SOURCE: Levitt, Marcus C. “An Antidote to Nervous Juice: Catherine the Great's Debate With Chappe d'Auteroche over Russian Culture.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32, No. 1 (Fall 1998): 49-63.

[In this essay, Levitt examines Catherine's Antidote, her response to Chappe d'Auteroche's attack on Russian culture in his Voyage en Sibérie. Levitt argues that although the work is flawed by ad hominem attacks on Chappe, the Antidote's defense of the Russian people and Russian literature reflects both Catherine's desire to push her country forward through cultural transformation and the complicated status of Russia in the European Enlightenment.]

In the age of Enlightenment, when works of philosophy were often oriented toward analyzing specific political problems, travel notes played a significant part in debates over culture and politics, either providing proofs for a given theory or themselves advancing philosophical postulates. At the same time, tendentious histories and travel notes were often written—even commissioned—to serve immediate political goals. Such may well have been the case, I will argue, with the Chappe d'Auteroche's Voyage en Sibérie (1768),¹ which provoked Catherine's Antidote, ou Examen du mauvais livre superbement imprimé intitulé Voyage en Sibérie (1770).² In the analysis below I will examine two aspects of this exchange: first, I will consider Chappe d'Auteroche's book in the context of France's anti-Russian diplomacy of the time and locate it more generally within the context of Russia as a problem in European Enlightenment thought, with special attention to Chappe's unique attempt to ground political and cultural arguments in physiological terms. Second, I will analyze Catherine's response, both as part of an ongoing defense of her role as Enlightener of Russia, and as a defense of the worth of the Russian state and of modern Russian literature. The state and literature, whose fates were to be so closely intertwined in the later tradition, both intellectually and institutionally, were here explicitly linked, perhaps for the first time in Russian history.

The timing of Chappe's book was peculiar in many respects. Chappe was a French astronomer and geographer who had visited Russia in 1761-62 on behalf of the Parisian Academy of Sciences, in order to observe Venus when it passed across the sun on June 6, 1761.³ With Russian help he organized an expedition to a superior observation site at Tobolsk. His Voyage en Sibérie, three great folio volumes lavishly published, with copious tables, maps, and beautiful engravings based on illustrations by Jean-Baptiste Le Prince, appeared only six years later, in 1768. A few weeks after the book's approval for publication by the French Academy, Chappe set out to observe the transit of Venus once again, this time from California. On June 3, 1769, he observed the eclipse near San Jose and soon after caught sick and died on August 1.⁴ The Voyage en Sibérie was not merely the story of Chappe's expedition, but included an account “Of the MANNERS and CUSTOMS of the RUSSIANS, the Present State of their Empire; with the Natural History, and Geographical Description of their Country, and Level of the Road from Paris to Tobolsky.”⁵ Why the level of the road between Paris and Tobolsk is important is something to which I will return. It is possible that the lag in publication was due to the labor involved in compiling the work or to the time needed to execute and prepare Le Prince's illustrations for the magnificent publication.⁶ The time lag, however, may also have had a less innocent explanation.

Just at the time when Chappe was making his trip and compiling his book, views of Russia's significance as an ideological problem within French Enlightenment thought were crystallizing into two opposing tendencies.⁷ On one side, whose most extreme exponent was Voltaire, stood those who embraced Peter the Great's reforms and looked to Russia as a success story, the embodiment of European Enlightenment values put into practice; as Carolyn Wilberger has written, Voltaire's “optimism about Russia was nothing less than an affirmation of faith in the basic validity of civilization itself and in its benefits for all mankind.”⁸ The mostly pro-Russia camp included Voltaire's fellow encyclopedists Diderot, d'Alembert, Grimm, and Jaucourt, plus La Harpe and Marmontel; into this group also fell the travel writers Ségur, Falconet, Levesque, and De Ligne (although none of these individuals were as committed as Voltaire). Those who criticized Peter as despot and imitator took their cue from Rousseau (especially from the Social Contract of 1762) and in part from Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws (1748).⁹ The anti-Russia camp saw Russia as oriental (not European), barbarian (not civilized), and despotic (not ruled by law or social sensibility); this group included Mably, Condillac, Raynal, and Mirabeau.

This ideological bifurcation corresponded to the international diplomatic situation of the time and was in part inspired by fear of Russia as a new major player in European politics and her successes in the Seven Years' War. Political and philosophical positions became intertwined; the defenders of beleaguered Polish independence, for example, decried Russian despotism and were often sympathetic toward Russia's enemy, Turkey. From the late 1750s and early 60s, despite being allied with Russia, France became extremely alarmed at Russia's military potential as a new continental force, especially after her victory over Frederick the Great at Kunersdorff in August 1759 and her triumphant occupation of Berlin in 1760. When Catherine came to power by coup in June 1762, she resumed nominally friendly relations with France (briefly interrupted by Peter III's sudden switch of alliances), but Louis XV and his foreign minister the Duc du Choiseul continued to pursue the covert anti-Russian foreign policy begun during Elizabeth's last years, a policy motivated by a combination of fear, jealousy, and miscalculation about Catherine, whose legitimacy and ability to rule they questioned.¹⁰

