845, guaranteed him rights that belonged to the gentry, such as the ability to own serfs and freedom from corporal punishment. By law and status, he is a master; but his mind and speech are destroyed to such an extent that he looks and sounds like he does not belong to himself. Though he speaks often, nobody - neither his doctor, nor his superiors, nor his servant - understands him. He is listened to as if he is a subaltern, i.e. he is not listened to at all. Only his unreliable double understands him; but the double is always ready to betray him in order to take his place. Now that he is in two places at once, the gaze of power cannot control him. He pays for it dearly.

We do not know in which Ministry Goliadkin served. From what we do know, his knowledge and interests are all connected to what Russians then considered to be their orient. In his conversations with his double, Goliadkin mentions Turkey, Algeria, and India. The only writer that he ever refers to is the prolific Osip Senkovsky, the orientalist scholar and also author, editor, and censor. Goliadkin and his double "smiled a lot about the simple-mindedness of the Turks" and talked about the Turks' "fanaticism which is aroused by opium." There is no further word in the story about Goliadkin's national sentiments or political views; his only allegiance seems to be his self- affirmation at the cost of those whom he considers inferior because they are more oriental than the Russians. There is not a word in the story about serfs either, though the servant Petrusha is a pertinent object of rivalry between Goliadkin and his double. As Goliadkin's delirium unfolds, Petrusha works as his reality check; when Petrusha leaves Goliadkin for his double, Goliadkin collapses. Superiors sack Goliadkin-the-original, hire Goliadkin-the-copy, and send the origi­nal Goliadkin to the asylum. There is a gloomy anti-utopian message in this early fantasy of Dostoevsky's. In order to be listened to and understood, the subaltern needs his equals; if he does not have them, he creates them; but these equals, inescapably, subject our subject to a new kind of oppression. His doctor, the embodiment of his horror, carries the name Rutenshpits, an inverted double of the Russian word shpitsruten, the gauntlet.

In Bhabha's words, which were evoked by his readings of Fanon rather than Dostoevsky, in the colonial situation, "in place of the symbolic unconsciousness that gives the sign of identity its integrity and unity, its depth, we are faced with the dimension of doubling" (1994: 71). But Dostoevsky's fantasy goes further than Bhabha's theories. Goliadkin's multiplication does not terminate with his dou­bling; as his delirium develops, he sees more and more copies of himself: St. Petersburgis full of them; flocking together like geese, they chase Goliadkin; a policeman brings them all in to jail, but in vain. "A horrible abyss of perfect simulacra," wrote Dostoevsky about Goliadkin's experience (1993: 1/242).

The intensity of the competition between Goliadkin and his double always surprised Dostoevsky's readers. As Mikhail Bakhtin (2000: 118) put it in his brilliant reading of The Double, "the foreign word settled in Goliadkin's consciousness and took power there." The "foreign word" is one of Bakhtin's most frequent and favorite con­cepts, but here it acquires a political, colonial connotation, that of a foreign settler who is also an invader, an occupant. According to Bakhtin, three voices interact in Goliadkin's internal conversations: the voice which affirms Goliadkin's independence from the foreign word of those in power; the voice which simulates Goliadkin's indif­ference to this foreign word; and the voice which imitates the foreign word as if it is his - Goliadkin's - own. These three voices model the dynamics of internal colonization, which results not in dialogue and integrity but in doubling and madness. The story of Goliadkin is told by someone else, a conventional observer who, as happens in novels, holds narratorial and also disciplinary power over the character, someone like a doctor or a detective who reconstructs the internal life of another person. But Bakhtin shows that this framing, objectify­ing narrative of The Double is often mixed with words that could be attributed only to Goliadkin. The circle closes here: the voice of power is also infected with the madness of the subject. Simultaneously with Bakhtin's discovery of dialogism in Dostoevsky, Walter Benjamin (1999: 13) wrote about the Russian peasants' incapability of "fol­lowing two simultaneous narrative strands" as a problem that was recognized by the early Soviet filmmakers. Essentially, Bakhtin's "dia- logism" is the subject's ability to follow and develop "two simultane­ous narrative strands" without collapsing into doubling. If Goliadkin's obsessive dialogue with his double illustrates the problem which was noticed by Benjamin, Bakhtin's focus on the open, creative dialogue - a process that always resists the monologic interference that comes from power - may be understood as his solution.

Dostoevsky's reader feels that there is no exit from Goliadkin's suffering precisely because he is possessed by a double, his exact and strangely modern clone, rather than an old-fashioned monster of the kind that Gogol and other Gothic predecessors of Dostoevsky loved to portray. Monsters are playful and picturesque; they are humans hybridized with animals and spirits; they come from afar and they might return there, like Transylvanian vampires or Haitian zombies. Monsters can be explored and tamed; doubles cannot be colonized because they are failed products of colonization. As the experience of horror movies teaches us, "To transform the double back into a monster is to retain a residual sense of oneself as one self" (Coates 1991: 87; see also Webber 1996). This is exactly what Goliadkin fails to accomplish. While external colonization finds its symbolic repre­sentation in hybrids, internal colonization finds it in doubles. The circular character of this imaginary matches the reflective character of self-colonization, which is striving to define its Other and ends up with doubles of the Self. Jean-Paul Sartre (1963: 22) wrote that "the European has only been able to become a man through creating slaves and monsters." His undoing has been through creating serfs and doubles.

