In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to the political and cultural life of the Russian court.Footnote 1 In his influential book, Scenarios of Power, Richard Wortman analyzed the Russian court, with its ceremonies, parties and parades, imagining it as a stage on which “an ongoing theater of power” was played out.Footnote 2 This paper attempts to observe the court from a different perspective, asking what lay behind all those showy manifestations of court culture and ideology. Which books were read at court? What motivated the purchase and reading of those books? And, more generally, what purpose did reading serve at court? By analyzing the books read and the main reading practices at the Winter Palace, we gain insight into certain hidden mechanisms of court culture. By analyzing the space of the court not as a “theater of power,” but as an intimate reading room in which the members of the court exchanged ideas about the latest literary output of their time, the paper tries to shine a light on that mixture of desires and fears, of censorship and self-censorship that those books aroused in them, shaping more complex social and cultural identities than those manifested in their monarchic “theatrical masks.”
In this paper we focus especially on the reading of novels, both foreign and Russian, at the court of Nicholas I. Although reading novels, at that time, was certainly not the only form of court culture, which also included masked balls, concerts, theatrical performances, parlor games, and so forth, it accounted for a sizeable portion. Behind the most obvious purpose, as a form of entertainment, reading novels seems to have had a dual purpose at the court of Nicholas I: it enabled the courtiers to observe and analyze the social and psychological dynamics at play in Europe and in Russia and, at the same time, to model their own cultural identity. In addition, as we shall see, reading novels at court also had an indirect effect outside the palace, eventually influencing the tastes and behavior of other groups of Russian society. In this sense, an apparently passive and intimate cultural practice such as reading novels, much less theatrical and conspicuous than numerous court ceremonies, effectively gave rise to distinctions and hierarchies that were conveyed to Russian society, turning the court from a reading room into a veritable social workshop.Footnote 3
Intimate Reading
At the beginning of the nineteenth century there was one place in Russia that seemed, at first sight, to provide the perfect conditions for reading novels: the Winter Palace. For those who lived or worked there and enjoyed such pleasures, the sheer number of books available was astonishing and, moreover, the funds available for new ones seemed to be limitless.Footnote 4 The huge collections of the Hermitage library, comprising thirty-four catalogues, one of which entirely devoted to novels, were at their disposal.Footnote 5 In addition, readers at the Winter Palace could borrow from the collection of eighteenth century novels available in Paul I's personal library.Footnote 6 The library of Alexander I as well, put together by Frédéric-César de La Harpe, contained, according to one Palace librarian “all the best there is in terms of modern works.”Footnote 7 Few other European courts could boast such a wealth and variety of reading matter. At court, moreover, readers in general, but particularly women, seemed to have ample leisure time, and none of the limitations imposed elsewhere by the censors of certain foreign works.Footnote 8
In actual fact, however, as we shall try to show in this paragraph, even in this world, the choice and appreciation of any novel was the result of a complex series of negotiations between those with a different cultural and political capital, who tried to impose their own aesthetic, political, and moral priorities on the readers. Even the simplest and most intimate reading of a novel was thus subject to checks, pressure, and censorship, often unbeknownst to the readers themselves.
In the early 1820s, it was as if the court of the Grand Duke Nicholas and Charlotte of Prussia, the daughter of Friedrich Wilhelm III, the future empress Aleksandra Fedorovna, existed in a parallel world. Before her marriage, Charlotte, who at the age of twelve had lost her mother, the famous Queen Louise, had been fascinated by the poetry of Goethe and Schiller and by the medieval and courtly romanticism reflected in works such as The Magic Ring by Friedrich de La Motte Fouqué, one of the novels that greatly influenced the Prussian court at that time.Footnote 9 Nicholas, however, busy as he was with his military commitments, only really approached contemporary literature after being introduced to the Prussian princess. Following their marriage in 1817, the couple enjoyed life ensconced in the small, intimate world of the Anichkov Palace, where novel reading marked some of the most crucial moments of their family life. “We would read books together such as Corinne and Malek Adhel,” the empress recalled in her memoirs, thinking back to the time when she was expecting the heir to the throne, “and I have fond memories of those months of peace that preceded the birth.”Footnote 10 Such novels projected their readers into exotic, southern lands, such as the Orient or Italy, offering them idealistic models of chivalrous behavior. As well as Corinne by Madame de Staël and The Saracen or Matilda and Malek Adhel by Sophie Cottin, in the early 1820s their imaginations were captured above all by the novels of Walter Scott. Nicholas had met the Scottish poet in person during a trip to Edinburgh in December 1816 and, on his return, he began to read his novels.Footnote 11 In particular in 1820, after the tragic experience of a miscarriage that had endangered his wife's life, Nicholas spent entire evenings reading Scott's novels to the future empress. “It was in the wooden Constantine Palace that I spent six sad weeks, but lovingly cared for by my husband,” the Empress recalled, “at the time, Walter Scott's novels were all the rage and Nicholas would read them to me out loud.”Footnote 12 Under the influence of the novels of de Staël, Cottin, and Walter Scott, as well as that of the romantic writings of the poets Vasilii Zhukovskii and Thomas Moore, the imperial couple, by then sure of inheriting the throne, took their first steps into the theater of power.Footnote 13 Sometimes they would dress up and impersonate the roles of the characters in those stories, as they did in a celebrated court party arranged for the young bride and groom in Berlin, in 1820; the couple took on the roles of Moore's oriental poem Lalla Rookh in a live tableau, which was to be recorded in their family history.Footnote 14 The fictional world of those works fed the chivalrous and medieval ideal of purity and morality that characterized Nicholas's “scenario of power.” According to Wortman, his behavior no longer mirrored the classical models admired by previous emperors, but was shaped by his romantic-medieval ideals: “Nicholas played the role of knight, shielding the delicate and beautiful damsel from reality. Alexandra played the frail, exquisite damsel.”Footnote 15 Madame Cottin's and Walter Scott's novels underlined this clear separation between the male sphere—the sphere of politics, decisions, and command—and the female sphere—one of spirituality, poetry, and comfort—a distinction that had been questioned by the previous sovereigns but which they had proposed as a model for their subjects on numerous public occasions.Footnote 16 This idealization of those past worlds helped the young couple to cope with their present.Footnote 17 In that totally ideal world, however, due to the pressure of the European market, there started to be ever more exceptions to the rule. The courtly “scenario” imagined by Nicholas I at the beginning of the 1820s was suited to the world that had emerged from the Holy Alliance of 1815. By the early 1830s, with the new European revolutions, such a world was evidently looking increasingly obsolete. The arrival at court in the early 1830s of numerous new French novels, which questioned that family and social model, contributed to revealing how fast European society was changing, thereby undermining the tsar's trust in his principles as the basis for stability in Europe. Reading novels in fact played an important role in raising his awareness of Europe's new social dynamics.
