Chapter 9 Unfamiliar faces - red faces Obviously something happened. Now indiscipline, almost rebellion, was felt everywhere. The early morning formation had to be taken over by the two of us, LO. That morning, many seemed to be sick and unable to get out of bed.

Today, the question of how Russia is viewed in the West, how Russia’s image is formed in the world, is very relevant. As, indeed, always. Formation" positive image country" in the eyes of foreigners was part of state policy both under the tsars and under the Bolsheviks. They just calculated statesmen on different forces, were based on different political and social attitudes. However, as follows from experience, the best means for a favorable attitude was not intimidation, not saber-rattling, or even military victories, but Russian novels and Russian women.

Historian Olga EDELMAN talked with philologist and translator, author of works on Russian-French diplomatic and cultural ties, Vera MILCHINA, about how the perception of Russia in Europe and in its old center, France, developed over the centuries.

What was France for Russia, what did the Russians want to see there? And what was Russia for France? And in general, why is such communication between people necessary? different nationalities and why, in fact, study it?

The example of Russian-French ties shows: communication is often necessary in order to look for in neighbors (in the broad sense; for neighborhood it is not necessary to have a common state border, which we did not have with France) for those properties that we ourselves lack. And describe these properties (sometimes very exaggerating) as an example and edification for compatriots: this, they say, is how it happens with smart people. It is important to emphasize here that in the case of Russian-French relations, this construction of an ideal embodied in the life and state structure of another nation was mutual. Because about how we looked at Europe (and the French considered themselves and were considered throughout the world the embodiment of cultural Europeanness), about how Russian people exclaimed: “Oh France, there is no better region in the world!” - quite a lot has been written about this, both with praise and criticism. But less is known that the French in some eras with the same close attention looked at Russia and, moreover, found in it properties that, in their opinion, their native France lacked. Moreover, the most striking thing is that these properties are different times were completely opposite.

In the second half of the 18th century, a phenomenon arose that one French researcher, Alfred Lortolary, dubbed the “Russian mirage” two centuries later. French enlightenment philosophers, with the light hand of Catherine, who willingly created for herself the “image” of an enlightened empress, began to paint in their writings the image of Russia as a country much freer than the then French monarchy. It turned out like this: in France there is absolutism, and in Russia an almost constitutional monarchy is about to arise. The question is how much French philosophers believed in the reality of these structures is a difficult question. Perhaps they didn’t believe so much as they wanted to believe. It is probably no coincidence that Voltaire did not go to Russia - he did not want to be disappointed. But Diderot arrived and did not see anything particularly good that would confirm these mirages. But it was nice to think that there was a country where political ideal has already come true. In the Age of Enlightenment, the Russian mirage had, so to speak, a progressive character.

And in the 19th century, in the 30s and 40s, a Russian mirage of the opposite ideological content arose - monarchical, conservative. The roles changed: now France became a constitutional monarchy, with a parliament and parliamentary discussions, and Russia remained an absolute monarchy, but for those French who did not like their parliamentarism, this Russian monarchy became a symbol of the correct political structure. Because parliamentarism is (it seemed to them) chaos, disorder. And Russia, in the midst of this chaos, is an island of calm, order, an anchor in a stormy sea (the image is not mine, but of S.S. Uvarov, who conceived his famous triad “Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality” precisely as “our answer” to the French disorder). And the French readily picked up this idea; that is, we can say that this new, conservative Russian mirage, just like the previous, progressive one, was created in close cooperation between the Russians and the French. In XV??? century, such “co-authors” were the Russian Empress and French philosophers, in the first third of the 19th century - Russian “publicists” and diplomats, such as Uvarov or Prince Elim Meshchersky, and French monarchists, the so-called legitimists, who considered King Louis Philippe a usurper, and a constitutional monarchy - a state of loudmouths. And again, people wanted to think that if in home country It is impossible to return to the previous, pre-revolutionary state structure (that’s what it was called - the old order), then there must be a place on earth where this ideal is realized, where order reigns instead of chaos. They saw Russia as such a place. Moreover, it is characteristic that they came up with this specifically about Russia, and not about Prussia or Austria, which were also absolute monarchies. Apparently, because Prussia and Austria were closer and more present “in immediate sensations,” while Russia was such a tabula rasa - more distant, less known, so it was easier to be deceived by it. Although, on the other hand, both Russian publicists and Frenchmen married to Russian ladies had a hand in creating the “Russian mirage” (the phenomenon of Russian wives as a “culture-forming factor” already existed then). But even if something was invented by the Russians, the main thing is that the French were in demand at that moment.

It turns out that the domestic idea about some special messianic path that Russia will show to the world corresponded with expectations in Europe itself?