It was common practice for governments of the day to promote foreign policy goals by commissioning (more or less openly) the writing of historical and travel accounts to suit their interests. A famous example is Voltaire's History of the Russian Empire Under Peter the Great, which Empress Elizabeth commissioned in 1757 during the Franco-Russian alliance of the Seven Years' War; it was considered by many at the time, and also by later commentators, as (to use Peter Gay's tag) “a collection of gross compliments disguised as history,” although that may be unduly harsh.¹¹ In the Antidote, Catherine repeatedly suggests that it was the French government led by Choiseul that was behind the publication of Chappe's Voyage, and there is circumstantial evidence to support the contention. Chappe's book seems motivated by the goal of demonstrating that Russia was economically and militarily no true great power.¹² Not long before Chappe's expedition, Rousseau had menacingly predicted in the Social Contract (a refutation of Voltaire's idyllic view of Russia in the History of the Russian Empire Under Peter the Great)¹³ that: “The Russian empire would like to subjugate Europe, and will itself be subjugated. The Tatars, its subjects or its neighbors, will become its masters and ours. This revolution appears inevitable to me. All the kings of Europe are working together to hasten it.”¹⁴ Chappe notes near the end of his book that “While I was in Petersburg, just setting our for Siberia, I received a letter from Paris, desiring me to take an accurate survey of this country, from whence whole nations were in a short time expected to emigrate, and, like the Sythians and the Huns, to over run our little Europe. Instead of such people, I found marshes and deserts” (394). Thus Chappe concludes that the Russian military threat is not real. This passage also suggests Chappe's role (whether formal or not) as a French agent on a scouting mission and seems to support the contention that this mission was at least in part politically (rather than scientifically) inspired. The title, allegorical frontispiece, preface and first sentence of Chappe's Voyage all grandly emphasize that the expedition—and possibly the book as well—was “undertaken by order of the King” (and with the support of the Academy as well as “enlightened Ministers”), and it might not be wrong to take this literally. Chappe's bold advertisement of Louis XV's support, which could simply be taken in the usual sense as indicating that he was patronized by the Royal Academy of Sciences, particularly irked Catherine because the expedition had actually been funded by Elizabeth and with the support of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which had published Chappe's findings in 1762.¹⁵

A strong circumstantial case can be made linking Chappe to the clandestine French anti-Russian diplomatic clique called, appropriately, “the King's Secret” (le Secret du Roi). Unknown even to the French Foreign Ministry, and as the name implies under the king's direct supervision, its main goals in the period after the Seven Year's War were to create a Franco-Prussian alliance in order to protect Poland and the continental balance of power and to suport France's traditional allies (and Russia's enemies) Sweden, Turkey, and the Crimean Tartars.¹⁶ The group regularly used government subsidized publications to further its aims. Specifically, there are numerous threads linking Chappe and Claude-Carloman de Rulhière, an important publicist for the clique, which also included the Comte de Broglie, Jean-Louis Favier, and the French Ambassador to Russia Baron de Breteuil, who had been sent to Russia in 1760 with a secret brief to exert “his utmost ingenuity to prevent a further extension of Russia's power” before becoming ambassador soon after.¹⁷ Upon Chappe's return to St. Petersburg from Siberia on November 1, 1761, Breteuil prevailed upon the astronomer to stay the winter with him in Russia, which he did (he remained until May, thus experiencing most of Peter III's short reign and missing Catherine's coup by only a month). In Petersburg Chappe became close friends with Rulhière, who arrived in Russia in March on Choiseul's orders to serve as Breueuil's secretary. Rulhière spent three months in close association with Chappe, referred to him as his “premier ami” and even wrote poetry praising the truth of his works and sounding the anti-Russian theme.¹⁸ Rulhière's notorious Anecdotes of the Revolution in Russia in 1762 was a spicy eyewitness account of Catherine's coup, and helped both confirm and generate hostility toward her on the part of Louis XV's government.¹⁹ The Anecdotes of the Revolution reveals in an intentionally lighthearted vein intimate details of Catherine's personal life, and more seriously, the suspicious nature of Peter III's too convenient death. Intervention on the part of Voltaire, Diderot, and other of Catherine's well-wishers prevented publication of the Anecdotes during her lifetime (it was published in 1797, the year after she died), but in manuscript form the book immediately became a staple of Parisian salons—starting with Choiseul's—and made the rounds of other European capitals for many years.²⁰ Rulhière's biographer contends that if Rulhière's views on Russia were demonstrably influenced by Chappe (to the point of suggesting that Anecdotes of the Revolution may even have been a collaboration), it was Rulhière who “provided his friend [Chappe] with his political views.”²¹ In the same year that Chappe's Voyage was published, 1768, Choiseul commissioned Rulhière to begin his monumental and anti-Russian History of the Anarchy in Poland (1768-1791), and in 1773 he probably collaborated with Favier (on Broglie's orders) on Favier's Reasoned Conjectures On France's Actual Position in the European Political System, which may be considered a defense of the clique's position.²² Hence Catherine's assumption—that Chappe's book and its attempt to denigrate Russian power were inspired by external political considerations—seems quite plausible. The fact that the Voyage's appearance almost coincided with Turkey's declaration of war on Russia, which France had secretly encouraged, made it seem all the more sinister.²³

Chappe may also have been inspired by the sentiment Rulhière expressed in his Anecdotes: “Scarcely has one spent eight days in Russia than one can already speak reasonably of the Russians: everything leaps to the eye.”²⁴ Chappe (like Rulhière) could have been comforted by the fact that he spent whole months in Russia (fifteen, seven of which were spent in Petersburg). Although Catherine reproved Chappe for taking much of his material from faulty second-hand sources,²⁵ and made fun of the fact that Chappe saw Russia primarily from within a totally enclosed, fur-lined Russian sleigh while speeding along the post road in the dead of winter, Chappe made a concerted effort to back up his annihilatingly negative view of Russia with (what he saw as) objective, scientific data—using a battery of instruments and analytical methods to measure continually almost everything he came across (temperature, size, color, geographical position, elevation, etc.).

