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The amusements of adult pranksters: why did the nobles come to the Palace Square in 1825
The 200th anniversary of the uprising on Senate Square was marked both by reprints of already well-known works about the Decembrists, and by recent studies trying to place new accents. The work of the St. Petersburg publicist Andrzej Ikonnikov-Galitsky belongs to the latter. Critic Lidia Maslova presents the book of the week, especially for Izvestia.
Andrzej Ikonnikov-Galitsky
"The Decembrists: History, Fate, Biography"
St. Petersburg : Azbuka, AZBUKA Publishing House, 2026. — 640 p.
Ikonnikov-Galitsky begins with a rhetorical question: it would seem that since school we all know about the Decembrists, about whom "volumes of research, novellas, poems and novels were written, films were shot, plays were staged, songs were sung and even jokes were composed," but what do we actually know about them? According to the writer, there are still not enough clear answers to specific questions about the Decembrists: "How many were there? Who are they? What were you trying to achieve? And why were five of them hanged, while others went to forced labor, prisons, and exile for decades?"
Obelisk at the execution site of the Decembrists in St. Petersburg
Starting with the first question and based on the number of people convicted by the Supreme Criminal Court and other courts, as well as those who were tried but escaped trial and punishment, the author states: "We can only throw up our hands and admit that the list of Decembrists may contain from one to two hundred to one to two thousand names." For his research, the author confines himself to five key figures sentenced to death, as well as 120 members of secret societies and sympathizers who were subjected to less severe punishments by the Supreme Criminal Court.
Thus, "The Decembrists: History, Fate, Biography" presents the widest range of Decembrist destinies and characters, starting from the biography of Pavel Ivanovich Pestel, the namesake of Gogol's Chichikov ("He also looked like Napoleon. And he also had the intention to ride the troika bird of Russia and was thrown into tartars by it...") and ending with the mysterious "atypical" Decembrist Pavel Vygodovsky, a peasant's son who posed as a nobleman and therefore escaped the spitz, and eventually turned out to be the last Decembrist to die in Siberia.
In the spirit of the modern trend towards the decanonization of the Decembrists, various researchers put forward their own versions of what exactly was the main engine of the uprising, including rather mercantile ones, for example, as if the noble idea of emancipating serfs was dictated simply by the desire to simplify land purchase and sale transactions. Ikonnikov-Galitsky does not reach such cynicism and recognizes the existence of a wide variety of people among the Decembrists: "Irresponsible adventurers and Catholics imbued with a sense of duty. Altruists are also selfish. The righteous and the sinners. Smart guys and crazy people." And yet, sometimes, according to some of his intonations, one gets the feeling that he generally does not really believe that an adult and sane (at least for the time being) person is capable of risking his life and freedom out of a single selfless desire to make life better in your beloved fatherland, and not only for you. by myself. Therefore, the author of the book often tries to discern, if not openly material, then some kind of cunning psychological self-interest as the motivation of one or another person involved in the book, who is guided by a hidden resentment, wounded pride, or even banal boredom — the same one that Pushkin writes about in chapter XX of Eugene Onegin.
Ikonnikov-Galitsky hints at Pushkin's poems several times, talking about secret discussions of political plans "between Lafitte and Clicquot" and talking about the irrepressible thirst for heroism and the desire for glory.: "Fyodor Glinka, an active member of secret societies (who escaped punishment, however), once mentioned that during the Napoleonic Wars, under balls and bullets, he and his friends felt like heroes and leaders of history, and in the peacetime that followed, advancing in ranks, they suffered from the insignificance of a measured life."
Mikhail Sergeyevich Lunin clearly suffers from an allergy to a measured life in the description of Ikonnikov-Galitsky. In the book, he is described primarily as an enfant terrible, a bretteur and an adventurer, as if he specifically set out not to die in his bed for anything. Ikonnikov-Galitsky even cites a small "luniniana" from the everyday exploits and pranks of Lunin, who turns out to be not only the most colorful, but also the most humanly sympathetic character in the book - and looks like almost the only one who refused to name anyone during the investigation.
Ikonnikov-Galitsky does not comment much on the willingness with which the Decembrists willingly listed all their accomplices and associates, even the most insignificant and passive ones, during the investigation, although some researchers justify it with an aristocratic hatred of lies: going to kill the tsar was fine, but lying to the emperor was beneath noble dignity.
In his concluding remarks, subtitled "On Patterns and Coincidences," Ikonnikov-Galitsky complains about the subjectivity and unreliability of sources such as memoirs and correspondence that make it difficult to study Decembrist subjects, as well as the impossibility for a modern person to fully understand the moral guidelines and the "behavioral code" of the Decembrists.: "We only found out with complete certainty that the Decembrists were restless people. Their families and friends had a hard time with them."
Immediately, the writer identifies three ideological schemes — autocratic, liberal, and Soviet — which perceived the Decembrists as criminals, heroes, and good people, respectively, but proto-revolutionaries limited by their noble consciousness. Distancing himself from these schemes, Ikonnikov-Galitsky outlines his own, the fourth, which can be roughly designated as "pragmatic-philistine" and in which there is quite a comfortable place for the subjunctive mood. So, if Pestel had been lucky enough to make a good match before the resignation of his father, the governor-General, then maybe no uprising would have happened: "Matchmaking, quite likely, would have been favorably accepted, the son of the Siberian governor-general would have married the beautiful Isabella, had children, taken care of the household and career, as his brother Vladimir will do it later... I would forget about the conspiracy."
Arguing throughout the book that the Decembrists often played Freemasons, Carbonarians, fighters against tyranny and "agents of a brighter future," in the last pages Ikonnikov-Galitsky himself tries to play a rational historian and sociologist, although not without a slight self—irony: "Frowning and making a serious face, we let's try to express our understanding of the regularity of the Decembrist phenomenon." The writer defines this phenomenon as "a breakdown of the estate system on which the autocracy relied. The leading estate, the nobility, split from overexertion, just as the Russian church split earlier, and the breakaway part tried to destroy the autocratic government."
After praising himself for the dexterity of his formulation, Ikonnikov-Galitsky again departs from rational patterns towards the "inexplicable", which still remains a lot in the history of the Decembrists, and solemnly declares that "chance is a direct manifestation of God's will." And the latter, of course, is that the fighters for the idea mentioned in the book, even if sometimes rather vague, still "do not disappear into the indifferent fog of the past, but are imprinted in watercolors and engravings, in poetry, prose, performances, films and songs - in the historical memory and cultural code of Russian—speaking generations."".
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
