The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The fourteen ranks had three parallel branches: military, civil, and court (that is, “attached to the imperial court,” “courtier”). Rank Fourteen was where one began. Any rank above Eight (after 1856, any rank above Four) bestowed hereditary nobility. Many benefited from this system; sons of the gentry and even of low-born scribes and secretaries could now work their way into the nobility. Some professions, however, had no rank assigned to them at all - such as musicians before the founding of a degree-granting conservatory in St. Petersburg in 1862 - and thus officially did not exist. One’s rank guaranteed rights (such as existed in the Russian Empire): the right to own human property, the right to be exempt from public flogging. In official documents, a person’s rank came first. When addressing a person formally it was procedurally obligatory to use titles, which were multi-syllabic, bulky, and intrusive (ranks One and Two were addressed as “Your High Excellency” [vashe vysokoprevoskhoditel'stvo], Three and Four as “Your Excellency” [vasheprevoskhoditel'stvo], Five as “Your Highly Born” [vashe vysokorodie], Six through Eight as “Your High Honor” [vashe vysokoblagorodie], etc.). Gogol gives us stretches of conversation consisting largely of a vacuous and sycophantic exchange of these formal titles. But more was involved than verbal courtesy or the currying of favor. Every branch of every rank had its required uniform, mandated down to the shape of the collar and color of the button, as well as hats, gloves, boots, weapons, the prescribed cut for facial hair, the dances one could perform at balls and the style of carriage one could drive. Petersburg was a heavily military city, with a large percentage of its adult males in uniform; many of its parks were de facto parade grounds. Visually, aurally, and behaviorally, one’s rank bestowed one’s identity.

Pushkin and honor (its reciprocity, roundedness, and balance)

Pushkin was acutely aware of the rewards and constraints of official rank. They often conflicted with two other values precious to him: professionalism as a

102 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

writer, and noble birth. The poet possessed a distinguished genealogy of which he was very proud. On his father’s side the Pushkins were an ancient, although impoverished and marginalized, boyar family. His exotic mother, known as “the beautiful Creole,” was a granddaughter of Abram Gannibal, a black African who had been captured as a boy and educated as a favorite of Peter the Great (rising to rank Four, major general). Scarcely out of his teens, Pushkin was already celebrated as Russia’s supreme poet. But he never “served the state” with distinction on its terms - indeed, he was arrested and exiled in 1820 for several free-thinking poems and remained under police surveillance for the rest of his life.

Pushkin was to rise only one notch above the miserably low rank assigned him upon graduation from his boarding school, St. Petersburg’s imperial Lycee: the Tenth (civilian collegiate secretary). Many of his best friends were dashing officers. Pushkin felt his unglamorous official status keenly; but when the politically suspect and financially strapped poet volunteered for the army in 1829, he was turned down. In 1831 he was promoted to titular councilor (rank Nine), with access to imperial archives. He did receive one further dubious honor, however. On New Year’s Eve, 1834, Tsar Nicholas, desiring to gaze on Pushkin’s breathtakingly beautiful wife at imperial balls, named the poet a “kammerjunker” or Gentleman of the Bedchamber (court rank Eleven; the courtier ranks had no equivalent to civilian Ten). Pushkin considered this rank humiliating for someone of his years and stature, and furthermore it obliged him to escort his wife to palace events. Outraged, he avoided wearing the hated green uniform and (so it was said) even sabotaged it, ripping off a button and refusing to repair it.4 After Pushkin was mortally wounded in a duel defending his wife’s honor in January 1837, his widow bravely respected his wish to be buried in his frock coat, not in uniform - a gesture that greatly irritated the tsar. When his opponent, the young and well-connected French officer Georges d’Anthes, was eventually deported from Russia, the reason given was “for killing the kammerjunker Pushkin.”