For the purposes of this analysis I will center on one such measurement: Russia's alleged lack of “nervous juice.” According to Montesquieu's well known thesis, a nation's character directly depended on its climate and geography. Chappe continued this materialist-determinist line of thought, but challenged Montesquieu's view that Russians were essentially European, “a very brave, simple, unreserved, unsuspecting people, without policy or craft, having few vices, and several virtues, a great deal of sincerity and honesty, and whose dispositions are not very amorous” (321).²⁶ On the contrary, to Chappe these were no noble savages, but corrupt, scheming, dishonest, cowardly, sexually promiscuous barbarians riddled with venereal diseases. Chappe based his analysis of the Russians' physiological inferiority on the works of Claude-Nicholas Le Cat, a well known French surgeon and physiologist of the day²⁷; it is unclear whether Chappe is being disingenuous when he refers to Le Cat's ideas as “truths and opinions generally admitted” (322). Le Cat followed in the tradition of Descartes, who combined philosophy and physiology in contending that the body and soul have a physical point of interface in the brain at the pineal gland, the place where the vital or animal spirits within the blood make contact with the soul.²⁸ According to this doctrine, the animal spirits, starting from the brain, are what act mechanically upon the nerves throughout the body, causing sensation and muscle movement; the mind or soul influences the direction of the nerve impulses as they leave the pineal gland, their point of origin that acts as a kind of switchboard. Chappe contrasts the “human machine” and the “universal spirit” (known by various names including vitriolic acid, phlogiston, electric matter) which he describes as the “primary fluid which gives life to the whole universe” (322). This life force (Descartes' “fire without flame”) actuates the human machine; we ingest it with the air we breathe and the food we eat, and it becomes part of our blood via the digestive system and the lungs. In the brain, the blood is purified and the end product—what Le Cat calls “animal fluid” and Chappe (possibly after Montesquieu)²⁹ “nervous juice”—is formed, “the chief organ [both] of sensation and of the faculties of the soul” (323). The system of nervous juice seems close to that of what we think of as the nervous system, although with the crucial admixture of the spiritual component:

The nervous juice makes a kind of lake in the brain; the spinal marrow is the principal channel which conveys it from thence, and the nerves are so many rivers or streams which sprinkle and vivify all the parts of the animal. The nerves being tubes, their texture is such, that the sides of the canals are composed of much smaller tubes; which terminate by one extremity in the brain, and by the other in the skin, where they expand and from a net-work of nerves … it forms one continued stream, which becomes the organ of sense. This nervous juice, as subtle as light, transmits instantaneously to the brain, all the impressions it receives. This account of the nerves, and of the nervous juice, establishes the system of our sensations, of our ideas, of the mind, of the genius, and of the faculties of the rational soul.

(324)

Chappe's scientific advance (if we can call it that) is to take Le Cat's theory of the working of the nervous system and apply it to the problem posed by Montesquieu concerning “the influence of the climate on the inhabitants” (325). While “the universal spirit” is “everywhere the same,” Chappe argues, its action depends on a host of “secondary causes” (324)—such as the weather, and the elevation and quality of the soil. Bad weather impedes the particles of universal spirit; similarly the quality of the soil determines what sort of plants will grow, “in proportion as we rise, the air will become purer … [and] the universal fluid will become more active” (325). Hence it is essential to know such things as “the level of the road from Paris to Tobolsky … In any comparison we would make between climates and characters of men, it is necessary to attend to the height of the soil on which they dwell” (326).

On his travels from Petersburg to Tobolsk Chappe determined “with more accuracy than was necessary for [the] present purpose” that the Russian kingdom is “one vast plain” whose height is “very inconsiderable” (326). As opposed to France, whose “inequalities … have a remarkable effect on the varieties of soil observable in the French provinces, and on the nature of the atmosphere” (328), Russia is “almost on a level” and is characterized by a “striking uniformity” among its animals, flora and fauna, and people. “Whoever has been through one province knows all the Russians; they are of the same stature, they have similar passions, similar dispositions, and their manners are alike”—and the same goes for their dress, amusements, agriculture, and houses. (How convenient for the traveler on a tight schedule!) More seriously, the moistness of the marshy lowlands and the climate obstruct the flow of nervous juices. In winter, which

appears to be the only season in which the Russians can enjoy the benefits of a pure atmosphere … the cold is so intense, that all nature seems to be lifeless and totally inactive. All the inhabitants, shut up and confined within their stoves [“poêles,” what Chappe calls huts], breathe an air infected by exhalations and vapors proceeding from perspiration. They pass their time in these stoves wholly given up to indolence, sleeping almost all day in a suffocating heat, and hardly taking any exercise. This manner of living, and the climate, produces such a degree of dissolution in the blood of these people, that they are under the necessity of bathing twice a week all the year round, in order to get rid of the watery disposition prevalent in their constitutions, by raising an artificial perspiration.

(330)

The conclusion from this is that “the nervous juice in the Russian is inspissated and sluggish, more adapted to form strong constitutions than men of genius … the floggings they constantly undergo in the baths, and the heat they experience there, blunts the sensibility of the external organs … The want of genius therefore among the Russians, appears to be an effect of the soil and the climate” (330-31). Chappe cites Montesquieu's dictum that “to make a Russian feel, one must flay him” (331) and echoes Rousseau's cutting praise of the Russians as a people with a “genius” of imitativeness. Beyond the physiological inferiority due to lack of nervous juice, in the tradition of the Montesquieu-Rousseau line on Russia, Chappe also attributes Russia's social inferiority to the effects of despotism, and its concurrent deadening effects on education:

The love of fame and of our country [France?!] is unknown in Russia; despotism debases the mind, damps the genius, and stifles every kind of sentiment. In Russia no person ventures to think; the soul is so much debased, that its faculties are destroyed. Fear is almost the only passion by which the whole nation is actuated. … The fatal effects of despotism are extended over all the arts … these people, though deficient in genius, and deprived of the powers of imagination, would still be a very different nation in many respects, if they enjoyed the blessings of liberty. But the question is, whether they would make any considerable progress, even if they enjoyed this advantage.

