Inventing Eastern Europe

The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment

Stanford University Press

Contents

CHAPTER 1

Entering Eastern Europe:Eighteenth-Century Travelerson the Frontier

"These Demi-Savage Figures"

In 1784 Count Louis-Philippe de Ségur left France for Russia, appointedas minister plenipotentiary and envoy extraordinaire of Louis XVI to thecourt of Catherine II at St. Petersburg. Ségur was only 31 and owed hisposting to the fact that his father was the French minister of war. The youngman went by way of Berlin and received a royal audience at Potsdam withthe already old and famous Frederick. The king observed aloud that Ségurwas wearing the decoration of Cincinnatus, the mark of his military serviceunder George Washington in the American Revolutionary War. "Howcould you for so long forget the delights of Paris," asked Frederick sarcastically,"in a land where civilization is just beginning?" Such condescensiontoward America was typical of eighteenth-century assumptions about thelocus of civilization, and both men, the Parisian and the Berliner, had tobe aware that the comment carried a double significance, for the presentposting to St. Petersburg as well as past service in America. In Russia, too,by enlightened consensus, civilization was just beginning in the eighteenthcentury, and Ségur would have many opportunities to reflect upon thatin the five years that followed. It was a matter of reflection that interestedhim, though, the stages and progress of civilization in backward places,and he was willing to sacrifice delights and encounter inconveniences thebetter to learn about lands that excited only sarcasm in Frederick. "Whatroute do you take to go to Petersburg, the shortest?" asked the king. Theshortest and most convenient route would have been by sea. The most directland route would have followed the Baltic coast. "No sire," said Ségur."I want to pass by Warsaw to see Poland." To which Frederick replied, "It'sa curious land."

Both Ségur's curiosity to see Poland and Frederick's sense of its curiousnesswere features of an evolving eighteenth-century interest that appliedto Russia as well as Poland. For Ségur they were linked in the same voyageby land, emphasizing their regional contiguity for him and for othereighteenth-century travelers. In the seventeenth century, commercial connectionsby sea—the Arctic passage from England to Archangel, the Balticcruise from Holland to Gdansk—masked the relation of Poland andRussia to each other. Nineteenth-century railroad travel would fully enforcethat geographical relation, making tracks from Warsaw to St. Petersburg,from Warsaw to Moscow, but Ségur's eighteenth-century curiositycost him more time and trouble. Frederick pretended to encourage himwith some ironic reflections on what made Poland curious: "a free landwhere the nation is enslaved, a republic with a king, a vast country almostwithout population." The Poles were keen warriors but their armies undisciplined.Polish men were brave and chevaleresque, but Polish womenseemed to have more firmness of character, even heroism. Thus Frederickconcluded on a note of mockery, "The women are truly the men." Contradictionand paradox were the rhetorical forms in which he elaborated uponthe curiousness of Poland, its nonsensical disordering and inversion ofeighteenth-century ideas about society, politics, demography, even chivalryand gender. Nonsense was the adjunct of anarchy, and anarchy hadprovided Frederick with a pretext in 1772 for proposing the partition ofPoland and acquiring a portion for Prussia.

It is remarkable that Frederick, who obviously intended to be clever inhis summing up and putting down of Poland, could not claim to understandit better, did not seek to define and explain its implied inadequacy.The comprehension of Poland was, paradoxically, a matter of outliningits incomprehensibility, presenting its paradoxical contrasts, unresolved.Ségur had no political designs on Poland, even claimed to detest the partitionof 1772 as an act of injustice, but his voyager's curiosity inspiredtravel observations in Poland remarkably similar in rhetorical form to thosethat Frederick employed without leaving Berlin. Furthermore, the samestyle of characterization by contradictions continued to serve Ségur in Russiaas well as in Poland. Such formulas, pronounced by the Prussian kingor the French diplomat and applied to Poland or to Russia, marked theeighteenth-century discovery of Eastern Europe. The curiousness of EasternEurope, that is, its difference from Western Europe, its backwardness,was formulated as an intellectual problem of unresolved contrasts.

When a traveler of the twentieth century looks back at Ségur's tripfrom Germany into Poland, it seems clear that he left Western Europe andentered Eastern Europe. Ségur could not explain it so neatly, though, sincein the eighteenth century the whole idea of Eastern Europe was not yetfixed, was still evolving, was taking shape in the minds and words of travelerslike himself. What was remarkable about his account of this passage,the 500 miles from Berlin to Warsaw, was how powerfully he felt that he wascrossing a border of great significance, even without possessing the moderndistinction between Western Europe and Eastern Europe to explainthat transition.

