SOURCE: Gleason, Walter. “Introduction: State and Nationality in Fonvizin's Writings.” In The Political and Legal Writings of Denis Fonvizin, translated by Walter Gleason, pp. 1-21. Ann Arbor, Mich: Ardis Publishers, 1985.

[In the following essay, Gleason identifies the key arguments in each of Fonvizin's essays on political and social subjects; points out their concern with morality, political ideals, and the proper role and conduct of the state; and argues that Fonvizin's major contribution to eighteenth-century Russian political thought was his distinction between state and nationality.]

State and nationality: these two issues sum up the history of political thought under Catherine the Great. The topics are not independent of one another. The Imperial state laid claim to the banner of nationality as a means of maintaining the loyalties and enthusiasms of its citizens; nationality was the potential instrument to undermine the foundations of autocracy. While the advocates of each cause confined their debate to intellectual and literary forums in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the importance of the issues was vividly emphasized in the streets of Paris during the Great French Revolution of 1789. After July 14th monarchs throughout Europe knew they could not do without the prop of nationality. By the same token, proponents of the national cause found in the appeal to “the nation” or “the fatherland” an effective political banner capable of rousing the populace and replacing autocratic regimes with constitutional governments. It is no wonder Catherine sought to foreclose this possibility and appropriate the cause of nationality to the jurisdiction of the state. Where the Empress would subordinate the national principle to the interests of the Imperial state, Fonvizin defined the autonomy of the Russian “fatherland” apart from the claims of the state. His political ideas and relations with Catherine are witness to his role as the custodian of the cause of nationality in eighteenth-century Russia.

Fonvizin was the appropriate figure to play this part, as is clear from a brief review of his life. The key reference points to his career are well-established in the scholarly literature. Educated at Moscow University in the late seventeen fifties and early seventeen sixties, Fonvizin was schooled in the moral and legal principles that influenced the political thinking of many of his contemporaries. Idealistic in his convictions, Fonvizin as a student sought a model of morality and statecraft in the conduct and policies of Catherine and supported her at the time of her accession in 1762. He cherished the notion that truth could speak to power only to learn over the course of the seventeen sixties that Catherine's declarations of principle in 1762 were, at best, subject to modification for reasons of state or, at worst, a sham devised to win over the loyalties of the intellectuals of her day. The Empress revised her policies of 1762 by the time of the Great Commission of 1767. In so doing she eventually precipitated the so-called crisis of 1772, a period filled with rumors of plots to replace Catherine with her son Paul and institute a regime administered according to the political principles supported by the Empress in 1762 and betrayed, if you will, five years later. After 1772 Fonvizin had no alternative but to voice his indignation at policies he considered aberrant, and warn the unrepentant monarch of the political consequences of her follies. Steadfast in his advocacy of the political and ethical norms of his university years, Fonvizin vested his principles in a context of his own invention, namely, the fictional entity that was the fatherland. He was compelled by force of conviction to assume the role of an adversary of the throne and spokesman for the interests of the fatherland ill-served by the state.

A. THE UNIVERSITY PERIOD 1755-1762

When Denis Fonvizin entered the boarding school for nobles at Moscow University, he began the crucial period of his life, one in which the ideas accepted as a student dominated his thinking as an adult, the moral values cherished as an adolescent informed the political and social convictions of the adult and, more generally, modes of thinking about politics and society were cast in forms that would set the parameters and priorities for his opinions of Catherine the Great.

The young Fonvizin's habits of mind remained with him as an adult because of the special nature of his education. During his university years he was all but segregated from the conventional world outside the classrooms of the university. Opened the same year Fonvizin arrived in Moscow, the university set its students apart from the routine life of the average Muscovite. Students had to comply with a dress code that required them to wear the green university uniform with bright red collar. The language spoken from classroom podiums was Latin, not Russian. The students were not allowed to live in apartments near the university, but were housed in dormitories. They lived with and worked with the same individuals. Specifically, the university always assigned professors from the university to the supervisory positions in the dormitories. The result of these circumstances was that young nobles like Denis Fonvizin were confined all but physically to the little world within the walls of Moscow University and subject to the close supervision, both in class and out, of their professors. While the exclusion of everyday Muscovy did not necessarily lead to much consequence, it was significant for providing the milieu in which the students were under the intense and particular influence of the faculty.

The professors were the personal links between Fonvizin and some of the central figures of the European Enlightenment. The faculty served as witnesses that the ideas and individuals prominent in the intellectual revolution of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe had a presence on the parameter of the enlightened world. However far removed spatially from the salons of Paris and Berlin, Fonvizin could become at least aware of their purposes. Though a university student yet to attain intellectual maturity and hardly the peer of European enlighteners, he learned to appreciate their values and allowed himself to assume a certain kinship of purpose with them. He became familiar with the ideas of as varied enlighteners as Lord Shaftesbury, Alexander Pope and Samuel Pufendorf. In the early sixties he taught himself French, so that he could read Voltaire in the original. In the lecture halls, corridors and study rooms of the university, Fonvizin was not only interested in enlightened teachings but inspired by the pronouncements of its principal European spokesmen. His enthusiasm was life-long.

Fonvizin's interest in the European Enlightenment was given a specific focus because of the backgrounds of those on the faculty. Most of the instructors were hired on the recommendation of one man, Gerhard Friedrich Müller, the German-born historian, publisher and member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences. He sought candidates for the faculty slots at Moscow University from among his former colleagues at German universities. Since Leipzig, Halle and Tübingen were centers of the German Enlightenment, Müller's key position made the faculty not only the bearers of the Enlightenment to their Russian students but the interpreters and advocates of a particular national variant of the Enlightenment.

