E. F. Rosen against Slavophilism: two articles on the "Moskovsky sbornik" of 1847

Kuts Nikolai Viktorovich Postgraduate student, Department of the History of Russian Literature, Lomonosov Moscow State University 119234, Russia, Moscow, Leninskie Gory str., 1 nikolaikuts@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

Baron Egor Fedorovich Rosen (1800-1860) was a poet, playwright and critic, who was quite close to Pushkin in the 1830s - by the early 1840s he had lost contact with Pushkin's entourage. Most of them ended shortly after the death of the great poet, as Rosen himself admitted in an article in 1847. "Reference to the dead": "The death of the mediator has untied the knot of my relations with his friends and associates" ^{[6, p. 271]}. At that time, Rosen's relations with his Moscow acquaintances were also difficult: M. P. Pogodin, S. P. Shevyrev and A. S. Khomyakov, whom Rosen met in 1828 while participating in the Moskovsky Vestnik ^{[5, p. 2402]}. Shevyrev was a regular correspondent of Rosen throughout the 1830s and 1840s, in correspondence with Pogodin back in 1841, the baron shared the idea of the tragedy about Tsarevich Alexei Petrovich ("Peter's struggle with his son is such a plot on which one could put his whole life" ^{[1, p. 15]}) and praised Pogodinsky's "Peter" but by the end of the 1840s . Rosen finally distanced himself from the circle of Moscow friends.

The fundamental differences between them were revealed during Rosen's discussion with Shevyrev about Gogol's "Selected places from correspondence with friends" (1847). It was conducted on the pages of The Northern Bee and The Son of the Fatherland, in which Rosen collaborated at that time, on the one hand, and the Moskvityanin magazine on the other. In the course of the controversy, it turned out, in particular, that Rosen was the author of two anonymous reviews of the Slavophile "Moscow Literary and Scientific Collection", published in 1847. Rosen himself confirmed his authorship, not without reason believing that Shevyrev's negative attitude towards him was caused by displeasure at the harsh criticism of his "History of Russian Literature" in "Son of the Fatherland" ^{[9, p. 227]}. An article on the publication of Shevyrev's lectures, published in the journal in January 1847. together with the editorial introduction on criticism written by Rosen, it had no signature, and in the circle of the Moskvityanin, various persons were suspected of its authorship: Shevyrev – N.I. Nadezhdin, Pogodin – Rosen. But, contrary to Rosen's expectations, his renunciation of this article and recognition of the authorship of the reviews of the "Moscow Collection" only added fuel to the fire: Shevyrev, in a polemical response, noted that he learned about it "with regret", and that he never considered his former friend capable of writing such reviews ^{[11, p. 110]}.

Let us now turn to the text of the articles on the Moscow Collection, published in Nos. 9 and 10 of The Son of the Fatherland for 1847 and clarifying Rosen's historiosophical views. In them, the critic consistently analyzed scientific and literary articles and polemicized with the main provisions of Slavophilism, or "Moscow Scholasticism", as Rosen himself called this trend. He interpreted the concept of "Moscow Scholasticism" quite broadly, meaning by it both the basic ideas of Slavophilism and pan-Slavism, and the inherent "Muscovite" "Gogolefilism", which the baron attacked.

As in the later articles about the work of A. A. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky and about the story of K. K. According to K. S. Aksakov, Russian society is divided between the "public" and the "people" and concludes: "Imaginary Slavism is a completely lonely, disunited phenomenon that does not arouse the slightest participation in our public. <...> Society does not understand and cannot understand the meaning of this Slavism and considers them purely dreamy. <...> No Slavic dialectic can assure our society that it is cut off from the people" ^{[7, p. 2]}.