(332-35)

Following such a pronouncement, Chappe's subsequent statement that “the spirit of the nation seems likely to undergo a total change” under Catherine, and his rhetorically optimistic question “What progress will they not make under this Empress?” hardly seem convincing. These statements also point to another basic problem with the chronology of Chappe's book. Based on Chappe's experiences in Russia during the reigns of Elizabeth and Peter III, it was published six years into Catherine's, and hence in many respects was wildly out of date³⁰ (think of trying to explain Russia today on the basis of a visit to Gorbachev's Russia), but could not but cast an extremely unfavorable shadow over Catherine's ambitious program for political and cultural-reform then gathering momentum.³¹ However, if Chappe was anachronistic, so too was Catherine, challenging Chappe's analysis mostly with examples taken from her own reign, most notably her Bolshoi Nakaz (Grand Instruction) for the delegates of the Commission to Compose a New Law Code, published in 1767. The Nakaz had clearly been aimed as much for a European as for a Russian audience; it appeared in French, English, German, Italian, Greek, Swedish, Dutch, Polish, Latin, and Rumanian editions, several sponsored by Catherine herself.³² After the Commission was ended, Catherine made use of the young literary men who had served as its secretaries and inaugurated the Russian satirical journals with the publication of her own Vsiakaia vsiachina (Odds and Ends) in 1769.³³ During her famous Volga trip the summer before the Commission convened, Catherine organized a group translation of Marmontel's new political novel Belisaire (in Russian: Velizer), published in Moscow in 1768. In the same year she created the Society for the Translation of Foreign Books into Russian, “probably the leading voice for the French Enlightenment” in Russia,³⁴ which translated selections of the Encyclopédie (Catherine had even offered to publish the Encyclopédie in Russia) as well as works by Voltaire, Montesquieu, Mably, and Rousseau; and Russia's open-handed offers of haven to Voltaire, Rousseau, d'Alembert, and Diderot were highly publicized.

Catherine's program of conspicuous political and intellectual toleration seemed calculated in part to highlight the contrast between Russia and France under Louis XV. Indeed, in the Antidote Catherine repeatedly juxtaposes her own liberal policies to France's repressive ones—for example, that neither Belisaire nor the Instruction could be published in France, leading her to ask pointedly which of the two nations was the more “monarchist,” and which the more “despotic” (81-82; 289-90).³⁵ That Catherine took these issues seriously is shown not only by the fact that she took it upon herself to answer Chappe, but by the vehemence with which she did so. Catherine demolished Chappe's book section by section, often sentence by sentence, and even word by word, listing his errors, failings, confusions, lies and biases, mostly in an extremely sarcastic, even abusive, manner. The narrative conceit is that the work is addressed directly to Chappe (it is written primarily in the second person), who at the time of writing was already dead, and several times Catherine spitefully refers to him as “M. Le Defunt.” Such rhetorical improprieties as well as the exhausting catalog of Chappe's failings lessened the Antidote's impact on European readers. That Catherine could not reveal her authorship (which, indeed, was disputed for a long time, especially in France) and published the work anonymously, also contributed to its obscurity.³⁶

Nevertheless, Catherine's Antidote is a unique and valuable document, presenting as it does in an extremely direct way the empress's response to what she took as an insult to Russia and as a personal challenge to her entire program of political and cultural transformation. The Antidote was composed and published in French and was clearly meant as “a reply to all French detractors of Russia.”³⁷ It shows her to be not only fully conversant with the European debate over Russia's place in the Enlightenment, but also eager to assert her own positive, unique vision of that place. For example, she denied the notion of Russia's total barbarism before Peter the Great, which was shared by Russia's detractors and friends alike (including Voltaire). She defended Russia's “ancient ways” as not only analogous to European historical experience³⁸ but also worthy of interest in their own, indigenous right (thus some historians even consider her a proto-Slavophile). Yet Catherine not only defended the Russian peasant and traditional Russian culture, but also (and unlike the Slavophiles) Russia's contemporary high secular culture and its achievements in the arts and sciences (a subject on which even Voltaire was notably silent).³⁹ Catherine's defense of Russian letters only takes up a few pages of the lengthy (though unfinished) Antidote, which undertook to demolish Chappe's argument chapter by chapter. Nevertheless it is significant as one of the first efforts to justify the existence of Russian literature; it was followed by Novikov's Attempt at an Historical Dictionary of Russian Writers of 1772, which endeavored to confirm the modern canon of Russian letters (and in a small degree polemicized with the Antidote).⁴⁰

Catherine begins her defense of Russian letters by noting that Chappe “surveyed the level of our intellectual capabilities and determined that we are fools because there are few mountains in Russia. This reasoning,” she added, “inspires us with boundless respect for the Swiss and for Savoyards”; she feigns great distress to think of people of such genius employed as concierges or shoe-shiners (251; 424). She responds to Chappe's physiological excursus in a similar vein:

He begins by overwhelming us with data from Physics, far more ingenious than trustworthy, in order to prove via composites of solids, spirits and fluids, fibers, vessels and channels; by elemental fire, by the universal spirit, sulphuric acid, phlogiston, electrical matter, etc.; by the digestive system, by chyle, by the circulation of blood, by the way in which it becomes agitated in the lungs and is pushed by the heart through the aorta to the brain, by the nervous juice (suc nerveux), by the conformity of the brain and the spinal marrow, by the skin and the nervous network it forms, by the system of nerves and nervous juice, which, he says, “establishes the system of our sensations, of our ideas, of the mind, of the genius, and of all the faculties of the rational soul”; by the relation of nourishment to the soil and by various secondary causes—from all of this he deduces that the Russians can be nothing more than blockheads (sots).

(263; 434)

The Abbé is too simple to believe that he has proven, like two and two are four, that all Russians are wanting in genius. Ah well, reader! Will the Abbé's formal declaration, supported by the most beautiful proofs in the world, and appealing to all of the four elements, ever be enough to convince you that I am nothing but a boob (nigaud)?

(265; 436)

Pitiful slander! There is no need to be born in the mountains to see right through it. Even those who are from the plains can judge its merits.