In traversing the eastern part of the estates of the king of Prussia, it seems that oneleaves the theatre where there reigns a nature embellished by the efforts of art anda perfected civilization. The eye is already saddened by arid sands, by vast forests.

But when one enters Poland, one believes one has left Europe entirely, and thegaze is struck by a new spectacle: an immense country almost totally covered withfir trees always green, but always sad, interrupted at long intervals by some cultivatedplains, like islands scattered on the ocean; a poor population, enslaved; dirtyvillages; cottages little different from savage huts; everything makes one think onehas been moved back ten centuries, and that one finds oneself amid hordes of Huns,Scythians, Veneti, Slavs, and Sarmatians.

Clearly Ségur experienced this as much more than the mere passage fromone kingdom to the next. He had passed beyond perfected civilization,had left Europe entirely, had even traveled in time and passed out of theeighteenth century. In fact, though he specified ten centuries, a thousandyears, and could say of Poland that "there the feudal centuries live again,"he seemed to pass out of history altogether into a world of prehistoric hutsand hordes, the barbarians who "crushed beneath their weight the last debrisof the Roman empire." His own sensibility was allowed full play ingoverning his observations, the traveler's eye imparting sadness even tothe trees. Ségur had told Frederick he only wanted "to see Poland," buthis gaze was far from passive, engaging and transforming the landscapethat art and civilization had not embellished. He left behind a "theatre"only to discover "a new spectacle." The new spectacle was Eastern Europe,but he could not yet name it. Where was he traveling? It was not Europe,he believed, but neither was it Asia, the Orient. It was some intermediarygeographical space, with no precise location in time or history, where theinversions of nature were such that even his travel by land turned into an"ocean" voyage. In spite of his overland intentions, Ségur was at sea.

"Everything is contrast in this land," observed Ségur, echoing the formulaof Frederick, "deserts and palaces, the slavery of the peasants andthe turbulent liberty of the nobles." Poland was an "inconceivable mélangeof ancient centuries and modern centuries, of monarchical spirit and republicanspirit, of feudal pride and equality, of poverty and riches." Thetraveler's eye picked out the contrasts and combined the elements of observationinto that inconceivable mélange. In the chateaux there were "a greatnumber of servants and horses but almost no furniture, Oriental luxurybut no commodities of life." Wealth in grain contrasted with a scarcity ofmoney and almost no commerce, "except by an active crowd of avid Jews."The Polish "passion for war" contrasted with an "aversion to discipline."Ségur, like Frederick, followed the formula of contrast and contradictionthat rendered Poland as a curious land of nonsense and paradox, a land ofluxury without furniture.

"Such was Poland and such the reflections that occupied me," wroteSégur of his journey, "when emerging from the solitude of a vast forestof cypresses and pines, where one could have believed oneself at the extremityof the world, Warsaw offered itself to my gaze." Like Columbus hehad left Europe entirely behind, took to the ocean, and found himself atthe extremity of the world. Poland seemed to encourage in him a hyperbolicsensibility, which confused the significance of his discovery, for if hehad announced, more modestly, "the extremity of Europe," he would havecome much closer to the label that eluded him. The appearance of Warsawoccurred as an apparently unexpected interruption of the reflectionsthat occupied Ségur, the reality of Poland intruding upon his thoughts ofPoland. The relation of the two, reality and reflections, was suggested bythe passivity with which Warsaw "offered itself" to his gaze, and the alacritywith which that gaze set about its analytical work: "Upon enteringI remarked there more of those singular contrasts: magnificent mansionsand mean houses, palaces and hovels." Further, "to complete the tableau,"Ségur described his own place of lodging in the city, "a sort of palace ofwhich one half shined with noble elegance while the other was only a massof debris and ruins, the sad remains of a fire."

One cannot help becoming suspicious of this gaze with which Ségur setout innocently "to see Poland." Warsaw had to offer itself up to the gazeas some sort of helpless victim, a sacrifice, to those irrepressible analyticenergies that left the city in ruins, that is, the intellectual ruins of its internalcontradictions. One thinks of Michel Foucault, who philosophizedhistorically about the gaze that made vision into knowledge and knowledgeinto power, the gaze of classical analysis. It was the birthright ofSégur, a Frenchman in the age of Enlightenment, but somehow the wholeoperation of analysis seemed to go awry in Eastern Europe. Instead of discoveringin the elements an understanding of the object they composed,Ségur's analysis, like Frederick's, rendered its object all the more incomprehensible,even ridiculous. Coming from Frederick, in a tone of franksarcasm, such analysis was easily recognizable as an act of intellectual aggression,the accompaniment to partition. Frederick's gaze upon the mapof Poland inspired in him thoughts of territorial dismemberment, just asthe idea of Poland provoked rhetorical analysis. Warsaw, eventually, would"offer itself" to Prussia in the final partition of 1795. The gaze of Ségurmeant neither conquest nor partition, but it was the gaze of intellectualmastery, posing as puzzlement, with which Western Europe discoveredEastern Europe.