To understand how that came about, we should first ask ourselves how the novels read at court were actually chosen and which criteria and measures of control lay behind those choices. The correspondence of the tsar's personal librarians, Karl Sayger and Florian Gille, draws a fairly detailed picture of reading at court.Footnote 18 Any suggestion that court readers enjoyed total freedom in the Winter Palace has to be contradicted.Footnote 19 In terms of cost, there is no doubt that the outlay for literary novelties for the court was high. In 1837, for example, a sum of 2000 rubles per year was allocated for purchasing “memoirs, novels and other light literature” and this sufficed for importing large collections of French and foreign novels.Footnote 20 From the mid-1830s, however, given the extraordinary boom in books on offer, the librarians began to stress European booksellers with the court's need to cut down on its spending in mind.Footnote 21
At the beginning of his reign, in addition to receiving regular shipments from appointed European bookshops, Nicholas personally selected the works to be bought for himself and his family. He chose the titles either from bookstore catalogues, or based on reviews that he read in magazines, especially the Journal des Debats.Footnote 22 According to the tsar's instructions, his librarian periodically compiled long lists of books, indicating the person to whom the works were to be sent (the tsar, the empress, the heir, the great duchesses). According to these requests, it appears that the tsar himself exercised some control over what the imperial family would read. For example, regarding the books for the empress, the librarian Gille wrote to Paris saying: “The shipments in question have two recipients: the Emperor and then Her Majesty the Empress,” and added: “the Emperor reserves the right to personally inform Her Majesty the Empress of everything that is published and that may be of interest.”Footnote 23 But even this apparently solicitous gesture concealed a form of control. Only in the 1840s did Nicholas grant his wife her own personal library, with its own independent administration. The forms of male control over reading matter frequently imposed on the Russian public persisted even at the Winter Palace.Footnote 24
Nicholas had initially granted his appointed bookseller in Paris a certain degree of freedom, but soon the tsar was complaining, through his librarian, that the books “were chosen with little discernment or taste, and too much time elapsed between shipments.”Footnote 25 In 1841 Nicholas decided to change the way he procured books from Paris: “His Majesty now deems it necessary to appoint a person tasked with collecting the best works published in France in the field of art, science and literature.”Footnote 26 Following the example of Catherine II, Nicholas delegated this delicate task to a French “expert.” His choice fell on Jean-Henri Schnitzler, a scholar from Strasbourg who had worked in Russia as a statistician between 1823 and 1828 and who had become the editor of the successful Encyclopédie des gens du monde.Footnote 27 Schnitzler was, according to Gille, a “learned man with both good taste and common sense” and, thanks to his statistical works, with a good understanding of the empire.Footnote 28 “You will learn how to become the new Grimm of our time” the Tsar's librarian wrote to him encouragingly.Footnote 29
But how to explain to someone unfamiliar with the Russian court, and a foreigner to boot, what the tsar and his entourage enjoyed reading? The Russian consul in France had asked for “all the information deemed necessary to make him aware of His Majesty's taste and needs.”Footnote 30 In September 1841, Schnitzler received instructions on the criteria to be followed when selecting books for the tsar. This is an interesting document because it describes the tsar's cultural priorities with a certain precision: “You will therefore have to send His Majesty: 1. Absolutely everything that is published on military arts, including lesser manuals and brochures for training soldiers; 2. With regard to science and literature: good works on history and politics, the publication of which arouses general interest, as well as books on geography, statistics, etc. Scientific or other publications on public works . . . . Works on administration, finance, political economy, public morality, hospital, hospice and prison improvement, etc. Satirical writings, brochures, memoirs, etc.”Footnote 31 In the list, literature comes last: “Regarding literature: only good works, those in which the doctrines of healthy literature (d'une saine literature) are explained,” the tsar's librarian recommended. He added: “Also send all the latest novels (les romans du jour), but take note! Only new and original publications.” He recommended further: “His Majesty does not disdain looking at this production as long as it contains a grain of salt (du sel), but he does not want any of that literary fodder that is born and dies within the space of a day.”Footnote 32 On the subject of poetry, the librarian is even more drastic: “As a general rule, regarding poetry, do not buy anything, or at least nothing but the exceptions that confirm the rule.”Footnote 33 Even more restrictive information was sent to Munich in August 1842 regarding the selection of German books: “As for literary works proper, do not send anything. There is a certain type of literary fodder that does more harm than good (une pâture litteraire d'une nature plutôt malfaisant) but which is fairly popular, and which Paris is entitled to procure for us. German imitations will not be tolerated.”Footnote 34
The metaphors that the Tsar's personal librarian used to describe his master's literary interests, all linked to the world of food (salt, fodder, healthy, harmful), underlined how pernicious and dangerous those books might have appeared at court, but in fact gave no clear indications about purchasing. Sometimes Gille clearly stated the tsar's interest in a certain satirical and humorous French genre: “Send small, humorous and caustic works like Les Guèpes, the physiologies of the student, the artist, etc. (which have already been sent), works that are a Parisian specialty and can only be conceived in Paris,” wrote the librarian, emphasizing the tsar's interest in a wide variety of expressions of French social life.Footnote 35 And again: “Do not forget that, exhausted as he is by his burden of work, His Majesty the Emperor adores looking at caricatures, humorous works, satirical pamphlets, playful and funny books that keep coming out in Paris.”Footnote 36 These indications help us to understand some of the sources that shaped the tsar's and the Russian court's idea of French society. Les Guêpes, for example, a very popular satirical magazine that had been published by Alphonse Karr since 1839, painted a merciless picture of recent French political and cultural life, attacking in particular the most prominent figures of the July Monarchy.Footnote 37 And yet, in general, the instructions were decidedly too generic to help Schnitzler select novels, given France's prolific output.