German enlighteners, particularly Samuel Pufendorf and Christian Wolff, differed from their English and French counterparts in the fundamental role of the individual in politics and society. Locke and Voltaire assumed that each citizen was due a large measure of autonomy and entitled to act in a margin unfettered by legal and social regulation. English enlighteners were, in the main, quite emphatic on the point of the inviolability of this zone by the state. In comparison, German enlighteners emphasized each person's obligations to his fellow man. One was obliged, according to Pufendorf and Wolff, to recognize one's duties to family, state and humanity. This stress on individuals' responsibilities to one another was the animating spirit that distinguished the message of the German Enlightenment from its English and French counterparts. This distinction is crucial in considering the influence of the professors over their students. Fonvizin and his peers were instructed in the basics of Pufendorf and Wolff, not Locke and Voltaire. The staffing pattern reinforced the effect of the organizational structure of the university to put the students in a position where they were systematically and selectively taught the fundamentals of the German Enlightenment.

The ideals of the German Enlightenment were cast in their most influential forms by the natural law philosophy of Pufendorf and Wolff. German natural law became Fonvizin's specific frame of reference for considering a broad range of questions from matters of personal morality to issues of political science and economics. The appeal of natural law aroused in him the expectation that the right order of politics and society was not only an attainable goal but one dependent in the first instance on the proper functioning of his own intellect and character. Reason was the tool that would refine his own capacities and lead him along the road of rationality and virtue. Fonvizin was ever concerned with cultivating the virtues of constancy, moderation and modesty, as well as purging his mind of prejudice of any sort. His inner moral and intellectual mechanisms had to be correctly arranged so that he would be able to honor his responsibilities to his fellow man. Natural law imparted to its adherents, as the American historian Marc Raeff points out, a clearly voluntaristic bent. The link between man and the world around him was not to be severed. For much of his life, Fonvizin sought to construct orders that would give him a sense of fulfillment and validate his quest in the first place.

During his university years Fonvizin sought confirmation of his personal values in two specific areas, politics and religion. In both, his ideas were on the level of what could be expected of a university student. His interest in political and religious questions reveals before all else that the old answers, the answers of the home with its uncomplicated beliefs and loyalties, were no longer adequate. New answers were needed to satisfy his acquired sense of himself as an individual, self-regulated by the norms of rationality and virtue. When Fonvizin reconsidered the bases to his religious and political convictions, he sought to make rationality the primary feature of his image of ruler and God.

New answers to religious questions were found in deism. This circumstance is a useful context for considering his essay, “The Just God Jupiter” (1761). The tale, a classic one recounted in any number of formats, tells of the misconduct of the human race in wanting to know in advance what fate had in store for it. In this eighteenth-century version, the story is organized into a series of vignettes. Each scene describes the case of an individual, representative of those debilitated by a particular vice. As each learns the error of his or her ways, a general moral lesson becomes clear. As if to leave nothing to chance, Fonvizin spells out this lesson with the emphatic, didactic moralism typical of his times. Human beings who wish to know their own destiny will, Fonvizin counsels, fall victim to their own pride and arrogance. They err in not recognizing that everything is governed by Jupiter, an enlightened, beneficent ruler who would not temper with the functioning of the world. The universe of Jupiter is a mechanistic one, administered by rules established by the god but thereafter held inviolate. He should not intervene in order to give individuals a preview of their fate. On the occasion he does do this, his action eventually confirms his position as impartial governor of the world and so removed from the everyday affairs of mortals. Individuals were not to fall prey to the desire to know their destiny but to prepare themselves for their appointed fate. They would do well to discard passion and cultivate reason and virtue. “The Just God Jupiter” is clear evidence that Fonvizin's deism is described in a rather rudimentary form. Rational and virtuous conduct put an individual in accord with the mechanistic world of the Divine. The image of God and the image of man were cast in one and the same likeness.

This correspondence was also sought in the features of an ideal ruler. Fonvizin described the personal characteristics and policies of a utopian monarch in ways typical of many writers of the early seventeen sixties. The themes common to the publicist literature of these years were argued in Fonvizin's “Pro M. Marcello—The Speech of M. Tullius Cicero,” a translation completed by October, 1762. Fonvizin stressed that rulers primarily interested in wars and victory on the battlefield risked falling victim to delusions aroused by their own passions. While military heroes were admirable figures, pride of place was reserved for sovereigns who were not “distracted by the tumult of events, the clamor of the soldiers and the blare of the trumpets” but governed as exemplars of moderation, humility and justice. These virtues regulated the conduct and policies of the ideal ruler and prevented any arbitrary exercise of political power. Abuse of this sort was the original instance for Cicero's speech. His friend and fellow senator, Marcellus, was exiled to the island of Lesbos by what Cicero construed as the capricious decision of Caesar. The speech protested the wrong allegedly done Marcellus and implicitly argued for the inviolability of the deliberative powers of the Roman Senate. Arbitrariness was the codeword for a violation of the norms of conduct expected of a ruler.

There are three intriguing points raised by this speech. By urging Caesar to put the integrity of the Senate before any personal impulse to punish Marcellus, Cicero emphasized the distinction between the person and office of the ruler. By supporting the authority of the Senate, Cicero endorsed the idea that the proper operation of the government's administration was improved by the unimpeded functioning of the deliberative body with consultative, not binding, power on the head of state. By citing arbitrariness as a malfeasance contrary to the interests of the common weal, notice was served to men of irreproachable character like Marcellus that politics was potentially a threatening arena in which to seek confirmation of their personal values of virtue and rationality. All three points establish bases for evaluating the legitimacy of a monarch's exercise of power and the danger to virtuous men of trying to work in harmony with the purposes of the state.

