Shadow of Mazepa. Ukrainian nation in the era of Gogol Belyakov Sergey Stanislavovich

German city

German city

Visiting Ukrainians and even Russians themselves saw Petersburg as an almost foreign city. Yes, in fact, it is difficult to find a famous writer who has not written about this cosmopolitanism. Ukrainians are no exception. Panteleimon Kulish will call St. Petersburg "Russian Babylon". “The city is endless, maybe - Turkish, maybe - German, and maybe even Russian,” the impressionable and expansive Shevchenko writes in his almost insane poem “Dream”. And fifteen years before him, the respectful Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol wrote to his mother: “Petersburg is not at all like other European capitals or Moscow. Each capital is generally characterized by its own people, which stamp on it the stamp of nationality, but in St. Petersburg there is no character: the foreigners who settled here settled down and did not at all look like foreigners, and the Russians, in turn, became strangers and became neither one nor the other.

In April 1829, Nikolai Vasilievich had not yet seen a single European capital besides St. Petersburg, his information about Europe was completely bookish. But he saw the cosmopolitanism of northern Babylon with his own eyes. And in the Petersburg Notes of 1836, already compiled abroad, Gogol will repeat his assessment: in Petersburg there is "little indigenous nationality" and a lot of "foreign confusion."

Meanwhile, almost 85% of the population of St. Petersburg were Russians. However, the city was dominated by Western architecture, European clothing, and French cuisine. Even the signs on shops, shops, pastry shops were in two languages: Russian and French or Russian and German. Wealthy residents of St. Petersburg tried not to be inferior to the Parisians either in fashion or in cooking. Almost all the confectionery shops belonged to the French - from the legendary Wolf and Beranger on the Nevsky to the squalid confectionery on the Petersburg side, where the visitor could only order hot chocolate and sugar water.

Petersburg "at midnight begins to bake French bread, which the next day the German people will eat everything." The most notable ethnographic group in St. Petersburg, glorified even in Russian literature, were, of course, the Germans, who lived in the city, preserving their customs, manners, and language. “The Germans, as the excellent examples of the tinwork of Master Schiller and the shoemaker Hoffmann testify to us, do not crumble<…>here in Russia, ”noted Stepan Petrovich Shevyrev, literary historian, academician and Slavophile, in his review of Gogol's Mirgorod and Arabesques. If the Germans assimilated, then slowly. They married their pretty German girls, spent their free time with their German friends, and went to German pubs. The Germans usurped entire professions and retained their ethnic identity. The memory of German bakers, pharmacists, artisans lasted until the twenties and thirties of the XX century. “Petersburg is a neat person, a perfect German,” wrote Gogol.

The military and political elite of the empire was formed including from the Germans. For nearly three decades, the Foreign Office was in the hands of Karl Robert von Nesselrode, who spoke poor Russian and even outwardly was a real “German Karl”. Here are the names of Russian diplomats of the Nikolaev time: Brunnov, Budberg, Palen, Meyendorf. Of the nineteen Russian envoys to the European courts, nine professed Lutheranism.

The Ostsee region until the reign of Alexander III was a real German kingdom. In fact, far from all Russian laws were in force there. Under the auspices of the Russian tsar and his deputy, the governor-general, all affairs were managed by the Landtags, which consisted almost entirely of German nobles. In Estonia, Livonia and Courland, they were a real dominant minority, while Latvians, Estonians and Russians were a humiliated, almost powerless population. The well-known Slavophile Yuri Fedorovich Samarin, who served in Riga in 1845-1848, was previously shocked to see "the systematic oppression of Russians by the Germans, an hourly insult to the Russian people," which he wrote an anti-German pamphlet - "Letters from Riga." It was impossible to print a pamphlet, and Samarin read it in the salons of St. Petersburg, distributed it in lists. It all ended in arrest. But Samarin was a very influential man, among his patrons were L. A. Perovsky (Minister of Internal Affairs), P. D. Kiselev (Minister of State Property), A. F. Orlov (chief of gendarmes). And even these connections did not save him from arrest - such was the power of the "German party". The Russian tsars themselves, almost purebred Germans, remained consistent Germanophiles. “Our Tsar is a German Russian ...” This Germanophilism had sources more effective than German origin.