Internal colonization led to the unlimited sophistication of cultural differentiations which had as its limit the replication of subjects' vicious doubles. In the mid-nineteenth century, this process targeted the middle men of the imperial system who found themselves split by the unstable but razor-sharp colonial frontier that cut through their selves, leaving them alone with their doubles. Goliadkin's despair produces a community of his own simulacra: a parody of the social­ism of Fourier and his Russian followers with whom Dostoevsky, at the moment of writing, was increasingly disenchanted. When the self collapses, its split produces a double and then a multitude, a society of equals. Readers of Bakhtin and Dostoevsky use the notion of the dialogical as a paradigm for the postcolonial utopia, a proof of the human ability to relate to the other as other. The Double is also a blueprint for the post-totalitarian anti-utopia, a document of human collapse when the other is purged.

The geography and history of internal colonization compressed nineteenth-century Russian culture into folds, which connected dif­ferent levels that in other western cultures were separated either by oceans or by millennia. On the level of high professional culture - among Russian authors and their cultured heroes such as Grinev, Myshkin, and Darialsky - there developed rationality, individualism, writing, and discipline. On the level of folk culture - among millions of Russian peasants - life was "eastern," "native," "communal," "oral," and "mystical." This is the level of Pugachev, Rogozhin, and Kudeiarov. There was also the middle-ground level of the imperial officials, managers, and executors of colonization, people like Maksim Maksimovich, Kovalev, or Goliadkin. The heart of darkness was there; their terrible conflicts developed in an imperial solitude, in the conspicuous absence of women and worldliness that triggers the dynamics of a novel. Representing the short circuits of sacrifice and doubling that punctured the folds of history, the Russian novel por­tended the modern condition, in which internal colonization gradu­ally takes over from external colonization. As Iurii Tynianov put it in 1924: "Russian literature was subjected to many demands, but all were futile. It was ordered to discover India, but instead it discovered America" (Tynianov 2001: 458).

Conclusion

Things move fast in the postcolonial world. Just a few decades ago, the idea that Ukraine or even Central Asia were colonies of the Soviet Empire evoked furious resistance on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In the 1990s, postcolonial experts still debated the reasons for not applying their concepts to the emerging countries of the post-Soviet space. The current literature resolves these problems but reveals new ones. Focusing on ethnicity, nationalism, and sovereignty in this part of the world, many scholars have turned their backs on the peculiar institutions of the Russian Empire that defined the life of northern Eurasia for several centuries and brought it to its twentieth-century turmoil. Russian serfdom provides a good example. A central subject for nineteenth-Russian politics and historiography, it is reduced to a footnote in the twenty-first-century textbooks of Russian history. Abolished at the same time as American slavery and involving much greater numbers, serfdom must have had at least as deep and lasting an impact. However, nothing similar to the North American attention to the legacy of slavery has emerged. This reveals a double standard, in academia and elsewhere.

The constructivist paradigm downplays the notions of legacy and historical continuity that inspired several generations of Sovietologists. During the Cold War, many scholars justified their interests by deriv­ing the Soviet institutions from the history of the Russian Empire. Ignoring the changing agency of the rulers and the populus, these straightforward explanations do not seem convincing now. There is no more reason to believe that the Soviet regime was a reincarnation of the Russian Empire than to deduce the peculiarities of post-Soviet Russia from the Soviet regime. Every generation makes its own choice within the window of opportunities that it receives from the past.

However, some of these opportunities and constraints have proven to be surprisingly stable in this part of the world. There are continu­ities in Russia's geography and ecology that one cannot deny. Russia acquired most of its territory before the institution of the Empire, and the main reason for amassing this territory was fur. With the exhaustion of this natural resource, the state underwent a cata­strophic and productive transformation that laid the foundation for the Empire. This was a period of multiple experiments with discover­ing, appropriating, populating, cultivating, and domesticating - in a word, colonizing - lands within and beyond the moving boundaries of the Empire. For centuries, the Russian state combined its territorial expansion with a strong immigration policy. It imported people, settled and resettled them, and launched experimental forms of popu­lation management. Illicit or organized, these movements spanned the elastic continuums of internal versus external, native versus foreign, assimilated versus alien. These spatial oppositions were sub­ordinated to intuitive ideas of temporal order. Old areas of coloniza­tion were felt as domestic, recently occupied areas as foreign. Political categories of space emerged from the perception of historical time. The external and the internal swapped ceaselessly. Konigsberg was outside Russian borders for the larger part of its millennial history; but when Russian troops took it, the dwellers of Konigsberg more than once became subjects of the Russian state, as had the people of Ingria where St. Petersburg stands, and as, much earlier, had those who lived where Moscow stands. While military and political borders were expanding outside, the heartland remained underdeveloped. It had to be colonized again, and again. In the mid-nineteenth century, Russian mainstream historians started to use this colonial terminol­ogy, and gradually the bureaucratic circles of St. Petersburg accepted it. In 1907-17, Problems of Colonization (Voprosy kolonizatsii) was the title of the official journal of the Resettlement Administration, an agency that had been founded in 1896 within the Ministry of Internal Affairs and later moved into the Ministry of Agriculture. Led by their "etatist and technocratic ethos," officials of this administration oversaw the colonial efforts of the state that were directed both onto the reorganization of the Russian heartlands (Stolypin reforms) and the migration of the peasantry to Siberia, Central Asia, and Transcaucasia (Holquist 2010a). This terminology survived the Bolshevik Revolution but did not outlive Stalinism. In 1922, the Bolshevik government opened the State Scientific Research Institute of Colonization, which functioned until 1930 (Rybakovsky 1998; Hirsch 2005).