Slezkine

Naturalists Versus Nations: Eighteenth-Century Russian Scholars Confront Ethnic Diversity Author(s): Yuri Slezkine

Source: Representations, No. 47, Special Issue: National Cultures before Nationalism (Summer, 1994), pp. 170-195

Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928790 Accessed: 29-02-2016 22:42 UTC

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YURI SLEZKINE

Naturalists Versus Nations:

Eighteenth-Century Russian

Scholars Confront Ethnic Diversity

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY MUSCOVITEs did not travel. They might

escape, migrate, or peregrinate, but they did not view movement through space

as a worthy pursuit in its own right and did not encourage wonder at things

profane or blasphemous. According to Isaac Massa, the tsar's servitors "saw many

curious plants, flowers, fruits, rare trees, animals, and strange birds. But as the

Muscovites themselves are not an inquisitive folk they care nothing for such

things, seeking only profit everywhere, for they are a rude and negligent

people."' Because of this negligence, "nothing was enquired into,"2 and when

Leibniz, the world's most unrepentantly inquisitive polymath, requested some

Asian exotica, the Brandenburg ambassador in Moscow explained that some

people considered such pursuits "useless": "The Muscovite nation is totally inca-

pable of searching for such curiosities because it does not apply itself to anything

that does not smell of money and does not appear to be of obvious practical use."3

No one in Muscovy seemed to be in the least defensive about this. Chasing

"strange birds" was ludicrous and perhaps even dangerous behavior, and "inquis-

itiveness" was indeed a bad word. "New rivers" were needed to find-and

define-"new lands"; new lands contained little besides new "foreigners" (inozem-

tsy); and new foreigners were only useful if they could provide "profit" (pygoda)

for the tsar. Profit was usually equal to tribute, while tribute-paying foreigners

remained "inozemtsy" and were expected to keep their own names, gods, and

"oaths." There could be no New Muscovy after the fashion of New France or New

England because old Muscovy had no clear borders (in time or space) and because

the "new lands" in the east were being incorporated without being fully appro-

priated (christened, Christianized, and conquered 'a la Columbus "by proclama-

tion made and with the royal standard unfurled").4

Peter I's mentors and mercenaries lived in a different world and saw the

world differently. All creation as they understood it was neatly divided into the

"natural" and "artful" (or man-made) varieties, with the recovery of "natural"

nature possible only as a result of the apprehension of everything "erring" and "al-

tered."5 "Curiosity" was both a virtue and a profession; "curiosities" were objects

remarkably close to the original plan ("primitive") or particularly far removed

170 REPRESENTATIONS 47 * Summer 1994 ? THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

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from it ("monstrous"); and travel was an increasingly well-regarded endeavor to

bring curios to the curious. Europe's most assiduous producers and consumers

of travel accounts were the Germans, who had been urged by August Ludwig von

Schlozer to count "love of travel" among their "national strengths" and who

brought to Russia a long tradition of Kavalierstour and-more important for

Peter-a fully developed science of academic fieldwork (gelehrte Reise) complete

with such trophies as could be housed in museums, cabinets, galleries, libraries,

zoological and botanical gardens, Kunst-Kammern, and Antiquitaeten-Zimmer.6 Soon

Peter was demanding to see "live animals and birds of various kinds that are a

marvel to man"; Vasilii Tatishchev was offering his own money to local officials

for "extraordinarily kur'oznye things"; and Gerhard Friedrich Muller was trying

to reproduce in St. Petersburg the "multicolored paradise of unknown grasses,"

"the zoo of rare Asian animals," and "the cabinet of antiquities containing pagan

burial sites" that he had found in Siberia.7 By mid-century the Russian Empire

was full of "places of interest" (Sehenswiirdigkeiten, dostopamiatnosti) that were being

described by the newly formed class of professional (and mostly German) reisende

Gelehrten to the newly formed class of "curious" and increasingly Russian "benev-

olent readers" (blagosklonnye chitateli).