Fonvizin was unmistakably interested in formulating political ideals consistent with his personal values of rationality and virtue. Though he managed to attain a certain symmetry to his personal, political and religious values during his university years, the harmony was maintained without any notable sophistication of opinion. After the university, his views went through a decade-long process of revision and refinement. These theoretical deliberations were joined to more practical bureaucratic concerns after the fall of 1762, when Fonvizin moved from the university into the government administration. As a public official rather than a student, Fonvizin was bound not only to honor his standards of rationality and virtue, but to find ratification of these values in the character of politics and society. Fonvizin became committed to steadily broader plans for political reform and social change. These involvements forced him to turn the general ideals of his university years into specific points of social and political opinion during the seventeen sixties.

B. SOCIAL REFORMS 1763-1770

Fonvizin's appreciation of “society” was, it must be emphasized, quite abstract. What he wrote about social issues in the mid and late sixties was, in fact, a series of refinements on his vision of a utopian social order dating from the early sixties. Typical of his early social commentary was the Moral Fables (1761), a translation of the work of the Danish enlightener Baron Ludwig Holberg (1684-1754). Each fable described satirically a figure embodying a particular social malady. Typical were satires on the young dandy who scorned his homeland and posed ridiculously as an exemplar of French culture—and then only in the superficialities of fashion, manners and a bastardized version of the French language. Other targets for satire were the incurably tradition-bound nobleman or the social parasite. The point is that these caricatures were hardly unique to Fonvizin or Holberg but conventional figures in the repertoire of social critics throughout Europe. In Fonvizin's case, however, these examples of literary stereotypes became the company of the morally inadequate. He preferred to understand “society” as an abstraction, fit to be purged and reordered according to his notions of rationality and virtue. “Society” was a psychic reality, unrelated to the social and economic worlds outside the walls of the university. His version of “society” allowed Fonvizin to extend his moral values to a limited range of social subjects. He could envision a reformed Russian society in which each constituent entity, whether person or class, was expected to regulate its activities according to the same criteria that governed Fonvizin's own conduct.

This extension of personal ethical values should be considered in the general context of his relations with his bureaucratic superiors and with Catherine the Great. With regard to his service responsibilities, Fonvizin worked in the upper echelons of the court and civil bureaucracy during the mid and late sixties. His service assignments put him in regular contact with the premier figures in the government, the movers and doers of Catherinian Russia. In October 1762, he began his service career as a translator at the College of Foreign Affairs. His working knowledge of Latin, French and German stood him in good stead as he was soon translating “very important” papers directly for the chancellor, Mikhail Vorontsov (1714-1767). Surely these duties were a heady experience for one still a teen-ager. Fonvizin completed and circulated his translation of Alzire in 1763 and won the favor of Ivan Perfil'evich Elagin (1725-1794), a political ally of Catherine during her years as grand duchess and one of her co-conspirators in the revolution of 1762. On October 6, 1763, Fonvizin was assigned to Elagin's offices and promoted to the rank of titular councilor, ninth class in the Table of Ranks. The appointment carried responsibilities to prepare petitions for Catherine's review and to write occasionally memoranda to the Empress. Fonvizin served under Elagin until 1769, when he was transferred back to the College of Foreign Affairs. These service assignments provided access to the court and bureaucracy and made Fonvizin familiar with the key social questions currently under debate among the most senior personages of the regime. As he came to appreciate the particulars of a number of social issues, to be discussed below, the realities of Russian society in the seventeen sixties had to be recognized in practical terms as a part of his service duties and also philosophically as a dimension and extension of his own moral values. Statist and moral considerations were twinned.

His career and social convictions were dependent on his relations with Catherine the Great. Her social policy was concerned with the problem of defining the corporate status of the nobility. She was specifically interested in reaching agreement with the nobles on a statement of the proper functions of the first estate. This area of social policy had been under debate in previous administrations without resolution of the conflicting interests of crown and nobility. In particular, the famous Manifesto on the Liberty of the Nobility, issued by Peter III on February 18, 1762, served, in Catherine's opinion, not to reconcile differences between the throne and its first estate but to further the interests of the nobility at the expense of those of the state. The manifesto recognized the rights of the nobility as a social corporation without detailing its duties. To correct this problem, the Empress established in 1763 the Commission on the Freedom of the Nobility. Its members reached no agreement with Catherine. The task of defining the functions of the nobility was assigned to the deputies of the Legislative Commission of 1767, the famous consultative assembly convened by the Empress to collect information from representatives of all social classes (except serfs owned by nobles) and settle the question of the corporate privileges and social responsibilities of the nobility.

The great debate between throne and nobility during the period of 1762-1767 set the precise context for Fonvizin's two key statements on social issues, “A Précis on the Freedom of the French Nobility and the Function of the Third Estate” and “A Trading Nobility.” Both works were translations, the first originally written by a M. de Boulard, and the second by Gabriel-François Coyer. The essays were completed before the opening of the Legislative Commission and in circulation at its sessions. Possibly Fonvizin made his translations at the behest of his superior, Elagin, so as to provide him with ready opinions for his use at the Commission. More important, the two have similar lines of argumentation and document, whatever the practical purpose of the translations, Fonvizin's own thinking on the proper role of the nobility in contemporary Russian society.