Yes. Only the French legitimists of the 1830s looked for this messianic path not in the future, but in the past. On Russia, like on a mannequin, they put on the concept of a patriarchal and paternalistic monarchy, where everyone submits to the sovereign, like children to their father, like believers in God - not with mental pain, not by force, but of their own free will. If you believe these French publicists, it turned out that in Russia the relations between landowners and peasants and between the emperor and his subjects are the same as the relations in a good family. And there is no need for any parliamentary noise; harmony is established by itself. I’m exaggerating somewhat now, but they actually wrote about this in France, and wrote a lot. Moreover, there is a book, and a very widely known book, which was born precisely from the collision of these “mirage” ideas about Russia with reality. This is "Russia in 1839" by the Marquise de Custine, published in 1843. Custine was a legitimist and a reader of the legitimist press; he was traveling to Russia to see with his own eyes that patriarchal utopia, that ideal order that he knew about from these newspapers. And I saw the wrong side of this order, the violence that ensures it, and returned from Russia as a supporter of that very constitutional monarchy, which I was very skeptical about before the trip. And his book, which was also very passionate and very talentedly written, drew a line under the existence of the legitimist mirage.

So, didn’t the French come up with any more “Russian mirages”?

No, and later there were wonderfully interesting episodes.

Then, in late XIX century, Melchior de Vogüe invented the “Russian soul”. Many here and in France do not know that the notorious idea of ​​the “Russian soul” is also a construct, deliberately invented by the diplomat Viscount de Vogüe, who visited Russia and knew it; he also had a Russian wife, the Empress’s maid of honor. He, a devout Catholic, terribly disliked the French naturalism of the end of the century, with its mundaneness and lack of spirituality, when only earthly things were described and the heavenly things were completely forgotten. And so he began to look for a kind of antidote to this in Russia, in a Russian novel, about which he wrote a whole book (it was published in 1886). Although it’s not that he was completely mistaken about Russia. He has a wonderful argument about the Russian soul - that, they say, it is like a soup, where there is everything: fish, and vegetables, and grass, and beer, and sour cream, and mustard (this, apparently, was about okroshka). performances, although this soup is more like Jerome’s Irish stew) - everything is in this soup, both tasty things and disgusting ones, and you never know what you’ll catch from there. Exactly the same, says Vogüe, is the Russian soul. This is a cauldron in which a variety of ingredients are mixed: sadness, madness, heroism, weakness, mysticism, sanity - and you can get out of it anything you want, even something you don’t expect at all; if only you knew, exclaims Vogüe, how low this soul can fall and how high it can rise! And how she is thrown from side to side. Amazing description, in my opinion. Vogüe realized that the Russian soul has everything, but deliberately exaggerated its spiritualistic side. With the help of the Russian novel, he wanted to present an example of spirituality to the French, who, in his opinion, had lost this spirituality. That is, again the Frenchman was looking in Russia for what he lacked at home, and this missing part was based on reality, and partly it was a “mirage”, a design, a construction made from improvised means. And I think the fact that the French still hold Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in high esteem is a consequence of the inoculation put into the culture by Melchior Vogüe. I myself have met more than once French people, and not necessarily philologists, whom you ask why they began to learn Russian, and they answer that it was solely because they read it - in translation! - Dostoevsky (or Tolstoy).

This is about the myths and mirages that the French made up about us. Did this phenomenon also take place on the Russian side in relation to the French?

Different Russians saw different France: for some it was a source of literary novelties, for others - political ideas and events, for others - new fashionable styles of caps. This is common knowledge. But this topic also has angles, known places less and something that is called even touching. This is due to the role of diplomats. In that era, one of the immediate responsibilities of diplomats and ambassadors (in addition to settling relations, etc.) was to ensure that in detail describe your conversations with the emperor and the minister of foreign affairs. But the main thing was with the emperor, since it was clear that in Russia all politics depended on him. I think that they quite accurately conveyed not only the meaning of his speeches, but even, so to speak, mental constructs. And here is a charming episode from 1834. Rumors reached St. Petersburg about the resignation of the French Minister of Foreign Affairs. Nikolai Pavlovich became agitated: relations were established with this minister, his policy suited Russia, why was he being removed and what would happen now? The ambassador explains to him: they say, government structure In France, if parliament does not support a particular measure proposed by a minister, the minister has to leave, but this does not mean anything, the policy will remain the same, because it is not about the person, but about the system. Nikolai incredulously replies that this is how it is, but we know that the main thing is in the person and in personal contacts with him. Because in Russia everything depends on specific people, and the very idea that politics may not change because another person comes seems rather wild to the Russian sovereign. And for a long time the ambassador explained to the emperor how the parliamentary system works. It turns out that communication with the French diplomat was a school of parliamentarism for the Russian Tsar.

