The scare of the self: Sentimentalism, privacy, and private life in Russian culture, 1780-1820

Slavic Review

Volumn 57, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 723-746

  Schönle, Andreas ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34248112931     PISSN: 00376779     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2501044     Document Type: Article

References (119)

1. On the Russian travelogue in the years 1790-1840, see T. Roboli's influential formalist typology presented in "Literatura puteshestvii," Russkaia proza (Leningrad, 1926), 42-73.
2. Reuel K. Wilson offered a somewhat pedestrian discussion of the "literary merits" of some of the major works of the genre in The Literary Travelogue: A Comparative Study with Special Relevance to Russian Literature from Fonvizin to Pushkin (The Hague, 1973).
3. E. S. Ivashina contributed a well-documented discussion of the travelogue's place in Russian literary history. See her dissertation "Zhanr literaturnogo puteshestviia v Rossii kontsa XVIII-pervoi treti XIX veka" (Ph.D. diss., Moscow State University, 1980)
4. and her article "O spetsifike zhanra 'puteshestviia' v russkoi literature pervoi treu XIX v.," Vestnik moskovskogo universiteta. Seriia 9: Filologiia, no. 3 (1979): 3-16.
5. Viktor Guminskii addressed some cultural themes of the travelogue throughout the history of Russia in his Otkrytie mira, ili Puteshestviia i stranniki (Moscow, 1987).
6. Sara Dickinson sheds useful light on more obscure travel texts in her "Imagining Space and the Self: Russian Travel Writing and Its Narrators, 1762-1825" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1995).
7. And I attempt a cultural study of the travelogue in my "Authenticity and Fiction in the Russian Literary Journey, 1790-1840" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1995).
8. On the philosophical sources in Scottish Enlightenment of a concept of the private sphere as a realm of noninstrumental, elective affinities, see Allan Silver, '"Two Different Sorts of Commerce' - Friendship and Strangership in Civil Society," in Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar, eds., Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy (Chicago, 1997), 43-74.
9. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 155-62.
10. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity Ibid., 363-67.
11. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity Ibid., 361-63, 375.
12. On Rousseau's dialectic creation and annihilation of the Autonomous self, see also Huck Gutman, "Rousseau's Confessions: A Technology of the Self," in Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, eds., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst, 1988), 99-120.
13. Quoted by Taylor, Sources of the Self, 375.
14. For a solid recent survey of Russian sentimentalist literature, see N. D. Kochetkova, Literatura russkogo sentimentalizma: Esteticheskie i khudozhestvennye iskaniia (St. Petersburg, 1994).
15. For a perceptive discussion of sentimentalism in the arts, with a careful attempt at contextualization, see T. Alekseeva, Vladimir Lukich Borovikovskii i russkaia kul'tura na rubezhe 18-go-19-go vekov (Moscow, 1975).
16. On the Russian reception of Rousseau, see Iurii Lotman, "Russo i russkaia kul'tura XVIII-nachala XIX veka," Izbrannye star'i (Tallinn, 1992), 2:40-99.
17. The Russian response to Enlightenment philosophy in general is addressed by Marc Raeff in "The Enlightenment in Russia and Russian Thought in the Enlightenment," in J. G. Garrard, ed., The Eighteenth Century in Russia (Oxford, 1973), 25-47.
18. See also Marc Raeff's "The Impact of Western Ideas," in his Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth-Century Nobility (New York, 1966), 148-71.
19. For a discussion of the various meanings of the public/private dichotomy and the various intellectual frameworks in which it occurs, see Jeff Weintraub, "The Theory and Politics of the Public/Private Distinction," in Weintraub and Kumar, eds., Public and Private in Thought and Practice, 1-42.
20. Weintraub underscores the double and variable meaning of the private as that which is hidden from the public and hence invisible and that which is individual. See Weintraub, "Theory and Politics of the Public/Private Distinction," 5. The term privacy clearly refers to the former signification, while private life also alludes to the latter.
21. See Roger Chartier, "Les pratiques de l'écrit," in Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, eds., Histoire de la vie privée, vol. 3, De la Renaissance aux Lumières (Paris, 1986), esp. 127-61.