To further enlighten Schnitzler, the librarian turned to Empress Aleksandra Fedorovna: “Her Majesty told me . . . that she would like to know everything a woman of taste (une femme de goût) could find interesting in today's novels.”Footnote 38 The empress was appealing to a concept, that of good taste, which was, to her mind, natural, evident, and unchangeable, whereas to the mind of a French publisher such as Schnitzler, good taste would have been something that varied according to the country, the social group, and the moment. Certainly one of the criteria for choosing a novel, in the eyes of the empress, would have been its novelty value: “Her Majesty wished to point out that she receives novels from Paris well after they have arrived in St. Petersburg itself and that she only knows about them by hearsay. Now, Monsieur, novels in general are like oysters: inedible the very next day. The only merit of these types of books is their novelty, their freshness. So this needs to be rectified accordingly.”Footnote 39 What was at stake for the empress was the chance to be the first to have those symbolic objects that enabled her to impose her own cultural superiority on the other Petersburg salons. The empress's opinions, reported by the librarian, clearly reveal some of Aleksandra Fedorovna's aesthetic hierarchies. While, for example, the courtly and oriental romanticism portrayed in the novels of the 1810s and 1820s (La Motte Fouque, Cottin, De Staël, Walter Scott) was welcome at court, the same could not be said about the new French romantic novels of the “frénétique” school of the early 1830s (the first novels of Hugo, Janen, Balzac, Sue, Soulié), which appeared to threaten the values of the old regime.Footnote 40 The librarian had pointed out: “Her Majesty would not want to rest her eyes on the ugly ideal (laid idéal) that has become the ideal beautiful of some, regrettably famous, writers.”Footnote 41 With the expression ideal ugly the empress was clearly referring to the French Romantic movement (Hugo had appealed to it in his famous 1830 preface to Hernani), and in particular to the early novels by the members of the “frénétique” school (Hugo, Janen, Balzac, Sue). Their first novels focused on criminals, convicts awaiting death, executioners, prostitutes, and urban, low-life, corrupt, or impoverished social environments. It is clear that the empress instinctively realized that this new “frénétique” trend spelled danger for the values that upheld the court and the Russian monarchy. The preferences of the French bourgeois public were starting to clash with the aesthetic standards of the Russian court. To help Schnitzler in his choice of novels, Gille therefore suggested that he: “should regularly consult some high-society Parisian lady known for her spirit and taste, so that she can guide you in choosing these novels.”Footnote 42 And he added “I believe that Madame Meyendorff's salon . . . could be your Sibyl's cave.”Footnote 43 She would be the one advising Schnitzler about which authors to follow and which to avoid.
The lists of books requested directly by the tsar in the mid-1830s show a wide range of views and interests: we find French medieval courtly romances, Renaissance erotic literature, eighteenth-century libertine novels, many contemporary French novels, alongside numerous books on numismatics and weapons and, above all, copious French memoirs on the Revolution and the empire.Footnote 44 Nicholas's most intimate readings certainly comprised a rich collection of erotic libertine novels, which the tsar was not averse to sharing with his wife.Footnote 45 Titles included works such as Vie voluptueuse entre les capucins et les nonnes, Le talisman de la volupté ou la relique de Sainte-Thérèse, Les délices du cloître ou la none éclairée, L'origine des cons sauvages, and Thérèse philosophe.Footnote 46 With their pornographic scenes these novels delegitimized the Catholic Church, the authorities, and the traditional values that upheld French society before the revolution.Footnote 47 While reading these stories, as well as a series of licentious memoirs about the French court in the eighteenth century, Nicholas and Aleksandra came face to face with the moral degeneration of the French élite before the French Revolution. Remarking on one of those memoirs, L'oeil de beuf, Nicholas first confessed to his wife that certain licentious scenes had aroused him: “thank you for this book, which is exactly my favorite sort of reading” he wrote to Aleksandra, who had sent it to him; only to conclude bitterly about the lack of morals at Versailles: “really difficult to imagine how there could have been an era of that kind, it's something that is hard to understand.”Footnote 48 Mixed feelings of attraction, curiosity, and scorn are evident in the Russian imperial couple's reactions to those scenes: “I don't know how you can read them without becoming aroused,” writes Nicholas to his empress, “reading them brings fire to my loins. But what times, what behavior!”Footnote 49 The inevitable link between such moral degeneration and the revolution would not have been lost on them.