"Curiosity" (liubopytstvo) served the double purpose of "entertainment" (uve-

selenie) and "utility" (pol'za).8 The utility of "entertainment" grew steadily in direct

proportion to the size of the "reading public" (readers minus sponsors), but

throughout most of the eighteenth century "pol'za" remained paramount. Unlike

the profit of the Muscovite sovereigns, it referred to a common good ultimately

based on natural law, and in contrast to the impressions of fin-de-siecle tourists,

it strove for strict scientific regularities (also ultimately based on natural law). As

Leibniz explained to Peter, the same cabinets, galleries, and museums would look

very different if organized "not only as an object of general curiosity but as a

means of perfecting the arts and sciences."9 The pol'za of the common good as

pursued by the state and the pol'za of the arts and sciences as defined by scholars

were perceived to be identical (unless scholars arrived at an erroneous definition,

of course, as both Muller and Schlozer had a chance to find out). In any case, a

truly useful activity had to be universalist: no group of people and no group of

objects could claim exemption from natural law, and no scholarly or administra-

tive practice could be complete unless they claimed to be natural.

As far as the gelehrte and aufgekldrte travelers were concerned, this meant

describing and classifying "everything" (not only curiosities), and as Russia was

"a blank slate" in matters of enlightenment, "everything" loomed very large

indeed.'0 Called upon to "debarbariser ce vaste empire," as Leibniz put it," the

German scholars hired by Peter were given Adam's-or Robinson Crusoe's-job

of naming the world in its entirety.'2 The fairly flat "lands" that used to melt

around the edges unless propped up by rivers were now crisscrossed by countless

borders at multiple levels, all of them neatly separating distinct but related layers

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of nature endowed with unique but ultimately transparent names. "The Earth's

sphere" was divided into longitudes, latitudes, and "climes of various magni-

tudes" that constituted the new "mathematical geography" and were invisibly but

inexorably connected to the stars and-via the much used "magnet hand"-to the

"innards of the earth." "Natural geography" further partitioned the "Earth's sur-

face" into well-delineated continents ("Is Asia connected to America?" "Where

does Europe end?"),'3 islands, peninsulas, mountains, oceans, seas, lakes, and

rivers; "natural history" filled them with minerals and populated them with all

creatures large and small; and "political geography" crowned the edifice with

such fruits of "human disposition" (proizvoleniia cheloviecheskago) as forts, mills,

mines, ranks, roads, fairs, towns, states, coins, churches, villages, monasteries,

cemeteries, chancelleries, family names, artillery pieces, governors' uniforms,

infantry regiments, "and the like."' 4 The universe, including the woefully under-

explored Russian portion, consisted of a prodigious but finite number of objects

and phenomena, all of which needed to be named, exhaustively described, and

then systematized "under a single point of view" (shape, origin, location, alpha-

betic order, "vital organs"9).'5 By the time Catherine and her French(ified) confreres

had begun to doubt the esprit de systeme, question the encyclopedic grasp of the

Encyclopedie,16 and cloud the stern scholarly gaze with an occasional tear of "sen-

timent," the Russian landscape-or "topography," as the systematizers themselves

would have it-had changed beyond recognition.

The most visible and uncertain presence in the new scheme of things was

Man: the apex of the scala naturae, the manufacturer of the system of artifacts,

and both the cause and beneficiary of the state-directed "pol'za" enterprise, he

straddled the creator/creature divide and was not easily classifiable in the well-

ordered universe next to "Homo monstruosus," angels, gorillas ("in respect of

shape"), parrots ("in respect of sound"), elephants ("in respect of memory and

understanding"), and bees (in respect of spirituality and power"').'7 But while the

final discovery of Adam's "scientific" (that is, genealogical) relationship to the

"cattle, fowls, and beasts" that he had named had to wait until the next century,

the search for order within the "family of man" was the principal preoccupation

of the Age of Reason. People were organized into peoples, and all of them needed

to be minutely (and thus ever more "faithfully") described if the shape of natural

society were to be ascertained and the career of the "arts and sciences," properly

traced. Every description of a "people" assumed a certain-rarely examined-

structure of human social existence (from birth to death); once all of life's ingre-

dients had been catalogued, the scholar knew "everything" and could move on to

another community. As in most other provinces of the eighteenth-century uni-

verse, however, the menu of ingredients grew faster than the capacity of the

amplest scholarly stomach. The ethnographic instructions that Muller received

from the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1733 contained only eleven items

