Abstract
When Moscow University was struck by a cholera epidemic in 1830, it closed its doors for much of the academic year. Students were forbidden from seeing one another, some were quarantined, and others were sent away. Ia. I. Kostenetskii described in his memoir how this isolation caused him great distress; he longed to see his friend Aleksei Topornin. Once the cholera restrictions were relaxed, Kostenetskii recalled running to the home of Professor Pogodin — where Topornin resided — just to get a glimpse of his friend at the door. When he did, the two young men, ‘not putting down each other’s hands,’ talked for a few minutes and then were forced to part ‘with tears in their eyes.’3 Kostenetskii’s description of this reunion illustrates the vocabulary of friendship among men in these decades — the tears, the pain at separation, and the affection expressed in holding each other’s hands.
Parts of this chapter appeared in The Russian Review 62 no. 2 (April 2003): 262–80.
Life without a friend is not sweet, but rather dull.2
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Notes
Ia. Kostenetskii, ‘Vospominaniia iz moei studencheskoi zhizni,’ Russkii arkhiv 1 (1887): 329.
In the first volume of his book Scenarios of Power, Richard Wortman argues that during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, friendship played a prominent role in autocratic ideology. Tsar Alexander I used the trope of friendship to consecrate the bond between monarch and subjects. Upon his accession, Alexander created a committee of ‘young friends’ and ‘Russia’s best sons’ to assist him in carrying out his reforms. By evoking a ‘feeling of friendship’ and ‘feelings of affection,’ Alexander united himself not only with his Committee of Young Friends, but also with his subjects more generally, who in turn were obligated to fulfill the wishes of their friend and Tsar. Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, Volume 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 195 and 204.
There is an extended discussion of radical youth in Daniel Brower, Training the Nihilists: Education and Radicalism in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975).
Nicholas Riasanovsky, A Parting of the Ways: Government and the Educated Public in Russia, 1801–1855 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
See also Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960);
and Gary M. Hamburg, Boris Chicherin and Early Russian Liberalism, 1828–1866 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).
Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 7.
Scholarship that addresses the question of friendship and makes this connection includes: Malia, Alexander Herzen, Edward J. Brown, Stankevich and His Moscow Circle: 1830–1840 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966),
Lidiia Ia. Ginsburg, ‘The “Human Document” and the Formation of Character,’ The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 188–224;
and Edward Hallett Carr, The Romantic Exiles: A Nineteenth-Century Portrait Gallery (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961).
Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 62.
See M. J. Ailes, ‘Love, Separation and Male Friendship: Words and Actions in St. Anselm’s Letters to His Friends.’ In Masculinity and Medieval Europe, ed. D. M. Hadley (New York: Longman, 1999), 240.
Alan Bray and Michel Roy, ‘The Body of the Friend: Continuity and Change in Masculine Friendship in the Seventeenth Century.’ In English Masculinities: 1600–1800, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Michele Cohen (New York: Longman, 1999), 65–84.
There is a growing literature on American and European male friendships and expressions of desire before the invention of homosexuality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to the above examples, the list includes Jonathan Ned Katz, Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001);
Stepan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ‘Civility, Male Friendship, and Masonic Sociability in Nineteenth-Century Germany,’ Gender and History 13, no. 2 (August 2001): 224–48;
Eve Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985);
George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988);
Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York, 1993);
and Jeffrey Richards, ‘Passing the Love of Women: Manly Love and Victorian Society.’ In Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940, ed. J. A. Mangan and James Walvin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 92–122.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 47 and 108. There are many examples of such friendships stretching into the second half of the nineteenth century.
See, for instance, David Newsome, A. C. Benson: the Diaries (London: John Murray Publishers, 1980), 39.
Michelle Perrot, ed., A History of Private Life: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, Volume 4 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 562–3.
Voltaire acknowledged that there is a special character to the love between young boys. Although same-sex desire was ‘an infamous outrage against nature,’ wrote Voltaire, it was ‘so natural’ as young men are ‘brought up together … and often resemble beautiful girl[s].’ Such dalliances, too, rarely were thought to last for more than a short time. Quoted in D. S. Neff, ‘Bitches, Mollies and Tommies: Byron, Masculinity and the History of Sexuality,’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, no. 3 (2002): 395–438.