The contemporary French novels that began to appear at the Russian court in the early 1830s depicted a side of French society that the courtiers at the Winter Palace had hitherto ignored: the world of city slums and the provincial bourgeoisie; a world in the throes of both great dynamism and inner turmoil. Despite the court's reservations—instantly echoed by most of the Russian conservative critics—about the novels of the “frénétique” school, such works effectively seem to have intrigued readers at court, considering the success enjoyed in France.Footnote 50 As early as June 1831, probably reacting to the news published in the Journal des Debat, the librarian wrote to Paris: “You could add to your shipment the two or three original publications that recently came out in Paris: the novel (if you can call it a novel) by Mr. E. Sue; Balzac's Scènes de la vie privée (Scenes from Private Life), but try not to exaggerate and among the novelties only send us those works that are, as they say, memorable, like Nôtre Dame de Paris.”Footnote 51 In just a few lines, Gille offered a full picture of the distinctions the Russian court made of its tastes on the subject of contemporary French novels: Nôtre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo was already considered “memorable,” Balzac's Scenes from Private Life were appreciated, while the librarian was uncertain whether Eugène Sue's first marine novels, collected in Plick et Plock, were dignified enough to even be classed as novels.Footnote 52 Similar opinions, often repeated in the highest spheres of the State, soon reached the ears of the censors and conditioned what the Russian public read. The censor Aleksandr Nikitenko wrote that the Minister for Education “has ordered not to allow the publication of Victor Hugo's Nôtre Dame de Paris. And yet he praised it highly. The minister believes it is too soon for us to read such books.”Footnote 53
After the publication of Scènes de la vie de province (that included Eugènie Grandet), in which the “excessive” features of the “frénétique” aesthetics had disappeared, giving way to a ruthless analysis of the social and psychological dynamics of French society, Balzac's reputation at the Russian court appeared to have been consolidated: “It would be very pleasant for us to receive Bertrand et Raton, Mr. Scribe's latest and humorous work. And I would say the same of Balzac's Scenes of Private Life in the Province,” wrote the librarian in March 1834.Footnote 54 In 1836, Nicholas suggested to his wife that she might enjoy one of Balzac's early novels, Annette et le criminal, which he found “increasingly interesting” and “decidedly charming.”Footnote 55 And yet suspicions and fears about that type of novel, which had risen from the ashes of the July revolution, were still deeply-rooted at court: “If a novel meets with the approval of people of taste, you can be sure that it will also make us happy to receive it,” wrote the librarian in 1834, “but even though we are part of the literary movement that has been going on in France for some years now, I can assure you that we are far from sharing this tendency to flights of imagination (dévergondage d'esprit) from which some of your young writers like Soulié, Alexandre Dumas, etc. seem to suffer. We do not want these crude and cynical reflections (élucubrations féroces), these galvanizing books (livres galvaniques), such as Angèle, Thérèse, etc. Here, no more than in France, I think, healthy readers do not want to hear about it.”Footnote 56 Such aesthetic opinions concealed precise political attitudes. Angèle, for example, was a pièce by Alexandre Dumas published in 1833, set during the 1830 revolution, which exemplified the loose amorous behavior and political cynicism that dominated French society during Louis Philippe's reign.Footnote 57 Contemporary British novelists, apart from Walter Scott, were decidedly little sought-after, but in January 1840, for example, Nicholas asked the Parisian booksellers for Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby in French.Footnote 58 Despite the disturbing spectacle of social mobility that they portrayed, those novels were avidly read at the Russian court.
Judging by his correspondence with the empress, the tsar not only recommended Balzac but also displayed a marked predilection for the satirical novel genre epitomized by Paul de Kock, the cheerful, light-hearted, and sometimes spicy bard beloved of the Parisian bourgeoisieFootnote 59. In September 1842 the tsar wrote to his wife: “I've read a novel by Paul de Kock, entitled Moustache, which Wolkonsky gave me, it's quite amusing, but not as much as those that I used to read to you when you were pregnant.”Footnote 60
In the novels of Balzac, Kock, and Dickens, the social mobility typical of Europe at that time must have appeared to the tsar in all its complexity, inevitability, and danger. The lists of the novels that the empress received from her husband in the mid-1840s testify to an extraordinary circulation of such novels at court, including dozens of titles by novelists such as Sue, Frédéric Soulié, Paul Lacroix, Paul Féval, George Sand, Charles de Bernard, and especially Balzac and Dumas.Footnote 61 Despite the tsar's attempts to protect his court and his awareness of the pernicious (malfaisant) character of these novels, the impression was that the court was prey to Parisian tastes.Footnote 62 From the mid-1830s, a new type of novel began to seem particularly noxious to Nicholas and his court: the French romantic psychological novel. A novel such as La confession d'un enfant du siècle by Alfred de Musset, full of suffering, disenchantment, and a spirit of self-destruction, was strongly deprecated by the court, much as Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of our Time would be a few years later: “Musset's La confession d'un enfant du siècle, which you sent us this winter, is one of those works that we do not want. It is one of those bad publications that will not appeal to us,” wrote the librarian to the Parisian booksellers.Footnote 63
An uneasy mixture of attraction and disquiet seemed to bind these royal readers to the new contemporary French novels. Their attraction stemmed from the awareness that those were the works that Paris, the cultural capital of Europe, had crowned with success; their disquiet was due to an uneasy feeling that those novels were proof of the fragility of the present political situation in Europe, a fragility that could undermine the social order on which the Russian monarchy itself rested. In this sense, the reading of French novels on the part of the tsar and his entourage helped foster the nationalistic spirit of state ideology from the mid-1830s. At the same time, the image that Nicholas tried to promote of himself publicly as a medieval knight, faithfully defending the sacred principles of the Holy Alliance in Europe, was falling apart in front of his very eyes. From a medieval knight, as he wrote to his wife in 1834, he was starting to feel like the Errant Knight: “I will feel myself turning into Don Quixote.”Footnote 64 Thus, to protect Russian society after the 1848 revolutions, the tsar decided to resort to one of the few measures he had at his disposal: significantly higher duties on foreign novels.Footnote 65
Shared Readings
Are there any differences between the publications read by the tsar and those of other men at court? Which novels were most frequently read by most of the court readers? To what extent did such readings influence the tastes of Russia's high society? For a long time, the majority of courtiers were allowed to borrow books from the new and up-to-date library that the poet Vasilii Zhukovskii, with the ample funds placed at his disposal, had put together for the Heir to the throne.Footnote 66 Thanks to that library's loan register, today we can, at least partially, reconstruct the reading habits of a large group of people. Altogether they numbered around eighty, including members of the imperial family, high court officials, ladies-in-waiting, and a significant group of tutors to the Heir.Footnote 67 Their requests cover the period ranging from 1827 to 1855, but were particularly frequent up until 1837, before the great Winter Palace fire. It was a very mixed group of readers, both in terms of their nationalities and their cultural level. They borrowed books in German, English, Polish and Latin, although of course, French predominated, while requests for Russian books were rare. Despite their very diverse national backgrounds and reading skills, and the wide choice of books available, the novels they requested were often the same and, most interestingly, were often borrowed together with memoirs.