Contradictions nested within contradictions. The divided palace whereSégur stayed, half elegance and half debris, was located within a dividedcity, half palaces and half hovels. By the same token Warsaw as a wholebrought out the larger contradictions of all Poland. Ségur observed, "Art,spirit, grace, literature, all the charm of social life, rivaling in Warsaw thesociability of Vienna, London, and Paris; but, in the provinces, mannersstill Sarmatian." Poland contained within itself the conflict between civilizationand the barbaric horde, but at the same time Ségur marked pointson the map to suggest an even larger contrast, a rivalry, between differentparts of the European continent. Vienna, London, and Paris were thecapitals of that Europe which Ségur left behind upon entering Poland, thecapitals of Western Europe.

In Warsaw Ségur was strongly advised to put off his departure for St.Petersburg, since the snows of the winter of 1784–85 were already falling.He would not wait, but later wished that he had. Ségur could makeprogress through the snow only in a light sleigh, and so had to deposit hisluggage along the way, somewhere between Bialystock and Riga. Later helearned it was all lost in a fire. In one of the typical paradoxes of EasternEurope, "snow and fire united to inflict upon me this punishment." Inthe last stretch of the voyage, from Riga to St. Petersburg, unburdened ofbaggage, Ségur in his sleigh was left to his reflections. He was thinkingabout how cold he was, and also about Peter the Great, who triumphedover nature by applying "upon this eternal ice the fecund warmth of civilization."The application of heat to eternal ice was another paradox, like thecombination of fire and snow, but Peter's "triumphing over nature" wasalready a cliché of the Enlightenment when Voltaire wrote his biographicaltribute in the previous generation. The sight of St. Petersburg itself interruptedSégur's reflections, and he was ready with another conventionalobservation to greet the city "where once one saw nothing but vast, uncultivated,and fetid marshes." No eighteenth-century visitor could see St.Petersburg without also seeing at the same time, and even smelling, thosefetid marshes, which one no longer saw. In Eastern Europe the gaze wascapable of manifold superimpositions, making a "mélange" of centuriesand landscapes.

Ségur was hardly the first Frenchman to come to St. Petersburg. He recalledDiderot's famous visit to Catherine ten years before. He knew that"enough voyagers and authors of dictionaries have described and detailedthe palaces, temples, numerous canals, rich edifices" of the city he called"this capital of the North." He nevertheless thought it worth recording hisless touristic impressions of the city, and, with the coming of spring and themelting of the snows, he described a city whose eastern features were farmore emphatic than its northern situation. The format of his impressionswas identical to that which served for Poland and Warsaw.

The aspect of Petersburg strikes the spirit with a double astonishment; there areunited the age of barbarism and that of civilization, the tenth and the eighteenthcenturies, the manners of Asia and those of Europe, coarse Scythians and polishedEuropeans, a brilliant, proud nobility, and a people plunged in servitude.

On the one hand, elegant fashions, magnificent costumes, sumptuous feasts,splendid fetes, and theatres the equal of those that embellish and animate the selectsocieties of Paris and London; on the other hand merchants in Asiatic costume,coachmen, domestics, peasants dressed in sheepskins, wearing long beards and furcaps, long skin gloves without fingers, and hatchets hanging at a broad leather belt.

This clothing, and the thick bands of wool around their feet and legs that forma kind of coarse buskin, bring to life before your eyes those Scythians, Dacians,Roxolans, Goths, once the terror of the Roman world. All these demi-savage figuresthat one has seen in Rome on the bas-reliefs of Trajan's column seem to bereborn and become animated before your gaze.

Inevitably, the eyes of Ségur, his rampant gaze, became your eyes, yourgaze, the gaze of all travelers to St. Petersburg, even those who traveledonly vicariously by reading the memoirs of Ségur. Those memoirs were notpublished until many years later, in 1824, when Ségur was an old man inthe nineteenth century, but he remembered that the Scythians had cometo life for him, and so he brought them to life for you.
(Continues...)Excerpted from Inventing Eastern Europe by Larry Wolff. Copyright © 1994 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
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