The “Précis” was an argument for the reconciliation of the traditional privileges of the nobility with the authority of the monarchy. Much of the reasoning was logically disingenuous. The rhetoric affirmed at one and the same time the inviolability of the nobles' privileges and the legitimate prerogatives of a centralized, monarchical state. However, the substance of the argument was a bill of particulars citing the nobility's abuse of privilege. The nobles violated the legitimate prerogatives of state authority when they arrogated to themselves political power independent of the monarchy. The text described briefly the rise of feudalism with a gloss explaining the process as one witness to the improper and irresponsible reservation of sovereignty to the upper nobility. This abuse of power was further defined as any action which was detrimental to the corporate autonomy of the upper class. The “lords” erred in assigning themselves the status of “little sovereigns” and compounded the error whenever they acted arbitrarily and capriciously with their vassals. The remedy was clearly spelled out. The nobility must recognize the primary laws of the state, “the fundamental laws.” While these grands principes were not specified, their implementation was. The nobles were subject to royal justice. The king's courts were empowered to decide cases where the litigants were nobles. This “reliance on the judicial process” was a matter of administration, not adjudication. The issue was not the defense of the entitlements of individual noblemen but the proper functioning of the internal affairs of the nobility as a social corporation as well as the placement of this entity within the jurisdiction of a well-regulated state. The autonomy of the first estate was guaranteed, that is, both protected and controlled, as long as the nobles conceded “the primacy and interests of their state.” The essay was an argument for the étatization of the estate, not the socialization of the state.

The argument for the primacy of state before class in Fonvizin's considerations is bolstered by the telling relationship between the “Précis” and his earlier writings. In the case of the “Précis,” Fonvizin changed his ideas on one contemporary social issue from the totally abstract and general notions of the early sixties to the more specific and immediate of the mid-sixties. More important, this refinement was made in terms of the same criteria that served as his personal moral standards. He associated himself with a proposal regarding the nobility that allowed no inconsistency between the ideal of a virtuous, rational individual and the status of a well-regulated estate. The replication is also evident in the advocacy of the state as the entity whose “fundamental laws” ensured the subordination of class to state as well as its proper measure of control over the constituent members of the polity. In the mid-sixties, Fonvizin could safely vest his political and ethical ideals in the authority of the Russian state and, separately, the tenure of Catherine's government.

Fonvizin's statist interests were evident in his major statement on the proper functions of the first estate, “A Trading Nobility.” Published in 1766, the essay originated as a rebuttal by Coyer to an article by the Marquis de Lassay critical of any mingling of noble and bourgeois functions. Both works were translated into German by Johann Henri Justi (1720-1771). Fonvizin worked from the Justi version and retranslated the Coyer essay while omitting the Marquis de Lassay's article. Clearly Fonvizin chose to publicize the merits of a “trading nobility.”

The essay is extended, perhaps rambling, in its line of argument, curious, if not utterly beguiling, in some of its turns of logic and vivid, if not also biased, in its presentation of the case. The work is not a philosophical discourse but an example of the publicist literature on a subject currently under debate throughout Europe. Aside from its intriguing as well as occasionally entertaining lines, the substance of the argument endorses the idea of a commercially minded nobility on moral, not economic terms. The non-moral advantages are cited and argued, namely, an increase in the arable, rise in the rate of growth of the population, substantial revenues to the treasury and the promotion of maritime trade. Yet Fonvizin's primary argument was that the nobles' reluctance to engage in commerce was a matter of prejudice, detrimental to their personal moral character and corporate welfare. “If my efforts to open the merchantry to the nobility required that I deal with sound reason alone, then all the gates would soon be open. Here, however, we are dealing with prejudices held by society.” Fonvizin read the roll of the morally corrupt and socially delinquent. Some nobles preferred to live in poverty on their estates rather than earn a profit commercially. Others led an idle life uninterested in any occupation other than the army. There were also those who lived hedonistic lives, fearful of disturbing their life styles by engaging in trade and the tumult of the marketplace. “I ask only whether it is better to live in a small village irresponsibly and to harm yourself, your family, and the entire state by your own idleness … [or] does honor consist in taking part in the advantages of your fatherland, giving people useful occupations, bringing agriculture into a flourishing condition, putting money in circulation into the government treasury … and improving the well-being of the state.”

Fonvizin was confident that the primary problem of correcting the moral standards of the nobles would be overcome. Rather than living the listless lives of the delinquent or indigent, the nobles would recognize the advantages of commercial involvement and regular relations with the bourgeoisie. Their self-improvement and eventual enrichment would lead them to see in commerce “the soul of the state.” “A Trading Nobility” argues the case made previously in the “Précis,” namely, the priority of statist over class considerations. Fonvizin's confidence in the ultimate redemption of the nobility relied on his assumption that the state would be interested in sponsoring a commercially minded first estate and would later become the principal beneficiary of a trading nobility.

Fonvizin's two essays on the nobility reemphasize the key characteristic of his social writings. His translations were supplemented by purely literary commentary on the status of the nobility. Fonvizin's most famous work of the 1760's, the Brigadier (1769), depicted on stage the stock characters of the young dandy, Ivanushka, his ignorant and greedy parents and their equally corrupt neighbors, the councilor and his wife. These stereotypical figures served Fonvizin in 1769 as they had in the Moral Fables of 1761, namely as portrayals of nobles whose life styles were morally depraved and socially useless. The councilor and brigadier did not demonstrate any respect for the norms of rationality and virtue. When the satire in the Brigadier is placed in the context of Fonvizin's other commentary on the nobility, his writings constitute a sustained, detailed campaign to correct the ethical standards of Russian nobles. His interest in such a reform led him from the psychic reality that was “society” in Holberg's fables toward consideration of the social and economic realities of Catherinian Russia in the mid and late seventeen sixties. This process of revision in his thinking about society was made without shedding the abstract character of his understanding of the world around him. The presence of the conventional characters in the Brigadier in 1769 attests to the primarily fictional nature of society to Fonvizin after nearly a decade of involvement with social issues. His translations and works describe a primarily utopian version of a Russian nobility chastised and fit to be morally reformed and perform its proper social and economic functions in Russian society. Fonvizin's various works in the mid-sixties on the nobility might be profitably understood as parts of a whole, an ideal social order whose characteristics needed to validate his own moral values more than correspond to the actualities of Russian society.