The genres most frequently consulted were, in fact, contemporary French memoirs and novels and, to a lesser extent, some French light dramas, in particular Eugène Scribe's plays. Historical works were also frequently consulted, while borrowing books of poetry was not very common. The importance of these genres at the court of Nicholas I should not surprise us. As Norbert Elias pointed out, court culture is above all a culture of conversation and the works that the court prefers are those—such as memoirs, novels, and light dramas—which best suit a salon situation.Footnote 68 The most popular memoirs among the readers at the court of Nicholas I between the end of the 1820s and the 1830s include, for example, those by Louis Bourrienne, Louis-François Bausset, Madame de Campan, John Brown, Emmanuel Las Cases, and Louis Philippe de Ségur.Footnote 69 They were mostly recently-published memoirs that offered different points of view about the tumultuous period of the French Revolution and the empire, with special attention paid to Napoleon's court and private life.Footnote 70 When reading such works, the court readers tried to understand and give some sense to a past that was still present and very vivid in their minds.
The courtiers’ choice of novels differed little from that of the tsar. Court readers focused on quite a limited number of novels that seemed to pass from hand to hand, as they read them almost simultaneously. There was great interest in classical novels such as Cervantes's Don Quixote in French translation, François Fénelon's edifying Les aventures de Télémaque, and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, which were not only borrowed by young readers. Maria Edgeworth's novels still seemed to appeal, while the classic sentimental novels—from Samuel Richardson to Rousseau to Goethe's Werther—no longer aroused any interest. What did arouse considerable interest, on the other hand, above all among members of the imperial family, were Atala and René, by François-René de Chateaubriand, an author whom the tsar had personally met in the early 1820s. But the most popular vein of all were contemporary historical novels, which passed from hand to hand among readers at the court and fed a collective fictional imagination. For example, between 1829 and 1834, Walter Scott's novels were requested twenty-two times by such diverse readers as members of the imperial family, tutors, and ladies-in-waiting. Scott's most requested titles were Quentin Durward and Ivanhoe. Alongside Scott's works, historical novels by Heinrich Zschokke, Jean Ch.L. de Sismondi, and Alfred de Vigny were also greatly appreciated. Balzac's novels were borrowed nine times between 1833 and 1836, by readers such as the influential Madame Iuliia Baranova, the court doctor Patrick Crichton, and several court ladies. They were fascinated from among Balzac's novels with Le père Goriot, as well as the Scènes de la vie privée series. Only one reader, the Marshal of the Court, borrowed Stendhal's novel Le rouge et le noir but his Promenades dans Rome were in great demand. Of course, French contemporary novels were not the only popular ones, but, alongside Walter Scott's, they certainly made up the majority of loans. Court readers seemed particularly attracted to historical and adventure novels, set in fascinating places and featuring brave and uncomplicated characters.
During his reign, Nicholas I had significantly tightened court etiquette, imposing strict and detailed rules regarding dress, ceremonies, and court behavior.Footnote 71 Judging by the novels that they borrowed from the libraries, court readers appear to have felt the need for action and escapism, perhaps to make up for the constrictions of their life at court with some fictional “cut and thrust.” The wild Scotland of the highlanders, chivalric, medieval England and Richard the Lionheart's crusaders evidently provided them with the adventures they longed for.Footnote 72 Those same novels that had contributed to shaping Nicholas's initial scenarios of power enabled his courtiers to escape from the obligations imposed by their tsar.