Thaddeus Bulgarin and Alexander Herzen, a convinced "guardian" and political emigrant, editor of the loyal "Northern Bee" and editor of the radical opposition "Bell", literally repeated each other precisely on the German question.

Thaddeus Bulgarin: “The Ostsee people do not like the Russian nation at all - this is an indisputable matter. The mere thought that they will someday depend on the Russians makes them in awe.<…>For the same reason, they are extremely attached to the throne.<…>The Ostsee people are sure that their own welfare depends on the welfare of the reigning family.<…>The Ostsee people consider themselves to be a guard guarding the throne, from which all their prosperity comes ... "

Alexander Herzen: “Having no other goal than to maintain the royal disposition towards themselves, they served the person of the sovereign, not the nation.<…>“We don’t like Russians,” one well-known person in the Baltic region once told me in Riga, “but in the whole empire there are no subjects more loyal to the imperial family than we are.”

The difference between Bulgarin and Herzen in their assessment: Faddey Venediktovich, a non-Russian person, liked this state of affairs very much, and the Russian publisher of Kolokol was indignant.

There was no international peace in the empire. The modern Russian historian Sergei Sergeev calls the relations between the two peoples "Cold Russian-German War". There was a constant undercover struggle between the Russians and the Germans: at court, in the army, in ministries, in the Academy of Sciences, in universities. Even the research topics of the Russian Archaeological Society depended on the nationality of its superiors. While the president of the society was the Duke of Leuchtenberg, the Germans dominated there, and scientific research was devoted mainly to classical (ancient) archeology and Western European numismatics. Everything will change after the Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich takes the place of the Duke of Leuchtenberg. He was known as a Slavophile, sympathetic to Russian scientists, "Russian and Slavic archeology."

The German dominance in the army irritated the Russians. The future Decembrist A. N. Muravyov proposed to create a secret society "to oppose the Germans in the Russian service." Brothers Alexander, Nikolai and Mikhail Muravyovs were enemies of "every German world." Hostility towards the Germans was extremely widespread among the Decembrists. According to Prince Vyazemsky, she was even required from potential members of the secret society.

“The propagandists and recruiters found, among other things, that I did not hate the Germans enough, and concluded that there was nothing to be expected of me,” Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky wrote down.

The Germans firmly defended their interests. Once Ernst Philip von Brunnov (Philip Ivanovich) mistook Philip Vigel (Russified Finn) for a German and offered to intrigue together against the Russian. “There are only two of us,” Vigel remarked. Brunnov replied that another German, a certain Frank, would help them, "and that would be enough to throw off the Russian fool and take over the place." Meanwhile, Philip Ivanovich Brunnov will become a well-known diplomat, the Russian ambassador in London, together with Count AF Orlov, he will represent Russia at the Paris Congress.

There has long been a persistent prejudice towards the Germans in the mass consciousness of the Ukrainian people. According to V. G. Korolenko, who grew up in Volyn in the Polish-Ukrainian environment, even the devil appeared to the Little Russians and Poles in the form of a "kurguz German".

“And a despot reigns over the three Slavic peoples, rules them through the Germans,<…>It cripples, destroys the good nature of the Slavic ... "- wrote Nikolai Kostomarov in the" Book of the life of the Ukrainian people. "

In "The Missing Letter" devils "with dog faces, on German legs" hover around witches, and the devil from "Christmas Eve" was "completely German in front." Gogol, however, had his own history of meeting the Germans. The "popular view" of the German devils will appear in his mind only with time.

There were few Germans in the Poltava region and in Nizhyn. It is not known whether Gogol was familiar with the life of the community of Poltava Germans-weavers, while the lands of the Germans-colonists were located to the south - in Novorossiya. Therefore, Gogol's first acquaintance with the Germans, apparently, was a book: "... I mixed German scholarship, German philosophy and literature with the Germans," he wrote many years later. An entire nation was represented in his imagination by Schiller, Goethe, Hoffmann. Hence not only the early Gogol's fascination with German romanticism, but also his sympathy for the Germans in general.