(255; 427)

Challenging Chappe more on his own turf, she goes on to dispute (in great detail) his method of using barometers in determining land elevation, and hence to deny the validity of his data. She also dissects what she shows to be his preconceived and mistaken conceptions of Russian geography (e.g., that all of Russia is a “vast plain”) and of the alleged uniformity of the Russian land and people from region to region. Montesquieu and company simply “furnish a convenient pretext to say a great many bad things about the inhabitants” of Russia (274; 443).

To Chappe's assertion that despite the efforts of Russia's leaders “not one Russian has appeared in the course of more than sixty years, whose name deserves to be recorded in the history of the Arts and Sciences” (320), Catherine asks: “Is it the Russians' fault that Chappe did not know their language, and had never heard of writers who distinguished themselves before the Dearly Departed (M. le Defunt) had his book approved and printed?” (255; 428). She “takes up his challenge” and names the following figures: Feofan Prokopovich, “who left many profound and scholarly works”; Antiokh Kantemir, whose satires were “translated into several languages”; Vasilii Tatishchev, and his erudite history; Vasilii Trediakovsky, with his “several good translations”; Mikhail Lomonosov, and his various writings “filled with genius and eloquence”⁴¹; Alexander Sumarokov, whose many works have brought him “loud fame”; and Stepan Krasheninnikov, whose description of Kamchatka Chappe himself published in French as an appendix to the Voyage. While this was no “Pushkin Speech,”⁴² and reflects some degree of equivocation (indeed Catherine had helped turn Trediakovsky into a laughingstock for his Tilemakhida, a verse adaptation of Fénelon's Télémaque),⁴³ this was a clear and straightforward assertion that, yes, Russia does have a literature and a literary life. Catherine adds that “After the Abbé's departure, and especially in the last years, when literature, the arts and sciences have enjoyed such special encouragement, almost no week passes when several new books, either translations or original, do not leave the presses” (256; 428).⁴⁴ Then Catherine cites Vasilii Petrov as an example of a promising young writer. His poetic gift “approaches that of Lomonosov, and has even more harmony,” and his uniquely faithful verse translation of the Aeneid (pub. 1770), of which none comparable exists in other languages, she asserts, “will make him immortal.” Here Catherine may have been playing to the home audience, since Petrov's talent (or lack of it) was a subject of contention on the pages of Russian satirical journals appearing at this time. Here as elsewhere, defending Russia meant defending her own reign and her own personal actions, down to the poets she patronized.

The immediate political campaign to denigrate Russia, in which we have included Chappe's Voyage en Sibérie, clearly backfired. If France had helped push the Turks into war with Russia in October 1768 (which had served as the pretext for disbanding the Commission to Create a New Law Code), by the time of the Antidote's publication in 1770 Russia had scored impressive victories (especially the total destruction of the Turkish fleet at Chesme in June 1770), fully justifying Catherine's defense of Russia's national honor and taste for glory, which Chappe had impugned. As if in answer to such critics, Catherine declared (notably, with stress on Russia's military rather than cultural prowess): “This war will win Russia a name for herself; people will see that this is a brave and indefatigable people, with men of evident merit and all the qualities that make heroes; they will see that she lacks no resources, that those she has are by no means exhausted, and that she can defend herself and wage war with ease and vigour when she is unjustly attacked.”⁴⁵ In a more long-term political perspective, though, Chappe's Voyage was one in a series of works that helped prepare and justify subsequent European military aggression against Russia, particularly the Napoleonic invasion of 1812. As Tolstoy dramatized it in War and Peace, and as the historian Larry Wolff has recently put it, “one may observe [how] the intellectual formulas of the Enlightenment … [were] deployed in the military maneuvers of the next generation.”⁴⁶

The terms in which the debate over the nature (and possibility) of civilization in Russia were posed had perhaps even more lasting repercussions. In Catherine's debate with Chappe d'Auteroche we may observe the process by which Russian culture (and more narrowly, Russian literature) as an abstract intellectual construct in European debates over Russia came to play such an acute role in the semiotic Yes or No of later Russian debates over cultural identity.⁴⁷ By the time of Petr Chaadaev, the Enlightenment commonality of interests between state and culture presumed by Catherine in the Antidote could no longer be envisaged.⁴⁸ For the intelligentsia, the connection between official ideology and Russian culture, whether presumed by Nicholas I in his doctrine of Official Nationality or its debunking in the Marquis de Custine's famous travel memoir Russia in 1839, could only give rise to despair, and to the long-term cultural crisis whose effects Russia is still experiencing.

Notes

1. Abbé Chappe d'Auteroche, Voyage en Sibérie, 2 vols. in 3, in folio (Paris: Debure Père, 1768); 2 vols. (abridged) (Amsterdam: Marc-Michel Rey, 1769-70); English version (abridged) as A Journey into Siberia (1770; reprint NY: Arno Press, 1970). Hereafter, and unless otherwise indicated, page citations of Chappe's work given in parentheses refer to the 1770 English translation; the sections cited have not been abridged.

2. Antidote, ou Examen du mauvais livre superbement imprimé intitulé Voyage en Sibérie … (1770, n. p. [St. Petersburg]; 2d ed., 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Marc-Michel Rey, 1771-72); English version (London: T. Jeffreys, 1772). Antidote was published anonymously; on its attribution, see A. N. Pypin, “Kto byl avtorom ‘Antidota’?” in Sochineniia imperatritsy Ekateriny II na osnovanii podlinnykh rukopisei i s ob”iasnitel'nye primechaniiami, ed. A. N. Pypin (St. Petersburg: Akademiia nauk, 1901), 7:i-lvi. This is a convincing defense of Catherine's authorship and one of the best critical analyses of the Antidote in general.