The impression of the court enjoying a limited but widely shared culture in terms of novels is reinforced if we abandon for a moment our usual picture of a solitary reader shut away in a room silently absorbed in a book. Quiet reading was but one of the court's reading practices and apparently not the main one. If we compare the life of a courtier with that of a St. Petersburg state official or a provincial nobleman, we can see that the residents of the Winter Palace had fewer opportunities for isolation.Footnote 73 The daughter of the poet Fedor Tiutchev, Anna Tiutcheva, realized this when she arrived at court as a lady-in-waiting to Mariia Aleksandrovna in 1853. She was immediately struck by the endless number of ceremonies, church services, celebrations, and other duties in which she was required to take part, even in the country estates. The members of the court, she wrote, “never have the chance to immerse themselves in reading, conversing, or reflecting. . . . In the end, this society life, out in the country, when you only return to your room to change your clothes, is deadly dull and stultifying. We have no opportunities to read on our own or to engage in anything in particular.”Footnote 74
Parlor readings with a large number of participants were one of the main forms of entertainment at the court of Nicholas I, along with theater and home games. At the Winter Palace, these readings took place in the Gold Drawing Room in the evening, and lasted till well after 11 p.m. There were often as many as ten regular guests, including some members of the most aristocratic families. It was they who acted as go-betweens between the court and Russia's high society, spreading the opinions, tastes, and idiosyncrasies of the court in St. Petersburg and Moscow. And yet, for several years already, cultural centers had sprung up in the salons and circles of both cities that threatened the hegemonic role of the court.Footnote 75 Tiutcheva, for example, who came from Moscow's Slavophile circles and took part in the salon readings in the Winter Palace in the last years of Nicholas I's reign, drew an ironic picture of them:
“We meet at nine o'clock in the evening,” wrote the court lady, “the Empresses usually sit at the table with certain elderly ladies, such as Princess Saltykova, Countess Baranova, Countess Tizengauzen. Count Shuvalov and Count Apraksin have attended these evening gatherings since they were first established . . . . Shuvalov sits down with his novel, neither the title nor the author of which anyone else has ever heard, and in a monotonous, nasal voice, drones on about a tangle of murders, kidnappings, poisonings, ambushes, betrayals, hangings, declarations of love, reasonings, dialogues, curses, spells, and catastrophes of all kinds, which are supposed to embody the appeal of the nineteenth-century novel of intrigue . . . This has been going on repeatedly every day since the court first came into existence and will continue to repeat itself for as long as it continues to exist.”Footnote 76
This practice of reading favored certain narrative structures more than others; emphasizing certain stylistic components over others. It excluded sentimental prose, which requires a more intimate form of reading, but also historical or philosophical prose, which requires greater concentration and the possibility of more complex, logical connections. Salon reading favored the novel genres, such as historical novels, maritime and adventure novels, dramatic genres, vaudevilles, comedies, and light dramas, all with compelling plots. In light of this kind of fragmentary, distracted, often interrupted reading, foreseen by the new serialized feuilleton novels, even the success of more democratic works, such as Sue, can be understood: “At court they greedily read The Mysteries of Paris—wrote lady Aleksandra Smirnova—the Emperor listened to the Louve episode with tears in his eyes.”Footnote 77 Sue's novel, conceived for a bourgeois audience, but immediately adopted by the Parisian proletariat as its manifesto in 1848, moved one of Europe's most reactionary sovereigns to tears.
Shared readings could outline different communities of readers within the restricted space of the court. Generational and gender distinctions were particularly relevant. In 1838, Empress Aleksandra Fedorovna remarked to lady Smirnova, who was reading Indiana by George Sand to her, about a female character: “Ma chère,” she said to her in French, “you understand that she loves a doctor. Even if he were as handsome as Adonis, he is still a man who prescribes purges.”Footnote 78 Smirnova commented: “What an aristocratic vision of love! Nowadays, love is blind, and even Russian ladies, after reading all of Ms. Sand's novels, have assimilated her way of seeing, and they travel round Europe with Italian clerks in tow as their lovers without so much as a pang of conscience.”Footnote 79 It was precisely with George Sand that a new model of female behavior penetrated the Russian court and high society. And yet, despite the increasingly widespread affirmation of alternative values and models of behavior to those upheld in the Winter Palace, court readings still appeared to exert some influence on the tastes of Russia's high society. Tiutcheva wrote in her diary: “Everywhere they will know and repeat that the two Empresses spent three nights a week, and even some mornings, for two months, listening to this awful novel . . . . Here they are unaware that none of their gestures goes unnoticed, that everything is made public and is attributed a particular meaning.”Footnote 80 So even the most intimate readings at court were shared, at least by one part of Russian society.
Reading Matter for the Servants
In the Hermitage archive, we could find no trace of any correspondence between the court and Russian booksellers. Both Nicholas's and his Heir's personal libraries contained Russian books, albeit in a far smaller quantity than French and German books, and the number of Russian novels was very limited.Footnote 81 This does not mean, of course, that Russian novels were not read at court. In June 1828, for example, Aleksandra Fedorovna read Eugene Onegin, Pushkin's novel in verse, and described it to her husband as a “delicate painting of the St. Petersburg world.”Footnote 82 In addition to novels by Balzac and Kock, Nicholas mentioned reading Mikhail Zagoskin's historical novel Iurii Miloslavskii and Faddei Bulgarin's Dimitrii Samozvanets: “I think I have told you,” he wrote to his wife, “that I finished Miloslavskii and yesterday I read about Godunov's farewell in Dimitrii Samozvanets, so it is historically doubly interesting.”Footnote 83 The tsar often tended to read Russian literature with the same aesthetic canons that he had learnt reading European novels. His impression of Pushkin's Boris Godunov is an example of this: “I believe that Mr. Pushkin would achieve his goal if, with the necessary deletions, he turned his comedy into a povest΄ or a historical novel à la Walter Scott.”Footnote 84 In the same way, the tsar's opinion of Lermontov's A Hero of our Time was based on an interpretative model that he had formulated after reading contemporary French novels: “It is the same emphatic representation of those despicable characters populating contemporary foreign novels,” he had written to the Empress in June 1840.Footnote 85 Here too, the tsar's tendency to censure encouraged him to focus his attention on the moral effect of the work. “Such novels ruin your character. Indeed, even if you read them with a sense of annoyance, deep down they leave you feeling oppressed, and you become accustomed to thinking that the whole world is made up of such people, whose deeds, even the best ones, are carried out for false or abhorrent reasons. And what is the outcome of this? Hate and contempt for humankind!”Footnote 86 That reading thus confirmed his decision to send Lermontov back to the Caucasus, where the writer was to end his life in a duel.