But the motive for the Russian threat, the danger emanating from Russia, also existed?

Certainly. By the way, this motive had very specific grounds, because there were Cossacks in Paris in 1814 and in 1815, after the Hundred Days.

Why did they talk about the Russian threat, and not the Prussian or English one? In fact, we simply know more about the “Russian threat” than about, say, French-English or Franco-German relations and how hatred towards the British or Germans periodically intensified in France. And yet, in 1814 or 1815, for the French, the Prussians or the British were “theirs,” and when the Cossacks appeared, it was already exotic, and a scary exotic at that. In addition, geopolitical concepts were superimposed on this perception: once barbarians came to Rome from the north, and since historical thinking often works by analogy, Russians were now assigned to the role of barbarians and the idea of ​​a Russian threat arose. But in the same way, we had the idea of ​​a French threat, and not only at the level of popular consciousness after the War of 1812. The French were afraid that their country would be filled with hordes of Russian barbarians, and the Russian sovereigns, since the revolution of 1789, were afraid of the revolutionary infection, and as soon as another revolution took place in France, they recalled all their subjects from Paris home.

We talked about the French royalist press. Is the press democratic?

There everything is the other way around, instead of the ideal Russia there is an empire of evil, an empire of the whip. An absolutely despotic, barbaric state, and the main barbarian is the emperor: he is a strangler, a bloody murderer. This is what French Republican journalists wrote; Naturally, the Polish emigrants wrote the same way, publishing their press in Paris in French and Polish. By the way, there was no less rhetorical “pumping” in these articles, just not positive, but negative, than in legitimist utopias. It’s just that now it’s more common to read it, because the denunciations of autocracy from school textbooks of the Soviet era are in approximately the same style. By the way, when re-reading the most fiery fragments of Herzen’s Past and Thoughts, you find there approximately the same philippics as in the republican French newspapers, only Herzen did it more talentedly.

Did Herzen read these newspapers?

Yes, I think when I wrote “The Past and Thoughts,” I certainly read it. If not these specific newspapers of the 30s and 40s, then some later ones, similar to them.

You have a book about Russian-French relations, subtitled “Diplomats, Writers, Spies.” We touched on the first two categories, now let's talk about spies. First question: are these the three lines along which the main contacts really took place, or are these your personal scientific preferences? And who were the spies in that era? At that time, industrial espionage did not yet exist, and military espionage was not at all what we understand. What were the spies doing then, what were they supposed to find out?

When I put the word “spy” in the subtitle, it was some kind of provocation, I understood that they expected something sublime from me, about Pushkin, but not spies. By the way, those who were called “spies” in the 10th century would now probably be called “agents of influence.” And I don’t think that many of these people themselves would call themselves spies, the same Yakov Nikolaevich Tolstoy, who lived in Paris for many years formally as an envoy of the Ministry of Education, but in fact as an agent of the Third Section, or a certain Durand, who managed to be simultaneously an agent of three states - Russia, Austria and France. But they did not think of themselves as spies, but had more flattering definitions for themselves. Journalists, publicists, observers, so to speak. What did you want to know? Well, for example, in 1834, a certain Colonel La Rue, on behalf of the French ambassador Maison, traveled around Russia and compiled seven reports about different areas- about agriculture, the state of the army, etc. Why was this necessary? Yes, just in case. Louis-Philippe did not want to fight at all; it was not for nothing that he was nicknamed “Napoleon of Peace,” but it was considered useful to know how things were going with his “neighbors.” In this spy-like way, statistics of a foreign country were compiled (in the ancient sense of the word statistics - “the science of the strength and wealth of a state, its state in at this time"). And besides, such diplomats-observers-spys were also home-grown sociologists. Diplomats, in addition to regular reports on conversations with the emperor or the minister of foreign affairs about current events, from time to time had to draw up separate reports on the state of public opinion. And this very La Rue’s latest report is precisely dedicated to public opinion - and, by the way, completely opposite to those idyllic ideas about Russian autocracy that were propagated by monarchist French newspapers. La Rue convinces his bosses that the monarchy in Russia will collapse literally tomorrow, the emperor has no credibility at all, he is terribly afraid of the nobility and in every possible way curries favor with them. La Rue served the July Monarchy, and he wanted to prove that the opposition legitimists were in vain setting up Russia with its supposedly ideal order to Louis Philippe, and so he builds his own image of Russia, which is exactly that; Look, it will fall apart. It’s funny that later, already at Second Empire, this La Rue himself became a faithful servant of a completely authoritarian regime. In France in the 10th century political regimes changed so often that the concept of “weather vane” was even invented to designate people who easily change their beliefs. Even the Dictionary of Weathervanes was published in 1815...