"for particular observation"; the instructions that the travel-weary Muller pre-

172 REPRESENTATIONS

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pared for his own successor, Johann Eberhard Fischer, reached no. 923 before

proceeding to maps, Kunst-Kammern, and dictionaries; and by the turn of the

century most travelers had given up on the idea of devouring "everything" and

started focusing on miscellany or "principles."'8

The search for principles, or what D'Alembert called "the art of reducing, as

far as possible, a great number of phenomena to a single one which can be

regarded as the principle of them," had, of course, always accompanied the grand

inventory of the eighteenth century.'9 "Everything" was not supposed to be a

shapeless pile: some of its components were-naturally or artificially-more

comparison. Before describing a nation, the scholar had to decide where one

nation ended and the other began: in other words, he had to find the ethnic

equivalent of Linnaeus' pistils and stamens by constructing a complex but neces-

sarily complete hierarchy of communal traits.

The first such trait was the name, invariably mentioned as the first and most

obvious badge of existential autonomy. It pointed to a nomenclature that was

preexisting and thus possibly natural; uniquely human in that it was based on the

actual nomen (no other classifiable item named itself or had its own kinship

hypothesis); and eminently convenient because "in our age it has become cus-

tomary in most of Europe to teach the sciences in alphabetic order through dic-

tionaries."20 Convenience was not the same as pol'za, however, and the

independent (and thus unverifiable) provenance of ethnic appellations created

more problems than possibilities for "the cautious and unbiased historian" whose

principal ambition was to separate "fables" (which "all peoples have" and which

"mothers tell their children in times of idleness") from "incontrovertible or at least

probable proof."'2' Nothing about ethnic names was probable or incontrovertible:

"For example, the Finns call us 'Venelaima'; the lakut call us 'Liudi'; the Tatars

call us 'Urus'; the Kazak Horde calls the Bashkirs 'Sarnisherek'; and the Ostiak

call the Tungus 'kellem' or 'kuellem,' which means 'piebald."' To compound the

difficulty, "we" could call ourselves "Orthodox" ("according to law"), "Slavs"

("according to people"), or "Russians" ("according to territory")-which, among

other things, meant that "we" did not exist before a certain people became

attached to a certain territory.22

Territory, or obitanie, as in "habitation" or "habitat," was usually the second

item on ethnographic lists and potentially the "single point of view" that might

result in a graceful classification (particularly if "Russian" was indeed a territorial

concept). There were the steppe peoples and the forest peoples; the peoples of

Europe and the peoples of Asia; the peoples of the Indigirka River and the

peoples of the Caucasian mountains; the peoples of the Kamchatka Peninsula

and the peoples of the Caspian Sea; the peoples of the Turukhansk District and

the peoples of the Orenburg Province.23 The main advantage of this arrangement

consisted in the inclusion of human communities in the "mathematical," "nat-

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ural," and "political" worlds that were being simultaneously catalogued by the

same scholarly "name-callers" (nomenclators). Peoples "were found" in certain

locales along with animals, vegetables, minerals, cemeteries, and artillery pieces;

they were a part of the landscape and could be studied as such. As indeed, they

were. The landscape molded in the eighteenth century proved extremely

durable, and the territorial principle of ethnic classification turned out to be as

useful as it was convenient. The English lived in England; russkielrossiiane resided

in Russia; and the Kamchadal "inhabited" Kamchatka. England, Russia, and

Kamchatka were all geographical concepts that defined people found within their

borders.

Not completely and not always, however. A "truly scientific" taxonomy had

to rest on traits inherent to the objects in question, yet it was clear that the English

had come from "Germany"; that some peoples of the Turukhansk District would

presently defect to Berezov; and that the various "Siberian" or "steppe" peoples

invariably collapsed into the Ostiak, the Koriak, and the Kaisak whose uniqueness

and mutual differences seemed to stem as much from their own nature as from

the Nature that surrounded them. And were not the Russians defining the shape

of Russia just as they were being defined by it? Did not russkii (Russian) and ros-

siianin (of Russia) mean one and the same thing?

