Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [240]
Finally, there was the intelligentsia. In a sense, it was this group almost alone which put Russian on the global cultural map, with the literary efflorescence that they achieved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Peter the Great sparked it off, with his reforms aimed at creating a secular Russia, inspired by what he had encountered in his visits to Britain and above all Germany. Mikhail Lomonósov (1711-75), the greatest scholar of this era—who had somehow managed to promote himself out of an Archangel fisherman’s family—combined expertise in chemistry and linguistics, and started the task of defining a Russian literary language, one that would incorporate foreign borrowings and colloquial speech into the rather ponderous style inherited from Church Slavonic. A Russian Academy, modelled on the Académie Française, was established in 1783; it compiled a major dictionary in 1789-94, and defined a Russian grammar that was published in 1802. Although, as we have seen in considering the history of French, foreign influence remained strong in the Russian elite’s social life, the newly educated generations of Russian authors rose to the challenge of their new language, and included Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, to name only the most famous. They took seriously the task of defining what Russian literature could do for Russia and the world. Most famously, Turgenev and Dostoyevsky both projected their ideas back to Pushkin at the celebrations in his memory in 1880: Turgenev said that Pushkin spoke to the educated nátiya, the nation that had come about through Peter’s reforms, but that the Russian naród, the people, would come to awareness through learning to read him; Dostoyevsky countered that Pushkin was intrinsically—and uniquely—universal in his appeal, something that gave Russia an immense advantage: ‘To become a genuine Russian means to attempt to bring reconciliation to the contradictions of Europe and to offer relief for Europe’s anguish in the all-human and all-embracing Russian soul.’58
Amazingly, Russian writers did succeed in reaching an audience all over Europe, though inevitably more among Turgenev’s nátii than Dostoyevsky’s naródï. But the realisation of their cosmic aspirations at home was limited by the very narrow base of the intelligentsia within Russia itself, almost cut off from the vast majority of their public. General literacy of the Russian population was still not above 10 per cent in the early 1880s, although it rose rapidly thereafter, approaching 30 per cent among the under-fifties by the end of the century.59 And of course, those who could read did not all have a taste for the highest, preferring adventure stories, romances and horoscopes.60
But the Russian intelligentsia made no attempt at all to make a place within their ideals for the Asian multitudes that their armed forces had exerted themselves so long, and so bloodily, to bring within the Tsar’s domains. From Ivan the Terrible’s conquest of Kazan to the conquests of the early nineteenth century, foreign nobility had always been recognised, and accorded property rights within the Russian system, when their own territories had been subdued; no effort had ever been made actively to involve them culturally. Occasionally, intellectuals from their own traditions who managed to get a Western education would try to devise an accommodation. The best example of this is the Crimean Tatar educationist Ismail Bey Gaspirali (who adopted the name Gasprinsky). Educated first in a village madrasa (Islamic religious school), he went to St Petersburg to learn Russian, and Paris to learn French. Next spending four years in Istanbul (1871-5), he returned to Crimea with the conviction that Russia’s Muslims must approach