Is Russia part of Europe ? Russian perspections of Europe in the reign of Alexander I
Janet M
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ARTICLES

JANET M. HARTLEY

IS RUSSIA PART OF EUROPE ?

RUSSIAN PERCEPTIONS OF EUROPE

IN THE REIGN OF ALEXANDER I

"Just look at our Russia! It seems that she

really is a part oť Europe, and I always

thought that was some mistake of the

geographers."1

(Pushkin, on hearing the news that

Eugene ()nef>in had found a publisher).

By the end of the fifteenth century the rulers of Muscovy were developing an ideology which regarded their territories as the only free Orthodox realm, the successor of Byzantium, the "Third Rome" and rival of the Holy Roman Empire and, insofar as people define themselves by negatives, they knew that they were not part of Western Christendom. Indeed, just as all Orientals were husurmany, the name for all Western foreigners indiscriminately was nemtsy, the dumb ones (the term still used in modern Russian to mean Germans). It is only at the end of the seventeenth century that the word for Europe is attested in Russian, and then only as a purely geographical term in translated geographical works which existed in only a few manuscript copies. A.I. Lyzlov's Scythian history (Skitskaia isloriia), written in Bielonissian in 1687 and translated into Russian in 1692, expressed the view that the Tatar invasion was a calamity not only for Russia but for all of Europe.2 The implication of this was that the invasion was a calamity for all Christian peoples, but Lyzlov was writing for Polemized Bielorussians who had different problems of identity.

It was only in the eighteenth century that Russia aspired to become part of "Europe," something which essentially meant being accepted as one of the community of civilized, modern nations. Russia's position vis-à-vis Europe has remained ambiguous and her "Europeanness" has never been fully accepted by either Russians or other Europeans. •' Indeed the Russian adjective evropeiskii (European)

Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique. XXXI II (4). octobre-décembre /992. pp. 369-386.