In Peter the Great, Rosen sees the exponent of the "spiritual life and gigantic moral force" of the Russian people, a demiurge who "penetrated Russia with his immortal genius" and "made it capable of performing all the great and beautiful things expected by Slavophiles"– and presents his phenomenon as a reward for centuries of meager intellectual and political development of Russia, as the ultimate the result of the ancient history of the Russian people, without which, as Rosen writes, it would be "painful for our feelings," although it produced such men as "John III, Boris Godunov, Alexei Mikhailovich" ^{[7, pp. 4-5]}. Rosen compares the Slavophiles who deny such a view of Peter with the Evangelical scribes and Pharisees who did not recognize Christ and persisted "in reckless expectations of another fulfillment of the covenant" ^{[7, p. 5]}. Slavophiles, according to Rosen, "also do not see that "there was already a Slavic demigod and laid the age-old foundations on which the mind and strength of our fatherland have been so wonderfully towering for a century and a half" ^{[7, p. 5]}.

Discovering strong pan–Slavic tendencies in the collection – in N. Rigelman's "Letters from Vienna" and Pogodin's article about Prague - Rosen speaks about them with particular rejection, considering them to be alien to the Russian people by Western Slavic trends. Regarding the observation of Pogodin, who compared the motto of "one Czech party": "We are not Slavs, but Czechs!" – with similar judgments in Russia, he remarks: "Can we not cherish the name of Holy Russia in front of that small-scale Slavic region, the center of which you call Czech Prague? God enlighten this ultra-Slavophile!" ^{[7, p. 14]} Arguing that the southern and Western Slavic peoples are "particles that, of course, by the will of Providence, did not become part of the great Slavic world called Russia", Rosen shows himself to be a pan-Germanist ^{[4, p. 14]}: he believes that the Western and South Slavic peoples sooner or later "are destined to merge with the German world, no doubt for the benefit of this latter," just as "particles of the German world" were annexed to Russia "not without some good purpose above" ^{[7, p. 14]}.

In line with imperial ideology and in connection with his own cultural self-determination, Rosen broadly interprets the concept of nationality. Having noticed in A. Popov's article "Schletzer. Russian Russian Russian Russian historiography" the underlying hostility towards the Germans, he writes: "We are always sorry when we see petty, intimate disfavor towards those foreigners (by birth or surname) who, having entered with glory into Russian history, are not only Russians, but also occupy a place among the best natural Russians. And what are natural Russians? The Russian Russian land did not give birth to a single Russian; the people were not created, like a man, from a lump of earth, but are made up and continue to be made up of a cluster of heterogeneous tribes that have adopted and are taking on one common form, called nationality. Russian Russian Russian Russian nationality There is and cannot be any difference between those who equally serve the Russian tsar, eat Russian bread, speak and write in Russian and act for the glory and benefit of Russia. Envy of the so-called non–Russian is unworthy of the greatness of our fatherland" ^{[7, pp. 14-15]}.

Commenting in detail on the article by A. S. Khomyakov "On the possibility of a Russian art school", Rosen notes that it "differs in a decidedly eccentric Slavophilism" ^{[7, p. 7]}. In Rosen's objections to Khomyakov's thesis on the folk character of art, classicist sympathies are noticeable: "Art, in its purity, is an attribute of the universal, according to the theory extracted from the entire history of the arts. With the exception of only one people – the Hellenic – all other folk-individual art has only a private, interesting feature in the history of art, of course, but in relation to the idea and their true purpose something superfluous, erroneous" ^{[7, p. 8]}. Rosen regrets that Khomyakov's intelligence and erudition are applied "exclusively to the unfounded permanent idea of Slavophilism," and remarks about the author of the article, turning to a literary "personality" that "Slavophilism has made him barren of poetic creativity lately," and life on an estate with peasants has not developed his literary talent: "How fruitless for art, this communication with the people is confirmed by the example of Mr. Khomyakov, a gifted poet who used to do something good: since he became a Slavophile, he - as far as is known – does not create anything, but only thinks wisely, thanks to European education, without which he would have been a boyar of the time of Vasily the Dark and knew if only they had their local rights" ^{[7, p. 12]}.