For a full exploration of Nicholaevan ‘Official Nationality,’ see Nicholas Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825–1855 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969). In 1833, Nicholas’s Minister of Education Sergei Uvarov famously declared these three tenets of official ideology, orthodoxy, autocracy, and narodnost, most often translated as ‘nationality.’
Wortman, Scenarios of Power, vol. I, 275. Alexander Martin explores the ways in which Romantic ideas influenced official circles in the reign of Alexander. Alexander M. Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries: Russian Conservative Thought and Politics in the Reign of Alexander I (Dekalb: Northern Illinois Press, 1997).
Orlando Figes in Natasha’s Dance: a Cultural History of Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), and Alexander Martin in Romantics, Reformers and Reactionaries, both discuss the revival of a national spirit in the aftermath of 1812. Catriona Kelly describes how this new emphasis on Russianness manifested itself in a number of ways among the educated elite in the capitals, including the wearing of peasant dress and marrying peasant women as an indication of one’s devotion to Russia. Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), especially 137–53.
This scholarship includes Malia, Alexander Herzen; Brown, Stankevich; and Marc Raeff, ‘Russian Youth on the Eve of Romanticism: Andrei I. Turgenev and His Circle.’ In Revolution and Politics in Russia: Essays in the Memory of B. I. Nicolaevsky, ed. A Alexander and Janet Rabinowitch, with Ladis K. D. Kristof (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), 339–55.
Cynthia Whittaker, The Origins of Modern Russian Education: an Intellectual Biography of Count Sergei Uvarov, 1786–1855 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1984), 154.
Among the professoriate in Moscow, the conservatives M. Pogodin and S. Shevyrev as well as the liberal-minded Timofei Granovskii espoused Romantic ideas. Priscilla Reynolds Roosevelt, Apostle of Russian Liberalism: Timofei Granovsky (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1986).
Yet, the Tsar himself was notoriously disdainful of Schiller. If Nicholas was touched by some of Herder’s romantic nationalism, he was intolerant of the ideas of the philosopher who most influenced his future servitors in their adolescence: Friedrich Schiller. The Tsar, in fact, is known to have remarked amidst all of the revolutionary turmoil of 1848 that it was ‘your Schiller and your Goethe who had corrupted the youth.’ Original from ‘Iz zapisok A. O. Smirnovoi,’ Russkii arkhiv 9 (1895): 85. Quoted in Martin Malia, ‘Schiller and the Early Russian Left.’ In Russian Thought and Politics, ed. Hugh McLean, Martin Malia, and George Fischer (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1971), 170.
Konstantin Aksakov, ‘Vospominanie studenchestva: 1832–1835 godov.’ In Russkie obshchestvo 30-kh godov XIX veka: Memuary sovremennikov, ed. I. A. Fedosov (Moscow: Moscow University Press, 1989), 317.
Writing on Boris Chicherin’s coming of age, historian Gary Hamburg notes that it was not only Schiller that may have inclined Chicherin to male intimacies, but also his reading of Byron. Gary Hamburg also comments on the impact of Schiller on the nature of Chicherin’s friendships. G. M. Hamburg, Boris Chicherin & Early Russian Liberalism, 1826–1866 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 35–7.
A. I. Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh II (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1954–64), 403.
P. V. Annenkov, The Extraordinary Decade (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), 23.
A. A. Fet, Rann’ie gody moei zhizni (Moscow: A. I. Mamontiv Publishers, 1893), 175–6.
Wayne Dobbler, An Unnecessary Man: the Life of Apollon Grigor’ev (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1995), 25.
Ianuarii Neverov, ‘Glava iz ‘Avtobiografii Ia. M. Neverova,’ Vestnik vospitaniia 26, no. 6 (September 1915): 107–8.
F. I. Buslaev, Vospominaniia akademika F. I. Buslaeva (Moscow, 1897).
Boris Chicherin, Vospominaniia B. N. Chicherina (Moscow: Moscow University Press, 1991), 31. On Granovskii’s own romantic friendships while a student, see Roosevelt, Apostle of Russian Liberalism, 17–19.
