Continued discussion of Danilevsky's Russia and Europe

Two blog posts ago I began discussing Danilevsky's influential Slavophile book, Russian and Europe. I have recently gotten some time to continue to read it, and whereas in my previous post I focused on what Danilevsky said to differentiate Russia's actions from those of contemporary European powers, I wanted now to remark on some of the more interesting and surprising opinions that the author had about the Russia and its relationship to its empire.

Danilevsky's civilizational model of world history is constructed in such a way as to justify the entire territorial integrity of the Russian Empire as the homeland of the Slavs. According to Danilevsky, unlike the other two great land empires, Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey, the Russian Empire was not formed out of conquest [zavoevanie] of lands belonging to foreign nationalities: "not one of Russia's possessions may be considered to have been won through conquest, in the bad, anti-nationalist sense of the word so detested by humanity [ni odno iz vladenii Rossii nel'zia nazyvat' zavoevaniem - v durnom, antinatsional'nom i potomu nenavistnom dlia chelovechestva smysle]." Regarding Congress Poland, which at the point of Danilevsky's writing had attempted two uprisings against Russian rule (in 1830-1831 and in 1863-1865), the author believes that Russia is protecting this country's Slavic identity in the face of encroachments by Germanic powers (Prussia and Austria-Hungary). Danilevsky claims that between 1815 and 1830 the Poles enjoyed semi-autonomous status and "constitutional forms of government." This time was "one of the happiest in Polish history", only to be spoiled by the 1830 uprising fomented by the Polish intelligentsia and apparently completely unrepresentative of the wishes of the Polish population.

The author admits that Russia's territorial acquisition of the Caucasus had met with rather mixed resistance. Russia's intervention in the region was a response to the pleas for help from the "trans-Caucasian Christian regions" [zakavkazskie khristianskie oblasti] (i.e., the Georgians and Armenians, though Danilevsky does not name these peoples by name). The author admits that the conquest was significantly less popular with the "Caucasian mountain peoples [kavkazskie gortsy]", who are, of course, Muslims. I was interested to learn that Danilevsky names Russia's conflicts in the Caucasus against these Muslim nationalities as an ongoing point of negative publicity in Europe.

I was most surprised to read that Danilevsky thinks that Russia's historic acquisition of Siberia cannot be considered to be a subjugation, since no peoples worthy of civilizational status have ever occupied that space. This land can either be considered to be vacant [pustoporozhnii] or "inhabited by wild tribes with no history" [zaselennykh dikimi neistoricheskimi plemenami]. Obviously, Danilevsky does not have a very high opinion of the aboriginal and Turkic peoples that have historically occupied the non-European part of Russia. Yet it is interesting that later in the same paragraph the author accuses Spain of having forcefully dominated and destroyed "entire civilizations" in the Americas. There is no academic way, even by nineteenth-century standards, of justifying a pronouncement that while Mesoamerica, for example, contained civilizations which should not have been disturbed, Siberia did not and thus was open to Russian colonization. (The author asserts that this ongoing colonization of the Russian east is a project advanced by many Russians of their own free will and without assistance from the government, a statement that is dubious and perhaps hard to justify. It is interesting that another Slavophile writer, Sergei Aksakov, wrote a family-saga novel about one such group of Russians who chose to resettle east of the Volga).

All of Danilevsky's cherry-picked examples serve only to put into question the enterprise of state and empire building by European powers but to justify Russia's historical expansion.

Reading Danilevsky's Russia and Europe

I have started reading N. Ya. Danilevsky's Russia and Europe [Rossiya i Evropa]. Since, as far as I can tell, there are no translations of Danilevsky into English, I am of course reading the work in its original Russian. Note the facsimile of the 1895 edition here.

The book is an influential treatise that describes a theory of historical and cultural development that is determined by a nation's particular civilizational type. In this way Danilevsky's work prefigures the works of Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, historians of culture who seem to be somewhat forgotten nowadays.

I have come to know of the importance of Danilevsky's book through my study of Dostoevsky. Danilevsky and Dostoevsky were both members of the Petrashevsky Circle, which was a literary gathering of intellectuals and freethinkers that was discovered and broken up by Nicholas I's regime in 1849. Dostoevsky was initially sentenced to execution for his participation in the group, but he was granted a last minute reprieve in which he was sent into a Siberian exile that lasted nearly a decade. Danilevsky was given the much lesser sentence of spending 100 days in the Peter and Paul Fortress, which was largely due to the fact that he wrote a letter to the authorities proving his political innocence. Given the importance Dostoevsky would later give to his time as a prisoner, I am sure that the great Russian novelist would not have found it beneficial to use his writing abilities to extract himself in such a way from this difficult situation.

Russia and Europe, which was originally published in 1869, made a big impression on Dostoevsky. The latter proclaimed that it would become a "bedside book [nastolnaya kniga]" for Russians in the decades to come (Budanova 138).  The particular idea advanced in the book that Russia would create an independent Slavic civilization initiating the next phase of world history informs Dostoevsky's character of Shatov in The Devils (Frank 560). However, Dostoevsky was on the whole dissatisfied with Danilevsky's reduction of the significance of Russian Orthodoxy to a national characteristic, denying its status as a universal embodiment of Christian doctrine suitable for the whole world.

Like so much nineteenth-century expository prose, whether written in Russian or another language, the beginning of Russia and Europe meanders and is in no hurry to get to its thesis. Instead, it gradually works up to its main argument by first positing the question of why Russia is treated like a second-class power by the other great powers of Europe. Danilevsky compares the outcomes of two recent historical events. In 1864 Denmark, a small power, was forced to cede Schleswig and Holstein to two great powers, Austria and Prussia, despite an earlier treaty which guaranteed Denmark these territories. A decade earlier, in 1853, Great Britain and France declared war on Russia because of the latter's insistence that Turkey honor its previous agreement that the Orthodox Church be given supreme authority over the Ottoman Empire's Christians. Danilevsky insists that Russia had no intention or invading or declaring war on Turkey and thereby expanding its own empire. Clearly we are meant to understand a certain continuity here where the great powers are allowed to use arms to seize territory in contravention of a previous treaty, and Russia is also prevented from acting in accordance with its diplomatic agreements with Turkey.

These events testify to the existence of a fundamental civilizational/cultural divide between Latin-German and Slavic civilizations. I will write more about my readings in Danilevsky in future posts to come.