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The Pobedonostsev Family

CONSTANTINE PETROVICH POBEDONOSTSEV was born on May 21, 1827, on Bread Lane, a quiet old street in the Arbat section of Moscow, within easy walking distance of the university, the Kremlin, and the main centers of life and activity of the capital of old Russia. The comfortable old house in which he was born was in a section then inhabited largely by bureaucrats, merchants, and a small group of professors and writers. It had been the family residence since 1816 and was still the family’s property when Pobedonostsev died in 1907. Close to the parish church, Simeon Stolpnik, and surrounded by a number of churches, the home on Bread Lane remained the central focus of his life, just as the church bells with which he became familiar as a youngster continued to symbolize Moscow and Russian civilization for him.

Information concerning his mother is rather scanty. She came from an old service nobility family named Levashov near Kostroma, and she was apparently a woman of inconsequential education, deep religious sentiment, and considerable courage and character. Born in 1780 and married early in the nineteenth century to a man fifteen years her elder, she remained the spiritual center of the family throughout her long life. It is difficult to estimate the influence she had on her youngest son, but she clearly did help impress strong religious feelings upon all of her children. She survived her husband by almost a quarter of a century. During most of that period, her youngest son, who married only a year before her death in 1867, lived with her on Bread Lane. Until the end of his life, forty years later, he tried to come to Moscow from St. Petersburg each September to visit her grave on the anniversary of her death, although he never mentioned the anniversary of the death of his father, who died in the same month in 1843.¹

Constantine Petrovich Pobedonostsev was remarkably reticent about his father, as he was about all the members of his family. Even so, the information available concerning Professor Peter V. Pobedonostsev is surprisingly abundant when one considers that he was an undistinguished member of the Moscow University faculty and an insignificant bureaucrat in the first third of the nineteenth century. However, Peter V. Pobedonostsev was himself an author, the fugitive journals he edited in the last years of the eighteenth century and the first three decades of the nineteenth century have survived, and some of his colleagues and students have also provided data about him.

Professor Pobedonostsev’s father was a Russian Orthodox priest in a small village just northeast of Moscow. We have no knowledge concerning him, except that he did move briefly to Moscow from the countryside before his son was born on September 22, 1771, and that he allowed or encouraged his son to obtain an education. Similarly, we have no data concerning Pobedonostsev’s grandmother, except that she was a strong and courageous woman who remained in Moscow in 1812 in an effort to preserve her son’s home and modest library, while he and his wife and children fled to Kostroma.

Peter V. Pobedonostsev was educated for the Orthodox priesthood in Zaikonospasskaia Academy on Nikolskii Street near Red Square and the Kremlin in Moscow. After completing his training for the priesthood in 1796, he was allowed to leave that calling to become a teacher. As a student, he had become especially proficient in Latin, which he loved, and in Greek, but his first teaching post, in 1797, involved instruction in French and in rhetoric at the Moscow University gymnasium or high school. In the fall of 1797, he received the equivalent of an M.A. degree in Philosophy and Literature from Moscow University, and in 1805 he transferred to Alexandrovskii Institute, where he taught Russian literature to young ladies of good family until 1831. Just before the French invasion of Russia in 1812, he became an assistant to Professor A. F. Merzliakov at Moscow University, which he considered an enormous advance and opportunity, even though Moscow University was not then a distinguished institution. Indeed, the level of instruction was low by contemporary European standards, and the faculty in 1812 numbered only twenty-five, of whom ten were Germans. In 1814, Peter V. Pobedonostsev joined the faculty of Moscow University as a lecturer in rhetoric and in Russian literature, where he emphasized “purity of speech and strict observation of the rules of grammar.” He became an extraordinary, or associate, professor in 1826 and retired in 1835. He died September 30, 1843, in Moscow.²