22. Brook Thomas, "The Construction of Privacy in and around the Bostonians," in H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism Reader (New York, 1994), 162.
23. The common-law right to privacy was first argued by Samuel D. Warren and Justice Louis D. Brandeis in 1890 in "The Right to Privacy," reprinted in Ferdinand D. Schoeman, ed., Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy: An Anthology (Cambridge, Eng., 1984), 75-103.
24. See Philippe Ariès, who charted, alongside changes in the relations between a particular and the state, the history of a change of sociabilities, from anonymous commerce in a public setting to the restricted but more personalized interaction within the family. Philippe Ariès, "Pour une histoire de la vie privée," in Ariès and Duby, eds., Histoire de la vie privée, 3:16-17.
25. Marc Raeff, Understanding Imperial Russia: State and Society in the Old Regime (New York, 1984), 41-87.
26. For a brief survey of the destiny of privacy in Russian history and culture, see Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 73-81.
27. On the philosophy behind patriarchy and on the pervasiveness of this notion, even among Enlightened writers such as Nikolai Novikov and N. M. Karamzin, see Stephen Lessing Baehr, The Paradise Myth in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Stanford, 1991), 124-28.
28. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 28-30.
29. See Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia, 43-47,
30. and Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York, 1974), 180-83.
31. "Catherine's Charter to the Nobility, 1785," in James Cracraft, ed., Major Problems in the History of Imperial Russia (Lexington, 1994), 205-12.
32. Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia, 97.
33. Baehr makes it clear that patriarchal conventions remained valid even under female rulers. Baehr, Paradise Myth in Eighteenth-Century Russia, 124.
34. Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, 180.
35. Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia, 98.
36. See also Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, 1997), 29-30. Wirtschafter emphasizes the ambiguity of the nobility's rights and privileges.
37. Elise Wirtschafter discusses the interaction between legal framework, societal self-definition, and individual self-fashioning in nineteenth-century Russia in Structures of Society: Imperial Russia's "People of Various Ranks" (DeKalb, 1994), 18-37, 118-25. She emphasizes the importance of culture, rather than legal status or economic condition, in the construction of social identity.
38. D. I. Fonvizin, Nedorosl', in Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow and Leningrad, 1959), 172.
39. Irina Reyfman studied the spread of the duel in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century as the nobility's response to the authorities' systematic violations of their personal rights and dignity. The duel was the only recourse a nobleman had to restore his good name and his personal rights, which the state had failed to protect. The duel took on this political and social function despite the nobility's awareness of its intrinsic irrationality and inefficiency, as an institution that gives any slanderer and scandal-mongerer the opportunity to provoke a respectable person into a potentially lethal duel. In fact, Catherine had banned duels because of their threat to individual rights, rather than on political grounds. Irina Reyfman, "The Emergence of the Duel in Russia," Russian Review 54, no. 1 (1995): 26-43.
40. Iu. M. Lotman, "Poetika bytovogo povedeniia v russkoi kul'ture XVIII veka," Izbrannye stat'i (Tallinn, 1992), 1:251-52,
41. and Iu. M. Lotman, "Teatr i teatral'nost' v stroe kul'tury nachala XIX veka," Izbrannye stat'i, 1:269-86.
42. For a discussion of theatricality and the ideology of "talk" at the beginning of the nineteenth century, see also William Todd, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 10-44.
43. See Todd, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin, 18-25, on language, taste, and fashion as exclusionary mechanisms.
44. Norbert Elias, La société de cour (Paris, 1985), 29. The role of the family as a unit of social representation, rather than a sphere of intimacy, is another reason why the concept of privacy developed by Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere fails to be applicable to aristocratic and noble culture.
45. N. M. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika (Leningrad, 1984), 365. Feminists have criticized the private/public distinction as a way to inscribe and perpetuate gender inequalities.
46. See Jean L. Cohen, "Rethinking Privacy: The Abortion Controversy," in Weintraub and Kumar, eds., Public and Private in Thought and Practice, 133-65. Evidently, Karamzin's assigning women to the private sphere, at the same time as he argues for its importance, is a case in point.
47. For a recent narratological study of Karamzin's fiction, see Gitta Hammarberg, From the Idyll to the Novel: Karamzin's Sentimentalist Prose (Cambridge, Eng., 1991).