The latter question was never posed in this fashion because the answer was

assumed to be in the affirmative (and the use of the two terms, interchangeable),

yet it was equally obvious that not every resident of the Russian Empire was Rus-

sian and that the traditional dividing line was called "faith." In seventeenth-

century Muscovy "Russian" had been equal to "Orthodox" (although not the

other way around), and baptism had dispelled foreignness along with darkness.

But what did faith mean beyond the act of conversion? What-if anything-did

a baptized Ostiak have to do to become a good Russian (Christian), particularly

if there were no priests around? And what was the equivalent of conversion out-

side Christianity or Islam? If the Ostiak and the Koriak were different peoples

(as they themselves contended and everyone else confirmed), and if "faith" was a

universal indicator of difference, then how could an individual Ostiak convert to

Koriakness? What did "faith" consist of?

The traditional answer-both popular and official-had seemed to begin

with food. Dietary taboos defined one's own community as distinct from "savages"

("raw-eating" Eskimo or "self-eating" Samoed), "foreigners" ("and that fish smells

so foul that a Russian person can barely stand it")24 or other "nonhumans":

Indeed these people are worse than animals, for even dumb animals [skot bezslovesen] do

not eat beasts, fowl, or grass that God has forbidden them to eat, while these people, not

knowing God who dwells in Heaven and refusing to accept His law from those who bring

it to them, are raw-eaters who eat the meat of beasts and vermin, drink animal filth and

blood as if it were water, and eat grass and roots.25

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Another crucial marker of foreignness had been sex. All aliens broke some

of the rules of proper procreation, and most forms of apostasy and impiety (zlo-

chestie) were accompanied by "lecherous business" and "filthy fornication" (skver-

naia pokhot').26 The third basic component of "faith"-ultimately related to sex as

well as sustenance-was a certain relationship to the land. Seventeenth-century

Russian frontiersmen had divided all peoples into "settled" and "nomadic" (sidi-

achie and kochevnye), and further into "pastoral or agricultural" (skotnye or pashen-

nye) and "walking, horse-riding, or reindeer-breeding" (peshie, konnye, or olennye).

Most non-Christians wandered in the wilderness (the original "savage," silvaticus,

was a "forest-dweller"), and a baptized nomad had to stop being a nomad because

all Orthodox Christians (khristiane) were, however indirectly, peasants (krest'iane),

just as all "Chaucha" were "reindeer people." Finally, an Ostiak who agreed

to cook his fish and settle down as both a husband and a husbandman was

also expected to adopt the numerous "customs" that invariably, though seldom

conspicuously, accompanied faith: that is, to "live in a household and make

bread, and keep horses, and cattle, and pigs, and chickens, and also make wine,

and weave, and spin, all according to the Russian custom [so vsego obychaia s

russkogo]. 27

Over the course of the eighteenth century the part and the whole changed

places. "Custom" rapidly grew in importance, acquiring a separate value and

gradually congealing into a "spirit of nations" (and eventually "culture"), while

"faith" became one of its elements, still necessary but increasingly divorced from

the vicissitudes of eating and mating. Stripped down to ethical and liturgical pre-

cepts collectively known as "law" (zakon), it usually came towards the end of eth-

nographic accounts, after subsistence and before festivals:

If they have not been enlightened by Christian Law, what notion do they have of divinity

and of man's duty toward his Creator and his neighbor; what is their idea of virtue; what

kind of reward for good and punishment for evil do they expect in future life; and what

kind of divine service or law or spiritual rites do they have, in other words, do they have

their own idols and worship inanimate things, and what do they hold to be sacred?28

By the end of the century, the answers to these questions could be entirely dis-

solved in customs, with ethics construed as part of the "spiritual qualities" along

with art and temperament, and divine service joined with "nuptial solemnities"

and "funereal rites."29 This seemed especially appropriate because not all peoples

had a clearly ascertainable canon comparable to "Christian Law" and because

Christian Law was broader than Natural Law and thus subject to abridgment.

The Tungus religion, for example, was "more custom . .. than law," which meant

that "they distinguish[ed] between vice and virtue on the basis of the universal

natural principle, namely not to do unto others what they would not have others

do unto them."30 Similarly, Grigorii Novitskii's Ostiaks wallowed in the "abyss of

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godlessness" and "evil idol worship" but followed "the law of nature" (zakon

estestva) by encouraging the love of one's neighbor (thus making up in custom

what they lacked in religion).3' Even developed "laws" were of little significance.