Peter V. Pobedonostsev and his wife had eleven children, at least eight of whom survived into adult life. The demands of this family led the energetic professor to supplement his income from his two teaching positions by work as a translator and editor, censor, and tutor. He was a prolific translator and publicist, from the time of his graduation from the Academy in 1796 until he retired in 1835. He served as a member of the Censor Committee from 1811 until 1827, a function which significantly increased his ability to support his family and which also reflects a clear attitude toward the role of the state in society. Finally, he tutored the sons of wealthy Moscow nobles and merchants, which established profitable relations and even friendships for him and for his children. One of his charges became the celebrated historical novelist, Lazhechnikov, who later introduced one of his sons, Sergei, to publishers and who took a fatherly interest in Constantine Pobedonostsev when he was in the School of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg after the professor died. This acquaintance proved to be stimulating for Constantine, who was able to repay the novelist in his declining years.

Perhaps even more important, Professor Pobedonostsev’s relations with the parents of his students helped obtain opportunities for higher education and for appointments in significant offices or regiments for his energetic sons and daughters. One of his elder daughters, Barbara, was able to attend a select school for young ladies in Moscow, and Constantine became a student in the School of Jurisprudence from 1841 to 1846 because of their father’s influence. Similarly, his son Sergei, who was born in 1816, joined the First Cadet Corps and received a splendid appointment in an engineering battalion in Warsaw because of his father’s diligence in obtaining assistance for his children from the grandees he came to know. Sergei and his sister Maria were also aided in publishing articles and stories in the 1840’s in the Slavophil journal, Moskvitianin (The Muscovite), by Professor Pobedonostsev’s friendship with the journal’s editor, Michael Pogodin, who had been a student of Professor Pobedonostsev and became a colleague and friend.³

Professor Pobedonostsev had an especially powerful interest in Russian literature and a strong conviction that knowledge of it should be increased. Thus, while his translations and editing helped increase Russian knowledge of the Greek and Roman classics and the literature of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, he was also one of the founders of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature, established at Moscow University in 1811 “to spread abroad information on the rules and forms of good literature and to give to the public selections of Russian prose and poetry, chosen and read first in the Society’s meetings.’’ His service as librarian of this organization, which ultimately gave its book collection to the Moscow University Library, reflects his love of books and of learning. He participated in the Society’s meetings by preparing reports and selecting readings on Russian patriotism and on important eighteenth-century Russian poets, novelists, and dramatists, and by editing some of the Society’s publications. The Society was most active in the decade following the Napoleonic wars. It went into eclipse after the accession of Nicholas I, perhaps because the emperor was somewhat critical of it, and it died in 1836. However, it was revived in 1858 by Khomiakov, Constantine Aksakov, Pogodin, Tiutchev, and other Slavophils, serving them in the 1860’s and 1870’s as a prominent and effective instrument. Indeed, the Society was a bridge linking Russian patriotism of the early nineteenth century with the Slavophils and with the panslav movement.⁴

Peter V. Pobedonostsev was probably best known among his contemporaries as an editor and translator. As a young man, presumably in the seminary, he acquired the ability to read Old Church Slavonic, Greek, Latin, German, French, and English. His first publication, Plody melankholii (Fruits of Melancholy) appeared in Moscow in 1796, when he was only twenty-five years old and in his final year at the Zaikonospasskaia Academy. Within the following thirty-five years, he translated, edited, and published at least ten more anthologies of foreign works, some of them two or three volumes in size. In addition, he served as editor or associate editor of six short-lived bimonthly or weekly journals designed to make available to Muscovites translated selections from foreign literature or poems, tales, and moral exhortations written originally in Russian. Only one of the anthologies was published in a second printing, and the most successful journal survived for only thirty-four months. Indeed, one of the journals, Detskii vestnik (Children’s Messenger), lasted less than a year in 1813.⁵