48. Iurii Lotman offered an important and stimulating, if speculative, discussion of Karamzin's intellectual evolution in Sotvorenie Karamzina (Moscow, 1987).
49. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, 366.
50. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, Ibid., 274, 267, and 298, respectively.
51. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, Ibid., 380-81.
52. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, Ibid., 381.
53. See, for example, P. I. Shalikov, Drugoe puteshestvie v Malorossiiu (Moscow, 1804), 79 and 85,
54. or I. M. Dolgorukii, Slavny bubny za gorami ili puteshestvie moe koe-kuda 1810 goda (Moscow, 1870), 87 and 175.
55. P. I. Makarov, Pis'ma iz Londona (1803-4), in V. I. Korovin, ed., Landshaft moego voobrazheniia (Moscow, 1990), 501.
56. P. I. Makarov, Landshaft moego voobrazheniia Ibid., 509.
57. P. I. Makarov, Landshaft moego voobrazheniia Ibid., 501.
58. P. I. Makarov, Landshaft moego voobrazheniia Ibid., 513-14.
59. P. I. Makarov, Landshaft moego voobrazheniia Ibid., 514.
60. P. I. Makarov, Landshaft moego voobrazheniia Ibid., 510.
61. P. I. Makarov, Landshaft moego voobrazheniia Ibid., 501.
62. N. I. Grech, Sochineniia Nikolaia Grecha, vol. 2, Poezdka vo Frantsiiu, Germaniiu i Shveitsariiu v 1817 godu (St. Petersburg, 1855), 334-35.
63. Grech echoes the perception of French moralists of the day that the café leads to the breakdown of the family. In fact, however, as a recent study has demonstrated, Parisian working-class café culture strengthened rather than weakened the family, providing a space of conviviality that the family could inhabit. Indeed, the evidence shows that in contrast to eighteenth-century forms of public sociability, the working class in the nineteenth century asserted and obtained a right to privacy in public, so that it could discuss familial affairs in a café without fear of meddling from other customers. In an era of housing shortage, the café facilitated private life, rather than destroying it. See W. Scott Haine, The World of the Paris Café: Socibility among the French Working Class, 1789-1914 (Baltimore, 1996), 33-58.
64. Grech is also blind to the political function of cafés, which facilitated the development of class consciousness and the recourse to political action; see Haine, World of the Paris Café, 207-33.
65. Philippe Ariès, "The Family and the City in the Old World and the New," in Virginia Tufte and Barbara Myerhoff, eds., Changing Images of the Family (New Haven, 1979), 29-41.
66. See also Krishan Kumar, "Home: The Promise and Predicament of Private Life at the End of the Twentieth Century," in Weintraub and Kumar, eds., Public and Private in Thought and Practice, 204-36.
67. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, 255-56.
68. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, Ibid., 337.
69. P. I. Shalikov, Puteshestvie v Malorossiiu (Moscow, 1803), 1:100.
70. Shalikov, Drugoe puteshestvie v Malorosiiu, 244-45.
71. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, 165.
72. N. M. Karamzin, "Mysli ob uedinenii," Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Leningrad, 1984), 2:120-23.
73. K. N. Batiushkov, "Progulka po Moskve," Sochineniia (Moscow, 1989), 1:294.
74. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, 102.
75. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, Ibid., 366.
76. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, Ibid., 105.
77. Grech, Sochineniia Nikolaia Grecha, 2:362-64.
78. A. N. Radishchev, Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu; Vol'nost', ed. V. A. Zapadov (St. Petersburg, 1992), 47.
79. A. N. Radishchev, "Dnevnik odnoi nedeli," Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow and Leningrad, 1938), 1:143.
80. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, 66.
81. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, Ibid., 187.
82. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, Ibid., 367.
83. On friendship as the private relationship par excellence, see Silver, "'Two Different Sorts of Commerce,'" 46.
84. F. P. Lubianovskii, Puteshestvie po Saksonii, Avstrii i Italii (St. Petersburg, 1805), 1:34.
85. P. L. Iakovlev, Chuvstvitel'noe puteshestvie po Nevskomu Prospektu (1820; reprint, Moscow, 1838), 422.
86. Shalikov, Puteshestvie v Malorossiiu, 32.
87. Radishchev, Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu, 63.
88. Radishchev, Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu, Ibid., 111.
89. Schönle, "Authenticity and Fiction," 58-60.
90. Radishchev, Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu, 41.
91. For an exposé of the Slavophiles' philosophy, see Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought (Oxford, 1975).