Clearly the two essays of the mid-sixties also suggest the extent to which Fonvizin would go to modify the exclusively psychic reality of the early sixties in favor of one with a measure of correspondence to social reality. However, his appreciation of society could become steadily less utopian and more specific and relevant to the actual circumstances of Russia in the seventeen sixties only as long as he could remain confident that he could find confirmation of his personal values in the social policy ordering the properly administered state and, more specifically, directing the decisions of Catherine. Unfortunately for Fonvizin, the Empress was opposed to both the totality of his social ideals and his specific endorsement of a “trading nobility.”

In her Instruction to the deputies at the Legislative Commission, she scornfully dismissed those who “imagine that it would be expedient to have Laws, which should encourage the Nobility to engage in Commerce. This would be the means of ruining the Nobility, without the least advantage to Commerce. … The Custom allowed to the Nobility, in some Countries, of engaging in Trade, is one of the Means, which contributed most to weaken the Monarchical Government.” Catherine changed her mind several times over the course of her long reign, favoring, for example, a trading nobility in the famous Charter of the Nobility (1785) and opposing the same proposition five years later. At any one point in her reign her views were formed with an eye to administrative advantage. Her policies had to adjust to varying circumstances. By contrast, Fonvizin was led by force of moral idealism to the conviction that the interests of state were served by plans for a commercially-minded nobility. His differences with Catherine on this point should not be lent exaggerated importance. The issue was not joined by rivals of equal stature. Nonetheless, Fonvizin had followed the dictates of his personal values into the arena of social policy and commented on the specific question of a trading nobility only to find that his ideas were at odds with Catherine's own notions. Consequently, if his expectations of her government were not met, Fonvizin would be compelled by force of moral idealism to choose between denying the state or himself.

The Empress gave him no choice. She also attacked the utopian character to Fonvizin's social writings. She did not direct her remarks to Fonvizin by name but addressed herself to all the social critics of her day. She considered them to be pathologically ill rather than ill-informed or ill-advised. “The individual begins to fall under the spell of the boredom and melancholy that are born of inactivity and reading books. He proceeds to complain about everything around him and eventually about the order of the universe itself. … The patient becomes enamored with the idea of building castles in the air. … Even the government itself, no matter how zealous its efforts, becomes completely unacceptable to him. In the end he will offer his advice and work for the general good only according to the dictates of his own ideas.”

Catherine acted quite shrewdly in passing over particular points of difference between her own policies and Fonvizin's recommendations and taking issue with the idealism that inspired all of his criticisms. She recognized that any specific proposal from Fonvizin was not likely to shake the foundations of the autocracy. At the same time his moral idealism and social commitment were genuine threats to the authority of the Russian state. Fonvizin represented the clear potential that individuals moved by the imperatives of conscience could work out their own definition of the best interests of the common weal. No monarch, particularly a competent one such as Catherine the Great, could afford to allow any agency but the throne to determine the interests of state. Even when the crown and the moral idealist were as one on an issue, such as the arguments in the “Précis,” the agreement was coincidental and fortuitous. When the two parties held quite opposing opinions, as was the case with the question of a “Trading Nobility,” the disagreement was an ill omen to Catherine. For if policies were decided on dictates of moral principle rather than calculations of practical politics, the regime would be vulnerable to criticism for failing to meet standards other than its own. Catherine could no more tolerate independent interpretations of the best interests of state than Fonvizin could accept from himself violations of the strictures of his own moral standards.

This parting of the ways had the very consequences Catherine predicted. “Even the government itself, no matter how zealous its efforts, becomes completely unacceptable to him.” After the Legislative Commission, Fonvizin could no longer assume that his moral expectations of the proper role and conduct of the state would be met by Catherine's government. As his writings of the 1770's will document, Fonvizin came to the conclusion that his ethical standards were no longer secure in the agency of Catherine's government and were, in fact, threatened by the presence of the Imperial state. After the Commission, he withdrew his enthusiasms for Catherine's government and the Tsarist state and sought to locate another entity to represent both the Russian polity and a safe haven for his moral ideals. Were he to fail in this task, his political and ethical thinking would be reduced to no more than solipsistic reveries.

C. POLITICAL CRITICISMS 1771-1783

Fonvizin's political writings of the seventies and eighties record his gropings for the ideas and language that would identify an ideal Russian polity. A utopian version of repellent reality was to serve as a contrast to the discredited regime of Catherine II as well as a reference point for the reassignment of his moral and political ideals. Initially his reservations about the regime were evident in his use of the term “the fatherland” (otechestvo) as an ideal representation of the common weal. The gradual definition of “the fatherland” during the seventies enabled him to return in the eighties to his point of departure and claim the cause of nationality as the standard against which to contrast and judge the aberrant characteristics of Catherine's government.

These fundamental changes in Fonvizin's ideals and allegiances took place in the context of his service career. On December 9, 1769 he was transferred to the College of Foreign Affairs to work directly for the “senior member” of the college, Nikita Panin (1718-1783). Fonvizin's service became more than that of a government official with the routine job of doing the legwork and handling the bureaucratic details for his superior. Rather, Fonvizin became a trusted associate, given such politically delicate tasks as that of supervising the correspondence between the college and several important Russian embassies in Europe. When Nikita Panin's brother Peter (1721-1789) fell from favor in 1771 and was ordered to leave St. Petersburg for his estates near Moscow, Fonvizin was the one chosen by Nikita Panin to keep his brother informed of political events at the court. In turn, Fonvizin's long period of service in the College of Foreign Affairs led him to regard his bureaucratic superior with personal affection and respect bordering on adulation. He became such a revered figure in Fonvizin's mind that Panin's foreign policy took on a hallowed quality in the mind of his servitor.