As Tatishchev put it,

[Religious] discord is sown by self-interested priests, superstitious pharisees, or brainless

fanatics. Among intelligent people it cannot occur because an intelligent person cares

nothing about another man's faith and it is all the same to him whether he lives and trades

with Luther, Calvin, a papist, an anabaptist, a Mohammedan, or a pagan. For rather than

looking at his faith he looks at his merchandise, his actions, and his ways, and treats him

accordingly.32

Thus, while the state continued to classify all imperial subjects according to

religion, the state-sponsored scholars and their "curious readers" (many of them

state bureaucrats) wanted to learn the "true nature" of nations and the "true

relationships" among them. And this involved the multiplying, cataloguing, and

ranking of customs-no longer simply obychai but Sitten und Gebrduchen, usually

translated as nravy i obyknoveniia, or "mores and traditions." The duly isolated and

subdivided components of the old "faith," they were expected to serve as inde-

pendent standards of comparison and, taken together, comprise "everything"

about a given ethnic group. Usually positioned after name and territory, the nravy

i obyknoveniia included food, dwellings, clothing, economic pursuits, transporta-

tion, tools and utensils, cosmogonic beliefs, calendar, social graces, festivals, the

arts and sciences, trade and manufacture, childbirth and child-rearing, sex and

marriage, war, crime and punishment, friendship and hospitality, disease and

medicine, death and burial, system of government, social classes, and, where

applicable, political/dynastic history and administrative status within the empire.

In addition, all peoples had individual characters known as Gemiiths-Beschaffenheit

(usually rendered as dushevnye kachestva, or "spiritual qualities"). Johann Peter

Fal'k preferred the "sober and clean" Tatars to the "rude and obstinate" Cossacks;

Simon-Peter Pallas found the "Ingushians" to be "an honest and brave set of

people" while describing the "Ossetes" as "a barbarous, predatory, and miserable

race of men who have always infested the public road leading to Georgia"; Fer-

dinand Marie de Lesseps "was astonished by the solidity of [the Chukchi] under-

standing" but thought the Koriak to be "suspicious, cruel, incapable either of

benevolence or pity"; and Johann Gottlieb Georgi reported that while the Mordva

were "honest, industrious, and friendly," the Izhors "not only led a life of scarcity

and dissolution but were also stupid, distrustful, thievish and, due to their pro-

clivity for violence and robbery, dangerous." In more ambiguous cases, Ivan

Lepekhin considered the Tatars "exceedingly amiable, curious, hospitable, but

also cunning"; Johan Eberhard Fischer believed the Moldavians to be as uncer-

tain in their friendship as they were generous in not remembering evil; and

Georgi characterized the Baltic "Semi-Germans" (Latvians, Ests, and Livonians)

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as "extremely obstinate, lazy, unkempt, and given to drunkenness, but notwith-

standing sharp of wit."33

Indeed, the closer to home-and the longer-one looked, the less focused

the portrait became. The distant Spaniards or Italians might be "jealous" and the

Dutch might be "the strictest observers of household cleanliness and neatness,"

but when it came to the ethnographically processed peoples of the Russian

empire, most had their clothes, economic tasks, and, yes, spiritual qualities cali-

brated according to gender, while some-most notably Finns, Poles, and Rus-

sians-had "national" subdivisions according to class.34 Still, the adding-up of all

mores and traditions of a given nation was supposed to result in a true and final

representation of that nation (nation was a French term occasionally substituted

for Volk/narod in the last quarter of the century). Fischer, for instance, believed

that he could prove the Chinese origins of the native Americans simply by com-

paring customs. Both despised virginity, respected couvade, and practiced "the

cutting of hair as an expression of the greatest grief"; "the destruction of dwell-

ings after the owner's death"; "the launching of an arrow as a sign of nationwide

alert"; "the carving of images on the face and all over the body"; "the scalping of