92. The Slavophiles' views on the peasant commune are summarized by A. S. Khomiakov in his "O sel'skoi obshchine: Otvetnoe pis'mo priiateliu," Sochineniia A. S. Khomiakova (Moscow, 1900), 3:459-68.
93. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, 119-20.
94. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, Ibid., 208-9.
95. Radishchev, Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu, 51-53.
96. Radishchev, Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu, Ibid., 51-52.
97. A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics, 2d ed. (Berkeley, 1986), 179-204.
98. See ibid., 164, on the attempts of stoicism to counter the critique that its determinism leaves no room for human freedom. See also Foucault, who describes the antique sources of a kind of cultivation of the self that does not lead to individualism or to an affirmation of private life. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, The Care of the Self (New York, 1986), 41-68.
99. Lotman attributes this desire to visualize eminent literary figures to the Russian religious respect for the artistic Word, which required those uttering the Word to be held accountable for translating it into their everyday existence. Lotman, Sotvorenie Karamzina, 59-61.
100. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, 72.
101. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, Ibid., 173.
102. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, Ibid., 21.
103. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, Ibid., 74.
104. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, Ibid., 75.
105. See the anonymous "Moia progulka" in Ippokrena, 1799, no. 6:545-49.
106. V. F. Malinovskii (?), "Rossiianin v Anglii," Priiatnoe i poleznoe preprovozhdenie vremeni, 1796, no. 12:366.
107. On changes in reading behavior - from public to private and loud to silent - in eighteenth-century Germany, see Erich Schön, Der Verlust der Sinnlichkeit oder die Verwandlungen des Lesers: Mentalitätswandel um 1800 (Stuttgart, 1987).
108. See also Robert Darnton's "Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity," in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984), 215-56. Darnton seeks to capture a new quality of reading, inspired by Rousseau, in which the readers strenuously attempt to link their readings with their private lives, deriving practical and moral guidance from involvement with books. See the following excerpt from a German manual on reading quoted by Darnton: "We must relate everything we read to our 'I,' reflect on everything from our personal point of view, and never lose sight of the consideration that study makes us freer and more independent, and that it should help us find an outlet for the expression of our heart and mind" (250-51).
109. M. Gladkova, 75-ti dnevnoe puteshatvie 15-ti letneiu, pisannoe v ugozhdenie roditeliu i posviashchaemoe 15-ti letnemu drugu (St. Petersburg, 1810), 6.
110. In the same line, see Lubianovskii's introduction to his four-volume travelogue: "I am not an author, but this thought that I am not an author already encourages me to come out onto the stage with my trifles, written not in an author-like fashion, but solely to entertain myself." Lubianovskii, Puteshestvie po Saksonii, Avstrii i Italii, 1:5.
111. A. A. Bestuzhev, Poezdka v Revel' (1821), in Sobranie sochinenii (St. Petersburg, 1838), 6:99-100.
112. Gladkova, 15-ti dnevnoe puteshestvie, 39.
113. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, 7.
114. Gladkova, 15-ti dnevnoe puteshestvie, 8, 21, 28, 41.
115. V. V. Izmailov, Puteshestvie v poludennuiu Rossiiu, 2d ed. (Moscow, 1805), 1:8, 92.
116. Shalikov, Drugoe puteshestvie v Malorossiiu, 159.
117. See, for example, N. P. Brusilov, Moe puteshestvie ili prikliuchenie odnogo dnia (St. Petersburg, 1803), 40.
118. "Zamechaniia o neschastiiakh, vozbuzhdaiushchikh priiatnye chuvstvovanita," Ippokrena, 1799, no. 1:374.
119. For a semiotic analysis of the high incidence of pretenders in Russia, see B. A. Uspenskii, "Tsar' i samozvanets: Samozvanchestvo v Rossii kak kul'turno-istoricheskii fenomen," Izbrannye trudy (Moscow, 1996), 1:142-83.