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Steven Vincent The Emergence of Russian Liberalism: Alexander Kunitsyn in Context, 1783–1840 By Julia Berest The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era: Reforming American Verse and Values By Lisa Szefel Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Institutions in Colonial India By Indra Sengupta and Daud Ali, eds. Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment (forthcoming) By Thomas Ahnert and Susan Manning, eds. Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present (forthcoming) By Jessica Riskin and Mario Biagioli, eds. The Emergence of Russian Liberalism Alexander Kunitsyn in Context, 1783–1840 Julia Berest THE EMERGENCE OF RUSSIAN LIBERALISM Copyright © Julia Berest, 2011. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-11173-8 All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-29404-6 ISBN 978-0-230-11892-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230118928 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Berest, Julia, 1976– The emergence of Russian liberalism : Alexander Kunitsyn in context, 1783–1840 / by Julia Berest. p. cm.—(Palgrave studies in cultural and intellectual history) Includes bibliographical references. 1. Kunitsyn, Aleksandr Petrovich, 1783–1840. 2. Kunitsyn, Aleksandr Petrovich, 1783–1840—Political and social views. 3. Intellectuals— Russia—Biography. 4. Law teachers—Russia—Biography. 5. Philosophers—Russia—Biography. 6. Liberalism—Russia—History— 19th century. 7. Natural law—History—19th century. 8. Russia— Intellectual life—1801–1917. 9. Russia—Politics and government—1801–1917. 10. Russia—History—Alexander I, 1801–1825. I. Title. CT1218.K827B47 2011 947(cid:2).07092—dc22 2010045410 [B] A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: May 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1 Formative Years 13 2 Years in the Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum 31 3 Kunitsyn in the Son of Fatherland 59 4 Kunitsyn and Nicholas Turgenev: “The Society of the Year 1819” 85 5 The Natural Law Tradition in Russia 105 6 Kunitsyn on Natural Law 143 7 In the Midst of Conservative Reaction 161 Epilogue 185 Conclusion 193 Notes 199 Bibliography 245 Index 259 v Acknowledgments I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Charles Ruud from the University of Western Ontario, whose guidance dur- ing my years as a graduate student made this book possible. He gen- erously spent his time helping me, an immigrant scholar from Eastern Europe, to adjust to the English-speaking academic culture. I am also extremely grateful to Professor Eli Nathans, who provided many valuable and insightful comments on selected parts of my work. His knowledge and enthusiasm for intellectual history have been a source of inspiration for me. Among my graduate teachers, Professor Neville Thompson showed much support and kindness to me. To David Murphy, Library Assistant at the Weldon Library (UWO), I owe my debt of gratitude for helping me locate rare Russian books in the libraries of the United States and Canada. Without his help this book would have been much shorter. Ekaterina Budagova from the Russian National Library at St. Petersburg also assisted me with obtaining some pre-revolutionary Russian publications. I also wish to thank Professor László Kontler from Central European University, whose stimulating classes on comparative intellectual history awakened my interest in Russian and European thought. Last but not least, I am grateful to my parents and my husband, who have supported me throughout the years of research and writing. Their love is precious to me. vii Introduction As a law professor and philosopher, Alexander Petrovich Kunitsyn had an unusual career, which mirrored major progressive and conserva- tive policies of the Russian government under Alexander I (1801–25). A person of obscure social origin from a small provincial town, he was one of the few Russian students selected to study at state cost at St. Petersburg Pedagogical Institute and later Göttingen University as part of the government project for creating the cadres of native teach- ers in Russia. Upon graduation in 1811 Kunitsyn was appointed to the position of professor in the elite Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum, where he earned a reputation as a talented educator and a favorite teacher of Alexander Pushkin, the greatest poet of Russia’s romantic age. Taking advantage of the improved publishing opportunities, Kunitsyn made himself known as a liberal-m inded publicist and an author of one of the first Russian works on natural law, which, alas, appeared at a time when Alexander I’s liberal era was already drawing to an end. The first signs of the impending change began to appear shortly after the Napoleonic Wars, but to Kunitsyn, a beneficiary of the government’s educational policies, they did not become obvious until much later. Kunitsyn’s intention to present his Natural Law to Alexander I was indicative of the reformist hopes created by the tsar’s liberal pronouncements during the early nineteenth century. The government’s interest in promoting legal education in Russian universities must have further encouraged Kunitsyn’s expectations. Courses in natural law were first established in Russia by Peter the Great, who sought to borrow from the West not only technical knowl- edge but also the ideology useful for building a modernized version of the autocratic state. German natural law in its Wolffian tradition, which emphasized the ethos of public duties over individual rights, appeared more suitable for the tsar’s purposes than any other vari- ants of natural law.1 The ambition to improve legal education was 1 2 The Emergence of Russian Liberalism intermittently kept alive by the Russian monarchs throughout the eighteenth century, but it was not until the early years of Alexander’s reign that the authorities made a concerted effort to seek out quali- fied teachers and textbooks to meet the growing need for trained government servants. Almost a dozen teaching manuals on natural law, written mostly by German visiting professors, were published during the first two decades of the nineteenth century—more than in the whole period since the introduction of natural law in Russia. A decision of the government to entrust universities with the function of self-c ensorship in matters of academic writing was an important liberal gesture, which spurred the development of the book market and, with it, the interest in serious philosophical literature among the reading public. The fact that the Ministry of Education recruited some of the well-k nown German Kantians to teach in the newly established Russian universities must have strengthened the impres- sion that the government was in a liberal mood. Yet, the authori- ties never intended natural law classes to become a training ground for liberal thinking. By choosing German rather than French or English professors, the government followed Peter the Great’s tradi- tion, hoping to bring Russian education up to the modern standards without, at the same time, exposing Russian students to undesirable ideas. Indeed, German teachers in Russia, despite their self- professed Kantianism, approached Kant in a selective manner, which diluted much of his liberal thought. Kant’s most provocative ideas, including his rejection of hereditary privileges and paternalistic government as incompatible with the notion of personal autonomy, were invari- ably ignored and often replaced with the principles going back to the Wolffian tradition of absolutist ethics and politics. It was Kunitsyn’s interpretation of natural law, with its emphasis on liberal individual- ism, that changed the government’s attitude toward the discipline of natural law and the principles of university autonomy. Based largely on the synthesis of Kantian and Smithian ideas, Kunitsyn’s Natural Law was more liberal than any other book on this subject approved for use in Russian universities. In 1821 it became to the Russian conservatives a standard of political unreliability by which censors would come to judge other works on this subject available in Russia. The same year the authorities banned Kunitsyn from teach- ing, removed his book from all the libraries, and put the discipline of natural law under intense scrutiny. Kunitsyn’s “case” marked the eclipse of Alexander’s liberal era in education, but it proved difficult to suppress altogether the spread