This worshipful regard for Panin was enhanced by his resistance to Catherine's diplomatic decisions of the seventeen seventies. The key incident was the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War in 1768, an instance of Russian aggression which was the prelude to later expansionary ventures against Poland with the partitions of 1772, 1793 and 1795 and against the Ottoman Empire with the famous “Greek Project” of the seventeen eighties. The Empress' diplomacy of expansion was a fundamental reorientation away from her general policy of non-aggression for the period 1762-1768. This respect for the diplomatic status quo was the constant in Panin's principles, the basis for his influence with Catherine and the measures of his prestige abroad as well as at the Russian court. When the Empress discarded the policies of the initial years of her reign and embarked on a course of war and expansion, Panin had to accommodate himself to a basic redirection of foreign policy. He never did. His decline from power was gradual but irreversible. In the fall of 1781 he was relieved of his duties.

Panin's stand on diplomatic principle moved Fonvizin to make his initial reference to “the fatherland” as the representor of the policies Panin accepted and Catherine disavowed. Fonvizin withheld extensive comment on the Empress' expansionary ventures until the time of the first partition of Poland. In a letter of May 2, 1772 to Peter Panin, Fonvizin noted that “your [i.e., P. Panin's] patriotic (patrioticheskie) discussions about peace, dear sir, do not of course find any opposition from any true citizens.” Fonvizin associated the interests of patriotic citizens with non-aggressive diplomatic policies. The wording was not casually chosen as the term “patriotic” was not used with any specific connotation during the time Fonvizin cherished expectations in the good offices of the state. Now in 1772 patriotism was to perform the same function assigned the state, namely, to play the mediating role between the individual weal and the common weal.

Fonvizin added substance to this national ideal during the events connected with the majority of Grand Duke Paul. The Grand Duke came of age politically in 1772, a year in which his quite legitimate claims to the throne stood in clear contrast to the basis of Catherine's tenure in regicide and usurpation of power. Since Paul's official tutor was Nikita Panin, the question of succession was inseparable from the twinned issues of Panin's diplomacy and prestige. The day of majority passed without any threat to Catherine but interest in Paul's status gave Fonvizin occasion to link the cause of the Grand Duke with that of the fatherland. The immediate circumstance was the Grand Duke's illness in the summer of 1771. Paul endured a bout with influenza that for a time caused grave concern for his health. When he survived and recovered fully by the fall of 1771, Fonvizin celebrated the Grand Duke's deliverance with “On the Occasion of the Recovery of Paul.” The work was Fonvizin's initial statement of the contrast between Catherine as the agent of the state and Paul as the representor of the fatherland.

Fonvizin said nothing that would explicitly deny the claims to authority of Russian absolutism. However, he did not describe Paul as another absolutist ruler. The Grand Duke was “the hope of the fatherland,” a man who was brought up aware of “those sacred bonds which united him with the fate of millions of people and by which millions of people are united with him.” The spiritual and emotional bonds uniting the Grand Duke and his subjects made the people bewail the threat to Paul's life for his death would signify “the ruin of our future happiness.” The intriguing part of this essay is the vital association of Paul with “the fatherland.” Fonvizin was to employ the term “the fatherland” as a focal point for recognizing and defining the parameters of the national ideal.

The word itself connotes a great deal. The fatherland presumes an understanding of the ruler's custodial responsibilities to a community—a national community. The bonds between ruler and ruled were emotional and instinctual rather than rational and contractual. Leadership was conferred by virtue of belief in the personality of the Grand Duke rather than his theoretical claims to formal office. In fearing Paul's death would be “the ruin of our future happiness,” Fonvizin has the people clearly presume a certain mutuality of interests with Paul. The net consequence was that Fonvizin found the word he would thereafter use as a codeword to refer to a still-undefined national ideal.

This comparison between, on the one hand, Catherine and the state and, on the other, Paul and the fatherland, was not made between reconcilable points of political loyalties. Fonvizin had a vaguely-defined vision of a national community and seems to have removed it from the jurisdiction of the absolutist state. The realm of the fatherland and that of the Imperial state were autonomous worlds. In terms of politics he did not demonstrate any disloyalty to Catherine's regime or the Imperial state. Yet he withdrew his enthusiasms from both the government and state and seemingly attached them to his interest in the fatherland. The key point is the relationship between state and nationality. In his thinking, patriotism was parallel, not in opposition, to statism.

Fonvizin gave definition to his “fatherland” in the late 1770's and early 1780's when he used the term as a standard by which to evaluate Catherine's policies. His remarks were made in two essays, “Ta Hsüeh or The Great Learning Which Comprises Higher Chinese Philosophy,” and the “Discourse on Immutable State Laws.” The two are profitably considered a pair. “Ta-Hsüeh” was translated in 1779 from a French translation by Abbé Pierre Marial Cibot (1727-1780). Written in the form of a collection of tales, the theme emphasized throughout “Ta-Hsüeh” is the question of an aberrant monarch, delinquent in meeting his moral and political responsibilities. The ruler's misconduct quickly moved his subjects to act in a similar manner undisciplined by regard for duty. The consequences were clear. “A ruler forbids in vain that which he allows himself; [for then] no one will obey him.” The monarch's “throne will fall under the burden of arrogance, and its ruins will be your grave.” Malfeasance on the part of the sovereign led unavoidably to revolution. Obviously Fonvizin invoked only the specter of social revolution rather than the real item. By publishing his essay in 1779 he could play on the then recent memory of the Pugachev revolt, the peasant jacquerie of 1773-1774. A shrewd reader would readily appreciate, in an article set in a distant time and place, the author's apprehensions about the propriety and beneficence of the regime of Catherine the Great. If the government and throne were defective agencies of governance, how were the interests of the common weal to be served and the flaws in the present regime corrected?