Primitive journals and anthologies of the kind which Professor Pobedonostsev produced and distributed for the citizens of Moscow began to appear in Russia in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and marked an early stage of Russian journalism and of the effort to introduce foreign literature to a wider public than the nobility who had received a foreign education. Translation and publication of this literature did enable the young father, just a few years removed from the stagnant life of a sleepy Russian village, to supplement his income, to utilize his apparent energy and his ability to read several European languages, and to satisfy his compelling ambition to educate others. He worked under heavy handicaps, with little assistance from his academic colleagues, who tired quickly of the labors involved in translating and in finding purchasers. He was not a man of confident learning. His own library was pitifully small. He lacked access to an institutional library until he became a member of the faculty of Moscow University, and even that collection was far smaller than that of a small American college in the twentieth century. He could not afford to subscribe to any foreign journals or newspapers, and he had no friends or colleagues who obtained these publications regularly. His journals and anthologies, like others published at that time and even much later in Moscow and St. Petersburg by eminent publishers and editors, lacked financial backing and indeed were published on a hand-to-mouth basis. Most of those who contributed original pieces in Russian or who translated foreign works for publication were no doubt rewarded by the thrill of seeing their work in print and by complimentary copies. For most of the translations from the classics and from French, German, and English literature, the editor had to rely upon materials he had read while a student or had obtained on an unsystematic basis, upon translations submitted by readers, and upon selected pieces which he found in earlier journals and anthologies. As one progresses chronologically through these tomes, one is increasingly impressed by the gradual deterioration in quality and by the rising percentage of selections made from contemporary French newspapers and popular journals.

These publications are unimportant historically, although they do represent a part of the Russian effort of that period to raise the national cultural level and to absorb some of the new humanistic learning from Europe. Indeed, Professor Pobedonostsev exposed himself to jealous criticism and was ridiculed for the poverty of his selections and the fleeting character of his enterprises. However, these publications provide us substantial knowledge of him, his interests, his ideas, and his qualities. They are especially valuable because they constitute reliable information concerning the atmosphere in which Constantine P. Pobedonostsev was raised, particularly because Constantine had some of the same instincts as a publicist as his father. At several stages of his long and busy life, particularly during the last twenty years, when he had the press of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church at his command, Constantine P. Pobedonostsev devoted a great deal of energy and attention to work as a publicist.⁶

The more signal characteristic of Professor Pobedonostsev’s work as a publicist was his burning interest in education and in spiritual and moral improvement. Indeed, the translated titles of the journals which he edited or helped to edit reveal his powerful concern in learning and in enlightenment: The New Science of Enjoying Life, True and False Happiness, A Treasury of Useful Entertainment, or Medicine for Doctoring People Subject to Grief and Boredom, Selected Moral Tales Useful for Producing a Feeling of Moral Beauty in the Heart, and Directing the Mind and Heart to Truth and Virtue.

A second characteristic was a deep and genuine interest in the classics and in eighteenth-century European literature, especially that of France. Professor Pobedonostsev taught rhetoric and Russian literature at Moscow University, and his journals did include substantial selections from contemporary Russian writing, but the quality of the Russian writing chosen was not high and the journals consistently emphasized foreign literature. Moreover, quite a high percentage of the Russian work published was not contemporary, but was taken from the works of Lomonosov and his contemporaries or consisted of memoir material or letters concerning great Russian rulers or military heroes.

Pobedonostsev’s publications also included numerous snippets from Cicero, Livy, Virgil, Sallust, Plutarch, Seneca, Quintilian, Horace, Pliny, and Homer, in about the same proportion as in an eighteenth-century journal in France or England. Moreover, Pobedonostsev included selections from English authors, particularly Gray, Pope, and Sterne, and from Germans, such as Kleist, Lessing, and Uz.

However, the main source for his selections was the body of French literature, particularly the great essayist Montaigne, the seventeenth-century moralists La Bruyère and La Fontaine, and the leading representatives of the Enlightenment, Diderot, Voltaire, and Rousseau. The Enlightenment was the center of attraction, both before and after the French invasion of 1812. In fact, some critics noted that Professor Pobedonostsev devoted a higher percentage of his journals to the Enlightenment than had earlier such ventures, which had given priority and emphasis to eighteenth-century English prose. It is apparent that the French writings selected emphasized more the sentiment of the eighteenth century than its philosophy or politics. Reading these anthologies today, in an age of intense nationalism and of national and ideological conflict, provides a measure of some of the changes which have occurred since the early years of the nineteenth century, when French literature was circulated in Russia at a time of bitter conflict with France.