P. I. Bartenov, ‘Vospomiannie o S. M. Solov’eve,’ Russkii arkhiv 318 (1907): 554.
N. L. Brodskii, Literaturnye salony i kruzhki: pervaia polovina xix veka (Hildesheim, Zurich, and New York: George Olms Verlag, 1984), 252.
Grigorii Pavlovich Galagan, ‘Otryvki iz iunosheskogo dnevnika G. P. Galagana,’ Kievskaia starina 62 (1898): 203.
Nicholas Dmitrievich Dmitriev, ‘Studencheskie vospominaniia o Moskovskom universitete: part II,’ Otechestvennye zapiski, 120, no. 10 (October 1858): 4–5 and 7.
William Mills Todd, The Familiar Letter as a Literary Genre in the Age of Pushkin (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 40–2 and 76–7.
Perepiska Nikolaia Vladimirovicha Stankevicha: 1830–1840, ed. Aleksei Stankevich (Moscow, 1914), 208.
Nicholas P. Ogarev, Izbrannie sotsial’no-politicheskie i filosofskie proizvedeniia 1 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1952–6), 304–5.
Edward Acton, Alexander Herzen and the Role of the Intellectual Revolutionary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 106; Malia, Alexander Herzen; Brown, Stankevich;
Abbott Gleason, Young Russia: The Genesis of Russian Radicalism in the 1860s (New York,: Viking Press, 1980);
Edward Hallett Carr, Mikhail Bakunin (New York: Octagon Books, 1975);
and Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populaist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1960).
The meaning that society assigned to these feelings, however, shifted over time. Robert Nye, ‘Kinship, Male Bonds and Masculinity in Comparative Perspective,’ American Historical Review 105, no. 5 (2000): 1665.
There has been some speculation that the Russian public was not inclined to attach the same symbolic importance to the sexual preferences of its members, as did its western neighbors. In Evgenii Bershtein’s study of Oscar Wilde, he explains that Wilde did not have the same reputation in Russia as he did in the other countries of Europe. In Russia, conversations about Wilde were more likely to involve an emphasis on ‘his rebellion, suffering, and saintliness’ than on his sexual improprieties. The lack of attention to erotic desires in general and homoeroticism in particular reflected, scholar Evgenii Bershtein suggests, the general prohibition against discussions of sexuality. Evgenii Bershtein, ‘The Russian Myth of Oscar Wilde.’ In Self and Story in Russian History, ed. Laura Engelstein and Stephanie Sandler (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 169.
Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-desiècle Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 57–8;
and Daniel Healey, ‘The Russian Revolution and the Decriminalisation of Homosexuality,’ Revolutionary Russia 6, no. 1 (June, 1993): 29. According to Healey, the ‘queen’ did not become a social prototype until the 1870s. ‘The Disappearance of the Russian Queen, or How the Soviet Closet was Born.’ In Russian Masculinities in History and Culture, ed. Barbara Clements, Rebecca Friedman, and Dan Healey (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 152–71.
George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 66.
Scholars have argued, taking their cue from Michel Foucault in his History of Sexuality, volume I, that prior to ‘the invention of homosexuality’ by social science professionals in the late nineteenth century, individuals were not assigned a particular social, sexual, or personal identity based on their sexual habits. Sodomy was imaged to be the ‘temporary aberrant act of an isolated individual’ and not the basis for a social identity. Historians of various national contexts have suggested that until the late nineteenth century, the category ‘homosexual’ was not recognized at all. At that time, across Europe, ‘sexual practices … once considered moral choices became regarded by the bourgeoisie as symptoms of biological and physiological flaws.’ John N. Chandos, Boys Together: English Public Schools, 1800–1864 (New Haven, CT: Harvard University Press, 1984), 303.
The second quote is from Angus McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1780–1930 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 8–9.
On the Russian/Soviet context, see also Dan Healey, Homosocial Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001); and Engelstein, Keys to Happiness.
D. Naguevskii, Professor Frants Ksvarii Bronner (ego dnevnik i perepiski) (Kazan’, 1902), 128.
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Friedman, R. (2005). Friendship, Romance, and Romantic Friendship. In: Masculinity, Autocracy and the Russian University, 1804–1863. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230500235_5
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