After living for six months in St. Petersburg, Gogol went, almost flees to Germany, to Lubeck. And there he really likes everything: cleanliness, order, abundance, "worthy of the Flemish school", the amazing politeness of ordinary merchants, "the life and occupations of good Germans." He writes about their cordiality, spontaneity, which you will not find in St. Petersburg.

Several years have passed. Gogol does not yet go to Germany for medical treatment, but he observes the manners and customs of the St. Petersburg Germans. And now German artisans appear in "Nevsky Prospekt" - the tinsmith Schiller and the shoemaker Hoffmann: the names of German romantics in comic contrast with mundane pursuits, and with rudeness, greed, and stupidity.

Good Germans were replaced by funny Germans. They will meet Gogol at the beginning of his long travels across Europe. In 1836, Gogol wrote to his sisters that if he was not lucky with fellow travelers and the Germans in the stagecoach were too fat, then one of them could be used as a pillow. However, over time, the Germans made Gogol less and less amused, more and more annoyed. "How disgusting the Germans seemed to me after the Italians, the Germans, with all their petty honesty and selfishness!" - he wrote to M.P. Balabina in April 1838.

The Germans do not know how to have fun, they only "drink beer and sit at wooden tables, under chestnuts." Now Germany for Gogol is "the most disgraceful belch of the ugliest tobacco and the ugliest beer." In Italy he lives and works, in Germany he is treated. German doctors at that time already had the highest reputation. However, Gogol retains his antipathy for the Germans, in whose veins "potato blood" flows.

From a letter from N. V. Gogol to S. T. Aksakov dated July 7, 1840: “I look at the Germans as at the necessary insects in every Russian hut. They run around me, climb, but they don't bother me; and if one of them climbs on my nose, then the click - and it was! "

Since the second half of the 1840s, Gogol either simply does not notice the Germans, or gets off with general phrases, although he spends more time in Germany than before. Thinks it's better for health. Germans use it mineral water, wrapped in a wet sheet and treated with skim milk, while the attending physician sips fresh cream.

Gogol, nevertheless, does not want to be branded as a Germanophobe, and therefore the author of The Nose assures P. A. Pletnev that he does not at all have "a personal aversion to the Germans." Gogol will even try to compliment the Germans, noting that there are many Russians "who should have been called Germans and who behaved much worse than the Germans." Such a compliment is worth a good curse.

Once Smirnova-Rosset, knowing about Gogol's dislike for the Germans, asked him:

“- You scold the Germans,<…>Well, you still love Schiller; and Schiller is also German.

- Schiller! - answered Gogol. - Yes, when he realized that he was a German, he died of grief. Why did you think he died? "

The Germans played a fatal role in the history of Ukraine. The German Catherine II destroyed the Ukrainian autonomy, eliminating the Hetmanate and the Zaporozhye Sich. The empress gave the lands that the Cossacks considered theirs to the Serbs, Greeks, Wallachians and, of course, the Germans. German colonists even settled on the island of Khortitsa, that is, on the site of the first Zaporozhye Sich founded by Dmitry Vishnevetsky. After visiting this prosperous German colony, Shevchenko “cried everything”, saying: “they spilled our Ukraine with a lot of people from the Muscovites, the stench changed.” And even in the Jewish shank, simple-minded Little Russians are lured by the game of German barrel organs: "Here is a poor man and drinks his last thread to German music."

But this hostility is ideological, historical, and not everyday, as in Gogol. Shevchenko was friends with the Germans. The young artist Vasily Sternberg, one of the closest friends of the young Shevchenko, became the first illustrator of Kobzar. Shevchenko was in love with a pretty German woman, Maria Evropyus. Finally, Karl Bryullov was Shevchenko's teacher, his benefactor and the highest authority in painting. And after returning from exile, when Bryullov's (and Shevchenko's) academicism had already gone out of fashion, Bryullov remained in Shevchenko's eyes “Charlemagne”.

From the story "The Artist" by Taras Shevchenko: "You notice that all my acquaintances are Germans. But what wonderful Germans! I'm just in love with these Germans. "