The “Discourse on Permanent Laws of State” was Fonvizin's appeal to the fatherland to represent an ideal moral and political order. His argument was in many ways a restatement of the ideals of his university days. The principal line of reasoning presumed a mechanistic universe whose regularities imposed operational imperatives on God, ruler and man alike. This hierarchy of responsibilities obliged the sovereign of any realm to govern according to the dictates of reason and virtue. As the Divine kept the watch on the welfare of the universe and man over his personal weal, a monarch was bound to care for the common weal. Any deviation from these normative standards was an exercise in arbitrariness (proizvol). A delinquent ruler faced the same consequences for his misconduct as were described in “Ta Hsüeh,” namely, he degraded his subjects, brought havoc on them by his abusive use of power, and left the realm in moral and political disarray. To stave off the worst eventualities, Fonvizin invoked the force of moral suasion he reserved for the fatherland. He did so, however, in ways that undermined his primary line of reasoning.

The appeal to the fatherland was put in terms Fonvizin did not previously employ. The fatherland was made one of two parties to a fictional contract binding ruler to ruled and entrusting governance to the office of the monarch. The fatherland—or occasionally the equivalent term “the nation”—was the repository of the subjects' “natural freedom.” When sovereignty was vested in a political agent, this allocation was temporary and, most important, voluntary and reciprocal. If the ruler violated his contractual obligations to the fatherland, its constituent members were obliged to recognize the abuse of their trust and recall their pledges to the monarchy. “All human societies are based on mutual, voluntary obligations which one destroyed as soon as they are no longer observed. The obligations between monarch and subjects are similarly voluntary for there has never been … a nation that forcefully compelled someone to become its sovereign. If it can exist without a monarch, he cannot exist without it. Obviously, the original power was in its hands. The accession of a sovereign means nothing other than that he is entitled by the nation and with whatever power it invests in him.” The key to this reasoning is, it may be argued, not the advocacy of any legal, technical contract between throne and subjects but the framing in legal terminology of his long-standing belief in a transcendent moral order that enclosed the affairs of ruler and ruled and set the standards for the specific, legal relationships between the two parties. This premise was as central to the argument in “The Just God Jupiter” as it was to the initial paragraphs of the “Discourse.”

Consider two aspects of the “Discourse” that point up the primarily ethical tone to its arguments. The moral link between governor and governed was emphasized by the voluntariness with which each side accepted the contract. If a monarch acted within the law, his subjects recognized their own interest in legal statutes. As a result a flaw “arouses a certain inner impulse that compels us to obey it willingly. In any other circumstance our compliance is not based on obligation but compulsion. Where there is no obligation there can be no law.” If individuals did not voluntarily submit to the legal authority of the throne, the ruler was deprived of his rights as sovereign. “Force and law are completely different in essence as in reality. Law demands merit, talents, and virtues. Force requires prisons, chains, and axes. … A tyrant, wherever he may be, is a tyrant, and the right of the people to protect its own existence is eternally and universally immutable.” Were the monarch to rule by force and dispense with the moral basis to his authority, “the fundamental tie [between ruler and ruled] cannot exist. There a state exists but not a fatherland. There are subjects but not citizens, not the political body whose members are united by the tie of mutual rights and duties.”

These lines carry, it is quite arguable, the sound of the tocsin. Yet if Fonvizin is to be considered a proponent of popular sovereignty and the fatherland the codeword for the right of popular recall of an abusive ruler, his own remedy for an arbitrary monarch was inconsistent with any notion of popular sovereignty. Fonvizin urged on his readers the merits of the corrective mechanism of “immutable state laws.” What was the nature of these laws as the legal specifics to the contractual relationship between the monarch and the fatherland? At this critical point in Fonvizin's argument, he voiced his expectations in the ruler in moral, not legal terms. “Sound reason and the experiences of the past demonstrate that the sound moral sense of a people is formed by—and only by—the integrity and conduct of its sovereign. In his hands is the power to lead the people along the way of the virtuous or put them on the path of the vice ridden.” The image of the ruler as a primarily moral personality was drawn in quite direct terms: “The sovereign as good man, good father, [and] good master will not need to resort to the mildest command to succeed in bringing to every home an internal tranquility.” Fonvizin gave priority to the moral hierarchy of God, virtuous ruler and ethically sound subjects over the legal hierarchy of a deist God, legal ruler and law-abiding citizens.

By describing the monarch as primarily a moral personality, Fonvizin allowed his political ideals to be reduced to a dependence on the beneficient intentions of the sovereign. In so doing, Fonvizin served notice that his appeal to the fatherland was ultimately a limited one. However much he might have wanted to design the fatherland to stand as a standard for the state, he was not prepared either to subordinate the national ideal to the interests of state or to assert its primacy. Fonvizin did not resort to an idealization of the state. He would not, apparently, turn his reflections on the fatherland to the service of the state apparatus. At the same time he would not relinquish his commitment to his version of the fatherland nor transform the national ideal into a set of political principles capable of serving as the bases to a genuine opposition to Catherine the Great. State and nationality were in the 1780's what they were in 1771, namely, parallel entities.

There is no element of syncretism in Fonvizin's writings of the 1780's. Nor should he be expected to have made such an effort to reconcile state and nationality. While the cause of the state had the benefit of German natural law philosophy, the national principles could not at this time be elaborated into a philosophy of nationality. Fonvizin could do no more than voice his attachment to the fatherland and spell out its distinctive characteristics. Given this purpose he surely succeeded in registering his apprehensions about the role of the state, its reliance on force as a justification for its policies and, in general, its willingness to serve the general good. The fatherland had his enthusiasms as a symbol of the voluntariness and reciprocity he found lacking in Catherine's regime.