captive or defeated enemies"; and "the killing of old and sick people"-hence

they were related, hence only migration (of the Chinese to Peru) could account

for so remarkable a similarity.35

The triumph of customs over faith led to a major reshuffle of the

seventeenth-century universe. The Muscovite state had formally divided the

frontier population into the Orthodox (also known as Russians) and the for-

eigners/infidels, whose otherness had usually been interpreted in terms of Ori-

ental "perfidy" or raw-eating beastliness. In the meantime, the Orthodox

frontiersmen themselves had been reporting on their heathen counterparts

without recourse to either vocabulary and on the apparent assumption that the

world consisted of countless peoples entitled to their languages, faiths, and cus-

toms (but not to liberty/volia, of course).36 Perhaps, ironically, the scholarly find-

ings of the eighteenth century seemed to vindicate the latter view. The new world

discovered by academic ethnographers appeared pluralistic, decentered, and rel-

ativist. "Objectivity" was a value applied to scholars as well as nations, and reflex-

ivity grew stronger as the century wore on.

The surest way to find out the spiritual inclinations of a certain people is undoubtedly the

one where we pay the greatest possible attention to their actions without forgetting to

watch ourselves and to note the thoughts that occur to us when we are discoursing about

others.37

Natural law presupposed the uniformity of human nature. Customs could

vary but the "passions" remained the same. Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle and

other Moderns could compete with the Ancients only if "their trees" were "as

great as those of former times," and Schlozer's world history could be truly uni-

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versal only if it saw "all parts of the world as equal to each other" and "passed with

equal interest from the Ganges to the Nile and from the Tiber to the Vistula."38

Accordingly, the Russians belonged on the same list as the Izhors and the Ossetes,

and it was possible to say-as it had been in a seventeenth-century "skaska"-that

"the muezzin corresponds to our sexton [ponomar']: our sexton calls people to

church by ringing the bells, and the muezzin, by shouting."39 Similarly, "as much

as [the Kalmyk] are inferior to others in the matter of husbandry, so they are

superior to them as pastoralists."40 And perhaps most remarkably, "the reindeer

Chukchi deal with the settled ones in the same way as Russian estate owners deal

with their peasants: the settled ones must prepare whale blubber for the reindeer

ones, while the reindeer ones bring nothing but reindeer meat.' On a loftier

scholarly plane, the first collection of Russian folklore did not distinguish between

Russians and non-Russians, and Martin Klevetskii's textbook portrait of the Rus-

sians was no more flattering than that of the Germans, Poles, or indeed Persians

and Moroccans: "They are of middle height, sturdy, strong, brave, good imita-

tors, many-especially the gentry-speak foreign languages and engage in the

sciences and arts with great success. The common people are rude."42 Even the

second edition of Georgi's ethnographic compendium, which introduced the

Russians as "the ruling nation," described them in terms usually applied to the

Tungus:

The Russians are for the most part cheerful, carefree to the point of frivolity [bezpechny

dazhe do vetrennosti], keen on sensual pleasures, quick to understand and to do things,

expert at reducing the amount of their work, lively in all things, agile, and sociable. They

are not moderate in their attachments, quickly lose their sense of proportion, and often

go to the farthest extremes. They are attentive, decisive, courageous, and energetic. They

have the greatest passion for trade and barter. They are hospitable and generous, often to

their own detriment. They are not overly concerned about the future. Their manner is

friendly, open, helpful, and unenvious when they lose. They are jocose and capable of

keeping a secret. Their naturally simple way of life and cheerful disposition do not

engender many needs, and those that they do have are easy to satisfy; this gives them time

to relax, free themselves from troublesome chores [zabotlivykh zatei], find joy in all things,

keep their health and strength, and enjoy an unburdensome, tranquil, happy and, for the

most part, lengthy old age.43

Even allowing for the Arcadian predilections of the age of sentimentalism,

this sketch does not make the Russians stand out among their peers. The amount

of space devoted to them is in proportion to their "ruling" status, but the specific

traits that make up the whole are subject to the same unblinking scholarly stare

that scrutinized the Moldavians and the Mingrelians:

Most [Russian] women have dark hair and fair skin, and many of them are true beauties.

Since they do not wear tight dresses or lace themselves up, their breasts are naturally large

and their other body parts are quite fat. Their breasts are much larger than those of Tatar

women. Girls usually mature by the age of twelve or thirteen, but some of them lose all

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