In the artistic part of the collection, Rosen singled out the poems of K. K. Pavlova and N. M. Yazykov, finding the latter "watery", and the former written without internal poetic motivation only out of a desire to "please the Slavophiles". Of the entire review of the artistic side of the collection, the most notable are Rosen's objections to K. S. Aksakov's criticism (under the pseudonym Imrek in the "Three Critical Articles") of the story by V. F. Odoevsky's "Orphan Girl" (about a peasant girl raised in a St. Petersburg orphanage, who returned to her native village and began to "teach kindness to peasant children"). Rosen remarked about Odoevsky's "Orphan Girl" that her plot was "extremely natural".: "Rural ignorance involuntarily submits to the influence of the peasantry, revived by education" ^{[8, p. 18]}. He assumed that Aksakov, "offended" by this work, is "an ardent advocate of the hillbilly in its primitive form" for the reason that he "is probably a Russian landowner who lives and has always lived in the manor house" ^{[8, p. 18]}. Believing that "Mr. Imrek" does not know the true state of affairs in the village, Rosen refers to his own experience of living in peasant houses – at a post while serving in a Hussar regiment– "often together with the farmer and his family." Once again, the writer refutes the opinion about the isolation of the nobility – and in particular, Prince V. F. himself. Odoevsky is from the lower classes and criticizes the opposition of "society" and "people" that he noticed in Aksakov: "Until now, we thought that the collective name of the people contains all classes of the people, from the peasant to the prince-grandee; but from the words of Mr. Imrek <...> it appears that by the name of the people the Slavophiles understand only one class of laborers, and that he is the "powerful keeper of the great secret of life"" ^{[8, p. 19]}. Russian russians, Rosen admitted that he himself, having become acquainted with "this class" of the people, fell in love with "its wonderful properties and amazing abilities" and sincerely considers the Russian people to be "the first people in the world," but stressed that when talking about the advantages of the Russian people, he does not mean only the "class of laborers." In the same anti-criticism, Rosen develops the idea of the gradual spread of enlightenment from the upper strata of society to the lower: "No one in the world develops knowledge by itself, but one must work, learn from someone who knows more and therefore is above us! Ignorance is darkness! And the great mystery of life breathes light. <...> Thanks to the paternal care of the government, the entire Russian people will be literate in a short time; and then we will talk about the class of laborers" ^{[8, p. 19]}.

Despite Rosen's fundamental differences with Slavophilism, which, as we have seen, Rosen criticized from educational and "Westernistic" positions, there were points of convergence, which allowed V. E. Vatsuro to note that in Rosen's historiosophical concept "elements of Slavophilism and Westernism" were combined ^{[2, p. 343]}. Russian Russians, considering the Russian people to be "the exponent of all Slavism," and in an article on the work of A. A. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky in 1848 (apparently in connection with the news of revolutions in Europe), following the Slavophiles, he talked about the special "vital principle" of the Russian people – "an unthinking feeling morality", which opposes Western Roman rationalism. At the same time, Rosen assigned a powerful civilizing role to the autocratic government. It can be concluded that both the divergences and the convergence of Rosen with the Slavophiles were explained by his specific "Westernism", focused on Pushkin and Karamzin, and the seeds of his ideas should be sought rather in the late 1820s than in the late 1840s.. Russian Russians, at the same time, the originality of Rosen's ideas about the superiority of the Russian people over the peoples of Western Europe was due to his own concept of an organic combination of "Slavic" and "Germanic" principles in the Russian people.

No less revealing is the fact that Rosen, in his objections to the "Moscow Literary and Scientific Collection", by his own admission, "agreed with the opinion of the public" ^{[10, p. 26]}. His judgments were appreciated even in the journal "Otechestvennye Zapiski", in all other spheres hostile to the "Son of the Fatherland" ^{[3, p. 29]}.