If reading Russian novels in the loftiest court circles in the 1830s and 1840s was more of an exception than a rule, the same cannot be said for the palace staff.Footnote 87 A partial explanation for the tsar's limited purchases of Russian literary works may be linked to the large number of books that the Emperor received as gifts. At Nicholas I's court, forms of patronage persisted well into the first half of the nineteenth century. Many Russian novels entered the Palace libraries as books donated by their authors, who were often rewarded by the court. This circumstance made the tsar's literary taste a key factor for influencing Russian literary output. Between 1826 and 1840, the tsar was presented with as many as fifty-three Russian literary works in prose (not to mention poems).Footnote 88 After being presented at court, most of these ended up in the hands of the servants working at the Winter Palace. This was not a coincidence, but rather the result of a precise strategy on the part of Nicholas, who aimed to train even the most humble servants to become readers loyal to the monarchy. In April 1836, for example, the Minister of the Court ordered a librarian to send him a list of all the works presented as gifts to the tsar from 1826 to 1836, so as to make a selection of those suitable for the servants’ library at the Winter Palace.Footnote 89 The list included thirty Russian novels, above all historical novels. The underlying idea of this measure was that if those books had been presented to the tsar, they were obviously in line with the monarch's ideology and, after a quick check, could be made into good reading matter for his servants.
At that time, the servants’ library at the Hermitage already boasted its own history.Footnote 90 It had been set up by Catherine II in 1776 for her servants in the hope that it would “preserve them from worse habits.”Footnote 91 At the end of her reign, the library already numbered 4,360 books, and by the end of Nicholas I's reign it had reached 18,655.Footnote 92 The library's correspondence gives us an idea not only of the interests of those who served at the Palace, but also of the significance that the tsar attributed to this library.Footnote 93 It was a library covering a wide range of themes. The literary section offered a great choice among many novels.Footnote 94 In 1838, to the librarian's request to increase the library's budget, the Minister of the Court responded with a refusal “because the library is significantly integrated with books presented by the authors to his Majesty the Emperor.”Footnote 95 In addition to subscribing to the magazines Syn Otechestva, Biblioteka dlia chteniia, and the newspaper Sanktpeterburgskie Vedomosti, purchases for the servants’ library included religious books, histories, geographies, handbooks, travel books, some pièces, and many novels, all in Russian. For example, in the early 1840s, besides various copies of novels by Mikhail Zagoskin, Bulgarin, Rafail Zotov, Vladimir Sollogub, and Aleksandr Vel΄tman, they also bought Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, Gogol΄s Dead Souls, and the Russian translation of Dickens's Oliver Twist. Poetry collections were not very numerous, but Pushkin's Complete Works could be found, as well as a volume of poems by Lermontov. In 1841, there was a proposal to buy twenty-one new novels, including four translations of Paul de Kock and E.T.A. Hoffmann's The Serapion Brethren, but the librarian asked to remove Kock's novels and Hoffmann's work: “they can be replaced with other useful books, works produced by Russian writers.”Footnote 96 Checks and other forms of censorship in force at the higher levels of the court were even stronger and more explicit here. The choices aimed to form a reader perfectly in line with the official ideology. For example, earlier on, the Minister of the Court had insisted on purchasing Karamzin's History in Smirdin's edition: “It is a cheap edition designed specifically to ensure that this work reaches all the classes, and I believe it is urgent for this book to be in a library designed for the court's servants.”Footnote 97
But who were this library's readers? One of the loan registers recorded the requests of more than 300 court servants.Footnote 98 Most were footmen, stokers, doormen, chefs, bellboys, some junior clerks at the Office of the Court (copyists or accountants), and other types of servants and workers in force at the palace. The servants at the Winter Palace were a privileged category, with a special status (pridvorno-sluzhitel’skoe soslovie).Footnote 99 Most importantly, their jobs were hereditary. For reasons of security, Catherine had established that no other personnel should be employed at court other than the members of this particular group. In 1826, Nicholas had confirmed that he had ruled out the possibility of “replacing vacant posts with peasants” and that those places were “exclusively reserved for the children of court servants.”Footnote 100 In addition, the tsar had specified that “only good looking persons could serve at court.”Footnote 101 Given their frequent participation in court life, they often established a special relationship of trust and gratitude with their masters.Footnote 102 So, on the one hand, it was a privileged group, who were often in close contact with their masters and enjoyed special privileges; on the other, most servants did not live in the palace but in housing in the city where they were in touch with the popular urban world.Footnote 103 In contact with this world, their literary tastes and preferences could not help being absorbed into the urban culture.Footnote 104