3. For additional information on Chappe's expedition, see Pypin, “Kto byl avtorom ‘Antidota’?” See also the note to “Sobstvennoruchnyi otryvok Ekateriny II s oproverzheniem svedenii Abbata Shappa to Rossii,” in Bumagi Imperitritsy Ekateriny II, khraniashchikhsia v gos. arkhive ministerstva vnutrennikh del, ed. P. Pekarskii (St. Petersburg, 1871), 6:317-20. This short document, in Catherine's own hand, may be an unused draft foreword to Antidote; it requests that the recipient “supplier votre illustre patron de parcourir un ouvrage” refuting Chappe's book and which also “est le juste et eloquent précis des eminentes vertus et des qualités sublimes dont le ciel a décoré l'auguste autocratrice” (i.e., Catherine herself) (319). This document helps to confirm both Catherine's authorship of Antidote and her interpretation of Chappe's political agenda that I discuss below.

4. The book was approved on August 31, 1768; Chappe left Paris for California on September 18. See Chappe d'Auteroche, et al., The 1769 Transit of Venus: The Baja California Observations, ed. Doyle B. Nunis, Jr. (Los Angeles: Natural History Museum, 1982), 50.

5. Chappe d'Auteroche, A Journey into Siberia, title page. A somewhat abbreviated version of the original French, which also lists “des Observations astronomiques, et les Experiences sur l'Electricité naturelle; enrichi De Cartes geographiques, de Plans, de Profils du terrein; de Gravures qui representent les usages des Russes, leurs Moeurs, leurs habillements, les Divinités des Calmoucks, & plusieurs morceaux d'histoire naturelle.” (Chappe d'Auteroche, Voyage en Sibérie), vol. 1, title page.

6. The drawings from which the engravings for the book were prepared are reproduced in Kimerly Rorschach, Drawings by Jean-Baptiste Le Prince for the Voyage en Sibérie. With an Essay by Carol Jones Neuman (Philadelphia: Rosenbach Museum & Library, 1986), esp. 9-11. On the sexual politics of these images see the works cited in note 26 below.

7. Dimitri S. von Mohrenschildt places the divide at 1760; see his Russia in the Intellectual Life of Eighteenth-Century France (1936; rpt. New York: Octagon Books, 1972), 242. On this problem, see also: Albert Lortholary, Le Mirage Russe en France au XVIII^e siècle (Paris: Editions contemporaines, n.d.); François de Labriolle, “Le Prosveščenie russe et les ‘Lumières’ en France (1760-1798),” Revue des études slaves 45 (1966): 75-91; Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A Parting of Ways: Government and the Educated Public in Russia, 1801-1855 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), chap. 1; Isabel de Madariaga, “Catherine and the Philosophes,” in Russia and the West in the Eighteenth Century, ed. A. G. Cross (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1983), 30-52; Carolyn Wilberger, Voltaire's Russia, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 164 (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1976), which argues for a continuum of views rather than two opposing sides (235f); and Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1994). See also the useful bibliographical essay in Voltaire and Catherine the Great: Selected Correspondence, translation, with commentary, notes and introduction by A. Lentin (Cambridge: Oriental Research Partners, 1974), 178-86.

8. Wilberger, Voltaire's Russia, 15-16.

9. Montesquieu's views were greatly influenced by John Perry's travel account, The State of Russia Under the Present Czar (1716). On Rousseau and Montesquieu's views of Russia, see the works cited in note 29 and in note 7, esp. Wilberger, Voltaire's Russia, chap. 7. On Rousseau in eighteenth-century Russia, see also Iu. M. Lotman, “Russo i russkaia kul'tura XVIII veka,” in Epokha prosveshcheniia: Iz istorii mezhdunarodnykh sviazei russkoi literatury, ed. M. P. Alekseev (Leningrad: Nauka, 1967), 208-81, and the forthcoming monograph on the subject by Thomas Barran.

10. On the political and diplomatic relations between Russia and France during this period, see: Albert Vandal, Louis XV et Elisabeth de Russie: Etude sur les Relations de la France et de la Russie au dixhuitième siècle (Paris: E. Plon, 1882), esp. chap. 7; and L. Jay Oliva, Misalliance: A Study of French Policy in Russia During the Seven Years' War (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1964). For a good recent overview of Russian foreign policy during the eighteenth century and a survey of views on Russian imperialism, see William C. Fuller, Jr., Strategy and Power in Russia 1600-1914 (New York: The Free Press, 1992), chaps. 3 and 4.

11. Gay is quoted by Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 206; Wilberger surveys the reactions and gives a sympathetic, revisionist view of Voltaire's work, Voltaire's Russia, 119-33.

12. See for example, Chappe's devastating and detailed critique of the Russian military capability, and of the army's size, maintenance, hygiene, morale, and tactics (or lack of these things), 371-95 passim. Cf. Catherine's comment, alluding to France's role in urging Turkey to war against Russia: “Russia blocked the way of the domination of the Goths (Welches); unable to keep this from happening, they take their revenge by speaking as much evil about her as they can. Pretty nation! Is this prettiness? I do not know, but I do know very well that this is all said in the tone of an informer (souffleur) for Mustafa [i.e., Sultan Mustafa III of Turkey]” (9:230). Catherine repeatedly suggests that Chappe (if he indeed were the true author) was the tool of anti-Russian political forces.

13. See Wilberger's point by point analysis of the passage of which this is the conclusion, in chap. 7 of Voltaire's Russia.

14. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract, Book 2, chap. 8. See The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 4, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, and Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 1994), 158. Rousseau was probably referring to the khanate of the Crimean Tatars, who with its Turkish overlords had been allies of France against Peter I. Captured by Russia during the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-74, the khanate was given independent status, but was subsequently taken over by Russia in 1783. On the other hand, as Larry Wolff points out, “in the eighteenth century [for Europeans] the name of Tatary designated a vague and vast geographical space—from the Crimea to Siberia” (Inventing Eastern Europe, 39-40).

15. Mémoire du passage de Venus sur le Soleil, contenant aussí quelques autres observations sur l'astronomie et la declinasion de la boussole, faites à Tobolsk en Sibérie l'année 1761 (St. Petersburg: Akademiia nauk, 1762). Chappe's results were delivered orally to the Academy on January 11, 1762. See M. V. Lomonosov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 9 (Moscow-Leningrad: Akademiia nauk, 1955), 807-8.

