SLAVOPHILISM

The romantic ultranationalistic ideology of a group of 19th-century Russian right-wing reformers who fervently predicted a brilliant future for Russia. They held forth in the endless debates inevitably occasioned by Russia's victory over Napoleon I in 1812. For them that future depended upon the restoration of Russia's legitimate past. They scorned St. Petersburg, Russia's "German" capital and the memory of the man who built it, Emperor peter i. The Slavophiles, as they came to be known, were the philosophers of nationality (narodnost '). For them nationalism was something more than a Russian subject's manifestation of patriotic loyalty to St. Petersburg's laws, policies of the moment, and international commitment to the concert of Europe. To the Czar's alarm Slavophilism logically developed into a cultural and political pan-Slavism with dangerous messianic visions of Great Russia. The Slavophiles were interested primarily in the Slavonic race and also in the land and the faith of the Russian people (narod ). Russian nationality was the object of Slavophile veneration. It was to them a grass roots "folkishness," a complexus of a Godbearing apolitical people's traditions and preoccupations: the commune (mir ), religion and worship, the things of the soul (dusha ) in general. Slavophiles opposed serfdom because formerly Russians were freemen. The definitive stand of the Slavophiles against their ideological enemies, the Westernizers, was crystallized in the summer of 1836 when the brilliant P. Y. Chaadaev's First Philosophical Letter appeared in Nadezhdin's Teleskop. The visiting Marquis Astolphe de Custine later published scathing observations in La Russie en 1839. Emperor nicholas i promptly declared Chaadaev officially insane, and the Slavophiles rushed to defend Russia, whose past, present, and future had been so grossly slandered by both son and outlander. Because they championed the wrong Russia, so to speak, Slavophiles were often jailed by Nicholas I. Ironically, they were frequently in material agreement with their professed enemies, the Westernizers, as Herzen and Bakunin were to note.

Conservative Slavophiles were deeply religious and supported the Orthodox Church; religion was the basis of their bias. They made their own the phrase perhaps first used by a journalistic supporter, S. P. Shevyrëv: "the rotting West" (gniloĭ zapad ). For men such as their talented leaders, A. S. Khomyakov and K. S. Aksakov, the West was deteriorating because of the false principles on which Europe's culture rested, the eclecticism and individuality of its thinkers, and the worldly political concerns of its philosophers and citizens. I. V. Kireevskiĭ and others drew up long lists of contrasts between East and West, always to the disadvantage of the latter. Slavophile theological thought was hostile to both Catholicism and Protestantism. Supported by M. P. Pogodin and F. I. Tyutchev, the Slavophiles Y. Samarin, I. S. Aksakov, and their followers all logically demanded that Russia halt the process of her contamination by the West, and quarantine herself spiritually and politically in the splendid Muscovite isolation of Holy Russia of a bygone age.

Bibliography: n. l. brodskiĬ, Rannie slavyanofily (Moscow 1910). f. fadner, Seventy Years of Pan-Slavism in Russia (Washington 1962). n. v. riasanovsky, Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles (Cambridge, MA 1952).

[f. l. fadner]