Repelled by the politics of Catherinian Russia after the early eighties, Fonvizin published two testimonials of redemption from involvement in the politics of Catherinian Russia. The first of this pair was his Life of Count Nikita Ivanovich Panin (1784). The essay would rewrite the books on Panin. His diplomatic career is only briefly mentioned; his particular diplomatic policies scantily explained and his loss of influence described without reference to the complexities of court and bureaucratic politics. Fonvizin chose to pass over political specifics and portray Panin as a figure of moral rectitude. The minister was to be remembered primarily for “the greatness of his soul.” As a man of unimpeachable integrity he labored selflessly for the welfare of the state. He was always ready to “console the unfortunate, defend the oppressed, and counsel the needy.” Fonvizin's choice of words and phrasing is revealing. He told the story of Panin's career as a morality play and described his loss of influence with the Empress as a case of virtue unrewarded. The minister's historical repute was best assured, so Fonvizin apparently assumed, by transforming Panin into the classic figure of the virtuous adviser to the monarch, whose political sagacity went unheeded and moral probity stood in implicit contrast to the undisciplined character of the monarch.

The essay was clearly written under the impact of Panin's death in 1783. Fonvizin actually witnessed Panin's suffering in his final years. Given the servitor's high professional esteem for Panin and devoted, if not filial, personal regard for him, the Life is an understandably idealized version of Panin's principles and career. The Life can also be considered as an elaborate model of random remarks similar in tone and scattered through Fonvizin's writings of the seventeen seventies. He was ready to describe Panin as early as 1771 as “a man of true reason and honor, an individual embodying the highest standards of morality of this century!” This image of Panin was repeated in Fonvizin's letters during the seventies and set in final form in the Life The moral accent to this character sketch suggests the same point made with reference to the “Discourse.” Namely, Fonvizin's repugnance with the policies of Catherine the Great led him to emphasize the value of morally sound figures rather than commit himself to specific modes of political redress. From his vantage point he was in a position to remove Panin from the corruption of political involvement and the debasing contest for power at the court.

Fonvizin struck the same themes in Callisthenes—A Greek Tale (1786) but cast his argument in such general terms as to stand not as a justification for Panin's life but as an apologia pro vita sua. Callisthenes was the classic account of a virtuous man who served as an adviser to Alexander the Great. The story was told many times with various revisions by commentators from antiquity to the eighteenth century. In Fonvizin's version, Alexander's policies represent a catalogue of offenses to the moral and political code Fonvizin made his own in his university days. Callisthenes' counsels of restraint and reasonableness recall to the reader Fonvizin's vain attempts to speak Truth to Power. What Fonvizin did not do was revise the story line to have any recognizable semblance with the specifics of his own life. Rather, he reduced the variety and complexity of his interests in the sixties and seventies to the preeminently moral stance of the eighties and reconstructed his entire biography with the moral posture as a constant. He was certainly not prepared to ask of himself the same degree of sacrifice required of Callisthenes, namely, a martyr for the cause of Truth. Nonetheless, Callisthenes did serve to register once again Fonvizin's lack of confidence in Catherine's government and reaffirm his grave doubts about the beneficence of the Imperial state. Beyond this notice of dissent Fonvizin did not allow himself to go.

D. FINAL POLITICAL COMMENTS 1784-1792

In his final years Fonvizin turned away from politics and devoted his remaining energies to literature. He suffered from a steadily worsening case of paralysis which forced him to retire from state service in 1782. The last image left to posterity is a tragic one. The dying Fonvizin continued to try to set words to paper but was so disabled that his last paragraphs remain utterly indecipherable comments written in what, by one report, appears to be wavy lines. Fonvizin died on December 1, 1792 and was buried in St. Petersburg.

Before crippled by his debilities, Fonvizin wrote one final statement on the issue which intrigued him since his university years, namely, the definition of the proper regulative principles for state, society and, by implication, the individual. He cast his remarks in a form which served not as a summary of his previous writings but one that all but contradicted them. The reference is to an undated essay entitled “A Political Discourse as to the Population of Certain Nations in Antiquity.” Fonvizin described an evolutionary process to Russia's history. The key premise was the assumption of a general historical schema ordering the development of Russian history according to a chronological cycle and the national histories of all peoples as parts of a sequence of cycles. He presumed the existence of “a circular evolution inherent in every human society.” Then, more strikingly, he noted that “society is a type of organism with a certain natural life cycle from infancy to old age.” Fonvizin spoke to the question of Russia's place in European history and did so in ways that carried him to the point of denying the very principles that engaged his interests for so long, namely, the fundamental premises of German natural law. Where natural law argued for the rational, scientific bases to historical change, Fonvizin suggested criteria that were organic and biological. Where natural law assumed an equality and universality to the laws governing Russian history, Fonvizin claimed that Russia's historical progression was to take place in a sphere separate from Europe. Fonvizin asserted Russia's historical and philosophic particularity. Yet he did so in terms that did not rely on the basics of German natural law and did not require the ordering principle of rationality. Fonvizin's comments on the individual, state and society were substantive revisions on lifelong articles of personal faith. In accomplishing such a thorough-going reconsideration of values and principles, Fonvizin left the “Political Discourse” as his final statement of political ideals.

His principal contribution to eighteenth-century Russian political thought was his distinction between state and nationality. Fonvizin removed the principle of nationality from its employ by the monarchy. By refusing Catherine the prop of nationality and setting the stage for its denial to her successors, Fonvizin took from her what she could ill afford to lose. The Russian state entered the age of political nationalism without the support of the national enthusiasms of its subjects. Against such grave potentialities, the Russian state was encumbered by its inability to win the unqualified loyalties of its citizens. As many nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals became more interested in varieties of conservative nationalist thought than the cause of the state, Fonvizin's position was enhanced as a pivotal figure, perhaps the key intellectual of Catherine's Russia and one whose ideas intimate the political ideals of writers of Alexandrian Russia.