16. On the history of the King's secret, see L. Jay Oliva, Misalliance, 9-10 and passim. See also Alice Chevalier, Claude-Carloman de Rulhière premier historien de la Pologne: sa vie et son oeuvre historique d'apres des documents inédits (Paris: Les Editions Domat-Montcrestien, 1939), 10-11.

17. von Mohrenschildt, Russia in the Intellectual Life, 19-20; before being sent to Russia he was admitted into the King's Secret. Hence he was receiving two sets of secret orders, from Choiseul and from Louis XV. See Oliva, Misalliance, 174-75.

18. Rulhière, Oeuvres (Paris, 1819), 2:346; cited in Chevalier, Claude-Carloman de Rulhière, 48 n. 5; see also 226. Chevalier also cites the similar anti-Russian position of the French diplomat Jean-Louis Favier, with whom Chapper was acquainted, and who also wrote political tracts to order, with Rulhière's help (10, 228).

19. Charles Carloman de Rulhière, Histoire ou anecdotes sur la revolution de Russie, en l'année 1762 (Paris: Desenne, 1797); in English as: A History or Anecdotes of the Revolution in Russia (1797; rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1970).

20. For example, Rulhière gave readings in Berlin and Vienna in 1776 (Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 273).

21. Chevalier, Claude-Carloman de Rulhière, 227; see also 54, 226, 227 n. 5. Notably, Rulhière was also in profound agreement with the opinions about Russia expressed by his “friend and master” (Chevalier's phrase) Rousseau in the Social Contract, which appeared in the same year as Catherine's coup. On the sources of Rulhière's book, including Rousseau, see Chevalier, chap. 2. and von Mohrenschildt, Russia in the Intellectual Life, 65-68.

22. Chevalier, Claude-Carloman de Rulhière, 10 and 228-29. The history of Poland, Rulhière's masterwork, remained incomplete. For its fascinating history, see Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 272-78.

23. Turkey declared war in October; Chappe's Voyage appeared some time between September and December. The French Academy of Sciences' recommendation to publish (Chappe d'Auteroche, Voyage en Sibérie, vol. 1, xxxi) is dated August 31, 1768, presumably the book's terminus post quem. Its publication had been announced as early as April 29, 1767, when Chappe had read a prospectus of the book at the Academy, part of which was published (Lortholary, Le Mirage Russe en France, 365 n. 123).

24. Rulhière, Anecdotes of the Revolution, 52; quoted in Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 274.

25. The authorities Chappe cites include: Voltaire, Johann Georg Gmelin, Guillaume Delisle, Philip Strahlenberg, and Laurent Lange.

26. Chappe is paraphrasing Spirit of the Laws, Part 3, Bk. 14, chap. 2. George E. Munro analyzes the polemic over Russians' sexuality in “Politics, Sexuality and Servility: The Debate Between Catherine II and the Abbé Chappe d'Auteroche,” in Russia and the West in the Eighteenth Century, ed. A. G. Cross (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1983), 124-34. On this, see also Larry Wolff, “Possessing Eastern Europe: Sexuality, Slavery, and Corporal Punishment,” chap. 2 in Inventing Eastern Europe, and in particular his illustrations of Chappe's “pornography of barbarism” (76-77).

27. See Theodore Vetter, “Le Cat, Claude-Nicolas,” in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles C. Gillespie (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1972), 7:114-16. Chappe refers to Le Cat's ideas as “truths and opinions generally admitted” (322).

28. See: G. A. Lindeboom, Descartes and Medicine. Nieuwe Nederlandse Bijdragen tot de Geschiedenis der Geneeskunde, no. 1 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1979), esp. 57-85; M. H. Pirenne, “Descartes and the Body-Mind Problem in Physiology,” British Journal of the Philosophy of Science 1 (1950): 43-59; David Farrell Krell, “Paradoxes of the Pineal: From Descartes to Georges Bataille,” Philosophy 21 (1987), Supplement: 215-28. For a recent sympathetic reading of Descartes' ideas, see Richard B. Carter, Descartes' Medical Philosophy: The Organic Solution to the Mind-Body Problem (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1983).

29. Montesquieu himself refers to “nervous juice” in his discussion of the differences between “northern” and “southern” peoples, in a chapter which Chappe cites repeatedly in criticizing Russia (cf. Spirit of the Laws, Part 3, bk. 14, chap. 2). However, Montesquieu elsewhere argues that the Russians are not an Asiatic, but a European nation, and hence amenable to Peter's civilizing reforms (14:14)—a position that Catherine proclaimed in the famous opening sentence of the Nakaz (“Russia is a European nation”). On Montesquieu and Catherine, see the works cited in note 7 above, F. V. Taranovskii, “Montesk'e o Rossii (K istorii Nakaza imperatritsy Ekateriny II),” in Trudy russkikh uchenykh za-granitsei: Sbornik akademicheskoi-gruppy v Berline 1 (Berlin: Slovo, 1922), 178-223; and A. N. Pypin, “Ekaterina II i Montestk'e,” Vestnik evropy 5 (1903): 272-300.

30. Or badly edited? Much of Chappe's analysis refers explicitly to Empress Elizabeth. Remarks about Russia as a place of tyranny and terror (275-77) due to its “despotic sovereign” (330), for example, refer to her, and contradict his praise for Catherine as reformer (e.g., 278). Lortholary refers to this as Chappe's “équivoque insupportable” (Le Mirage Russe en France, 192).

31. Soviet historians typically condemned Catherine's reform program and denigrated her as a hypocritical promoter of serfdom. Hence sympathy for Chappe's denunciation of “despotic Russia.” See, for example, I. M. Kossova, “‘Puteshestvie v Sibir” i ‘Antidot’,” Voprosy istorii 1 (1984): 185-89.