Generally speaking, how effective were Russian “agents of influence” in France? Did they have any influence on public opinion? And who were they targeting?

Well, for example, why did the above-mentioned Yakov Nikolaevich Tolstoy sit in Paris? To monitor the French press, find anti-Russian articles and respond to them, that is, refute them. Moreover, he refuted them not on his own behalf, but on behalf of the French, who were “in his pay.” And he published these notes in French newspapers, which were also “on the payroll” of Russian state. Because, he reasoned, why write well about Russia in the Russian name, but in the French name it will look more convincing.

Although the Russian foreign policy department had two concepts. Foreign Minister Nesselrode believed that there was no need to answer, saying that the dog barks, but the caravan moves on. It’s better not to react at all, and the attacks will be forgotten by themselves. And the chief of gendarmes, Benckendorff, on the contrary, believed that if some kind of “anti-Russian pimple” had arisen in the French press, it could not be left unanswered. Tolstoy dealt with these answers.

That is, it was “constructing a positive image of Russia in the international press”?

Yes, sure. And the creation, for example, of that legitimist “mirage” that I spoke about above was important element this design. And of course, this all influenced public consciousness. But for real knowledge of Russia, it seems to me, it was important not only this, but also communication with the Russians who came to Paris (who, by the way, after the July Revolution, in the 30-40s, Russian authorities they were released to Paris very reluctantly; the number of people receiving permission to travel to France was only a few dozen per year). Of course, not all Russians who came were like Alexander Ivanovich Turgenev, who delivered new products not only to Russian friends French literature, and he told the French about new Russian products, but he also informed the French about events in their own literature that they did not know about. Turgenev was a unique person. But all the same, it seems to me that they had contacts with the Russians in Paris great value, because they reminded that Russian nobles are the same secular people, they are no different from the French. I think then - as, by the way, now - it was much more important to show not that Russia is a superpower, the attributes of which are power and threat, but that “people like us” live in Russia (at least in regarding educated society). And in this sense, it seems to me, two little-known and perhaps not very aesthetically perfect novels by Paul de Julvécourt are very important. There was a Frenchman, also married to a Russian, a translator of Russian poetry (he published a collection called “Balalaika”), who had a hand in creating this very conservative, monarchist mirage. So, he published two novels, in 1842 and 1843, “Russians in Paris” and “Moscow Saint-Germain Faubourg”. In general, nothing special - the plot devices of the literature that Vyazemsky called the “living rooms” of the novel are applied not to the French, but to the Russians, and it turns out very interesting: the Russians are no worse and no better than the French.

That is, we can say that in the relations between the two countries two different trends are constantly at work: one is to find in your neighbor something that you don’t have at home, but that you would really like to have. And the other is to make sure that, in general, approximately the same people live behind the cordon.

Every nation has features that seem strange to representatives of other nations. This could be behavior, customs, culinary preferences. The French could not avoid misunderstanding from their neighbors. So, what do they call the French?

Features of national character

The word "French" comes from the name of the Frankish tribe. They conquered in the 5th century. the lands of the Celtic tribes, called Gauls by the Romans. Gallic rooster(the generic sign of the Gauls) is still an unofficial symbol of France. The French are confident that they inherited such qualities as courage and cheerfulness from the Gauls.

Residents of other countries associate the French with the rooster based on the following characteristics: cockiness, frivolity, arrogance. For the Spaniards, the French, considered arrogant impudents, look like hairy-legged pigeons - gabachos, which is slang for “Frenchies”.

Echoes of war

The British gave the largest number of nicknames to the French. The two countries have been at war with each other for too long (remember the Hundred Years' War), and mutual distrust between the inhabitants has persisted to this day.

Apparently from the time of hostilities French phrase“I give up” – Je me rends transformed into English into the similar-sounding proper name Jimmy Round, meaning “French”. A French girl is sometimes called an ou-la-la girl (o-la-la girl) because of the French habit of often exclaiming “Oo-la-la!”

Tell me what you eat...

The French get the most due to their peculiarities national cuisine. There is a version that the inhabitants of France had to use amphibians for food not because of a good life, but during the Hundred Years War due to a lack of food. Then they started eating snails and onion soup.

Because of these culinary delights, the English call the French froggies or frogeaters. And the area of ​​London with French shops was nicknamed Frog Valley. The French and Germans are called toad-eaters.

But the Serbs show originality, calling the Italians “jabar” (paddling pool).

Knowing what the French are called, let's not blindly follow stereotypes. After all, every nation has a lot of positive qualities.