One of the loan registers from the servants’ library that we analyzed bears the dates 1836 and 1839 on its cover but, given the large number of texts borrowed by each reader, the register probably recorded the readings over a broader time span.Footnote 105 It was always male readers who requested books, but it is likely that they also borrowed them for their wives or daughters, as some titles seem to suggest. The very wide variety of books borrowed by these readers is surprising, ranging from religious books to drama, historical biographies to the lives of saints, lubok romances to newspapers, but with one particular feature: the prevalence of novels. There was probably no other place in Russia where servants had such a choice of novels at their disposal. A few examples: in 1839, Arkadii Bubnov, a stoker, borrowed two volumes of Plutarkh dlia prekrasnogo pola, the historical narration Bitva Zadonskaia, the novel Susanna, the novel Tainstva chernoi bashni, Povesti o Sovestdrale, and Karamzin's Works.Footnote 106 Bubnov's appetite for reading could not have been more varied, embracing various types of popular narrative from different historical periods, ranging from the seventeenth century picaresque narrative Povesti o plute Sovestdrale (Russ. ed. 1781), to two early nineteenth century novels of different genres, such as Ann Radcliffe's gothic novel Tainstva chernoi bashni (Russ. trans. 1812), and the sentimental novel Suzanna ili nagrazhdennoe postoianstvo by the German Auguste Lafontaine (Russ. trans. 1818). In Plutarkh dlia prekrasnogo pola, Bubnov found a French collection of biographies of great historical female figures from the ancient and modern world (Russ. ed. 1816–1817), with the addition of a “Gallery of celebrated Russian women,” from Sofia Alekseevna to Catherine II and Princess Dashkova, which featured models of female behavior. Finally, Bubnov borrowed contemporary works, such as the historical narration Bitva Zadonskaia (1825) by one of Moscow's commercial novelists, Ivan Gur΄ianov. Another stoker, Sergei Datskii, borrowed a biography of Peter the Great, a biography of Catherine II, the Gothic novel Tainstvennaia, or Kavkazkoe mshchenie, and the translation of Eugène Sue's Mathilde.Footnote 107 Yet another stoker, Aleksei Dmitriev, took out a novel entitled Neschastnaia zhenshchina, The Life of Saint Sergius, and The Life of Lycurgus.Footnote 108 The porter T. Vasil΄ev focused on novels published in the most recent years and took out several Russian and foreign historical novels from the 1830s: two of Ivan Kalashnikov's historical novels, with extensive historical and ethnographic descriptions of Siberia; two historical novels by Ivan Lazhechnikov; Aleksandr Vel΄tman's Koshchei Bessmertnyi; two novels by Walter Scott in translation, Rob Roy and Count Robert of Paris; Han d’Islande by Hugo; Karamzin's History, and a History of Peter the Great. Lastly, two very recent Russian novels with a contemporary setting were checked out, Pan Podstolich by Foma Massal΄skii and Chudak, ili chelovek kakikh malo by Ivan Vanenko.Footnote 109Pan Podstolich was a regional novel (uezdnyi roman), that is a work that aimed to provide, as the author states in the introduction, a whole range of geographical information about Lithuania and Belarus held together by a thin fictional plot. The other novel taken out by Vasil΄ev, Chudak, or chelovek kakikh malo by Vanenko, is about Moscow's society life. It is the story of a rich, aristocratic young man, simple and feeble, who looks for a wife in vain and is made fun of by frivolous vixens and cynical matchmakers. For a servant, it was a cynical lesson on the rules of aristocratic love life.
In general, besides some of the lubok chivalric romances (the most popular of which was Guak) and religious literature works, the books borrowed by servants basically represented all the novels published in Russian in the previous eighty years. The most popular titles included the translation of Alain-René Lesage's Gil Blas, Auguste Lafontaine's Susanna, brigand novels, some books by de Kock, Hugo's Han d'Islande, Scott's Count Robert of Paris and, among the Russians, Kamchadalka by Kalashnikov and Kliatva pri grobe Gospodnem by Nikolai Polevoi, Pan Podstolich by Foma Masal΄skii, and Vanenko's Chudak. Among the Winter Palace stokers, there were even those who read Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, of course in Russian.Footnote 110 The most obvious difference, apart from the language, between the books chosen by the readers of the Heir's library and those chosen by the servants, was what these two groups considered to be the “latest craze”: for the readers at court they were the European novels of the last two to three years, whereas for the servants, they were the Russian novels published over the previous eighty years.
From an overall viewpoint, it is striking how a great number of novels and authors were enjoyed by readers of both the Heir's and the servants’ libraries: Paul de Kock's novels were read by both the tsar and his stokers; Walter Scott and Victor Hugo seemed to have been popular with most of the court readers as well as with their servants. In their choice of novels, the differences between the more cultured members of the Winter Palace household and those much less cultured were less marked that we had expected. Both the highest dignitaries and the lowliest stokers shared the same passion for reading European novels that does not appear to know significant linguistic or social barriers. Much more so than the theater, the novel is the genre that brought such different communities closer to each other, and that enabled readers with such different positions and linguistic skills to share a similar cultural experience. Yet, for every type of novel, each group appears to have had their favorite authors: Zagoskin and Bulgarin seemed to be much less in vogue among servants than Kalashnikov, Lazhechnikov, and Polevoi. The two groups seemed to prefer different titles by the same authors: servants favored Walter Scott's The Count of Paris to Quentin Duward or Ivanhoe; among Hugo's works, they could read only Han d'Islande.
Most importantly, what changed significantly between the reading enjoyed by the highest courtiers and by their servants, in addition to the language, were their reading practices, their horizons of expectation, and the readers’ interpretative skills. Although they often read the same novels, these three factors determined a different aesthetic and ideological rendering of the same texts. Walter Scott's or contemporary French novels were read by the tsar and his courtiers after a quantity of French memoirs about the French revolution and the period of the empire and, therefore, tended to acquire special political and social significance. Those same novels were projected by the servants against a fanciful, legendary background, made up of their many readings of lubok courtly romances and the picaresque or sentimental novels of the past decades, thereby fulfilling the purpose of entertaining and providing a diversion from their daily grind. According to the position of the readers at court, and what they saw in the Winter Palace, whether a political cabinet in which state ideology was discussed, a place in which the courtiers felt suffocated by hierarchies and etiquette, or a place where the servants could find books otherwise unobtainable, even reading novels could constitute either a form of social control or a form of escapism; or a school of good taste and proper behavior.