32. See John T. Alexander, “Catherine II (Ekaterina Alekseevna), ‘The Great,’ Empress of Russia,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 150, Early Modern Russian Writers: The Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Marcus C. Levitt (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman and Gale Research, 1995), 48-49.

33. See my forthcoming essay on, and translation from, Vsiakaia vsiachina (Odds and Ends) in Christine Tomei, ed., Russian Women Writers, vol. 1 (New York: Garland, 1998). On Catherine's career as a writer, see John T. Alexander, “Catherine II,” 43-54.

34. Gary Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700-1800 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985), 92. On the translation society, see V. P. Semennikov, Sobranie, staraiushcheesia o perevode inostrannykh knig, uchrezhdennoe Ekaterinoi II, 1768-1783 gg.: istoriko-literaturnoe izsledovanie (St. Petersburg, 1913).

35. Translations from Antidote are my own and are based on the French text (from vol. 7 of Sochineniia imperatritsy Ekateriny II), in consultation with the Russian translation (“Antidot [Protivoiadie]: Polemicheskoe sochinenie Ekateriny II-oi ili razbor knigi abbata Shappa d'Oteroshe o Rossii,” in Osmnadtsatyi vek 4 [1869]: 225-463). Dual citations of Antidote given in parentheses refer first to the French and then to the Russian text.

36. Catherine could not publish the work for many reasons. For one, it would have given Chappe's work greater notoriety. On the critical reaction to the Voyage and Antidote, see Lortholary, Le Mirage Russe, 196-97.

37. Lortholary, Le Mirage Russe, 194.

38. Cf. Voltaire's comparisons of France before Louis XIV discussed by Wilberger, Voltaire's Russia, 72.

39. Wilberger notes that “the lack of information in this area [Russian culture] is symptomatic of a major weakness in Voltaire's entire concept of Russia” (Voltaire's Russia, 106); see also 140-44, 159-60, 275-77, and her article, “Eighteenth-Century Scholarship on Russian Literature,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 5 (1972): 503-26. Wilberger's assertions about Catherine's sense of Russia's cultural inferiority (159) and that she (together with Rulhière!) “summarily dismissed” the notion of a “national character” (259-60 and 270) seem mistaken in light of the Antidote. It would be interesting to consider the Antidote in Wilberger's terms as a further response to Voltaire.

40. For a survey of scholarship on the European reception of Russian literature and a discussion of Novikov's work and his disagreements with Catherine, see I. F. Martynov, “‘Opyt istoricheskogo slovaria o rossiiskikh pisateliakh’ N. I. Novikova i literaturnaia polemika 60-70-kh godov XVIII veka,” Russkaia literatura 3 (1968): 184-91. Novikov's main objection to Catherine's description of Russian letters was her praise of Vasilii Petrov; see my discussion below.

    W. Gareth Jones asserts that the anonymous “Nachtricht von einigen russischen Schriftstellern …” that appeared anonymously in a Leipzig journal in late 1768 was meant as an answer to Chappe's calumny, but I see no evidence for this view (“The Image of the Eighteenth-Century Russian Author,” in Russia in the Age of Enlightenment: Essays for Isabel de Madariaga, ed. Roger Bartlett and Janet M. Hartley [London: Macmillan, 1990], 63-64). For a detailed analysis of this document, see Helmut Grasshoff, Russische Literatur in Deutschland im Zeitalter der Aufklärung: Der Propagierung russischer Literatur im 18. Lahrhundert durch deutsche Schriftseller und Publizisten (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1973), 196-212. Jones also asserts that the publication of Antiokh Kantemir's satires in French in the mid 1740s had been “part of what would now be called Russia's cultural foreign policy” (63), but I likewise find no indications that this was the case. Kantemir had supervised the project before his death, and if it was carried out under the auspices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that was because Kantemir had been a diplomat in its service; as Grasshoff has shown elsewhere, Kantemir's European colleagues had their own purposes for publishing the satires. See Kh. Grassgof, “Pervye perevody satir A. D. Kantemir,” in Mezhdunarodnye sviazi russkoi literatury, ed. M. P. Alekseev (Moscow-Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1963), 101-11, and N. A. Kopanev, “O pervykh izdaniiakh satir A. Kantemira,” XVIII vek 15 (Leningrad, 1986), 140-53.

41. Chappe also names Lomonosov as “a man of genius,” apparently in his role as a scientist (320).

42. Dostoevsky's famous address at the opening of the monument to the poet in Moscow in 1880, which confirmed Pushkin's canonization as Russia's “national poet.” See my Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989), chap. 4.

43. On Trediakovsky's reputation, see Irina Reyfman, Vasilii Trediakovsky: The Fool of the ‘New’ Russian Literature (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1991), 109, 165, 192.

44. According to Gary Marker's figures the annual average of Russian-language books between 1761-1770 was between 150-60 annually, or about three books a week. Of these, fifty percent were literary or general interest books. Marker, Publishing, Printing, 71-72.

45. Quoted in John T. Alexander, Catherine the Great: Life and Legend (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), 134. Alexander's description of the Antidote's tenor as “a bellicose superpatriotism … that brooked no criticism from Europe” (133) seems overstated.

46. Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 363.

47. See, for example, Boris Groys' recent analysis in “Russia and the West: The Quest for Russian National Identity,” Studies in Soviet Thought 43 (1992): 185-98.

48. See Wilberger's stimulating comments on the connections between Chaadaev's and Rousseau's views, Voltaire's Russia, 213-14. The fundamental problem posed by the work of Wilberger, Wolff, Riasanovsky, and others, that the crisis of nineteenth-century Russian identity (most dramatically expressed in Chaadaev's first “Letter on the Philosophy of History” [pub. 1836], and still reverberating) derived from the European Enlightenment debate over Russia's place on the “map of civilization,” has yet to be fully explored.