While this deeply religious and conservative teacher and member of the Censor Committee was printing extracts from the writings of some of those who helped prepare for the French Revolution but which he obviously hoped would improve morality and spread learning in Russia, he also emphasized fervent patriotism, respect for Russia’s rulers and leaders, and absolutely unquestioning acceptance of the status quo. Professor Pobedonostsev respected and even venerated Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Alexander I, and Nicholas I. Indeed, there is no evidence in all of his public and private materials that he ever questioned the world in which he lived. His acceptance of the institutions by which he was ruled and his faith in Russia have the unthinking character often ascribed, probably incorrectly, to medieval peasants, although they also remind one of the rudderless robot who is the ideal servant of today’s totalitarian state.

Peter V. Pobedonostsev’s patriotism bears a pre-nationalistic flavor. He had a great admiration for Peter the Great and his successors as Russian rulers, and he lauded Russian national customs and cultural achievements. However, he was just as impressed by foreign leaders and institutions. There is no evidence in his publications of animosity toward other peoples, either groups living within the empire toward whom many Russians traditionally have expressed suspicion or animosity, such as the Poles and Jews, or toward foreigners, such as the Germans or French. The Pobedonostsev family always participated in the ceremonies commemorating 1812 in the Kremlin, but the invasion did not lead Professor Pobedonostsev to make any changes in his literary values, even though his library was burned in the Moscow fire and he and his family had to flee from the city. In fact, he seemed unaware of the existence of national or religious minorities in Russia, which no doubt reflects the small, even parochial, Russian world in which he lived.⁷

His children represented a different generation, both in their awareness of the different groups of peoples who populated the empire and in their attitudes toward some of these peoples. Sergei, one of his older sons, lived briefly in Warsaw, knew Polish, was well informed about Polish literature and the Polish theater, and had a great affection for the Poles, but he was strongly antisemitic. His youngest son, as this essay will demonstrate, had a deep dislike for both the Poles and the Jews and was suspicious of the Baltic Germans, the Ukrainians, and other important minority groups, especially those who lived on the frontiers of the empire.⁸

Expanding the analysis of Professor Pobedonostsev from the journals he edited to his own writings, his teaching at Moscow University, and the other recorded data we possess confirms these conclusions and provides additional insight into his qualities and beliefs and into the atmosphere in which his children were raised. One of his principal characteristics was a belief in progress. He assumed that the community in which he lived and the outer European world about which he read were almost inevitably going to improve materially, but above all morally, as knowledge became more widespread and as more men and women became acquainted with the highest human ideals and the finest expressions of those great goals. This faith in steady cultural improvement was imprecise. Indeed, Professor Pobedonostsev never referred to serfdom or suggested the desirability of reducing its burdens or of abolishing it. Although he was an educator and publicist with a powerful interest in raising the cultural level of his community, he did not write about the expansion of public or private education, the role of Moscow University in Russian intellectual life, or the function of the Russian Orthodox Church. He simply did not think in this way. Indeed, he was fundamentally an unthinking and uncritical man who concentrated on the concrete problem directly before him.

Nevertheless, Professor Pobedonostsev’s energies were devoted almost entirely to what he considered the intellectual and moral advancement of the peoples among whom he lived—the only ones of whom he thought—and his judgments of institutions and persons reflected this concern. One indication of this was his selfless generosity toward his students. Another was his labor on behalf of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature. The journals and anthologies he translated and published constitute even more convincing demonstrations; they are educational enterprises, filled with moralizing tales, studded with edifying quotations from the classics and the great writers of the enlightened century, and directed in general toward the good and the beautiful, usually with a strongly sentimental touch.

Peter V. Pobedonostsev’s interest in the edification of his students and readers is most noteworthy in his essays on Russian writers and in his comments concerning Russian rulers. Writing that “living and acting for the benefit of our contemporaries and descendants is the most sacred of all laws,” he praised Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Alexander I, not for their military victories or their additions to state power and territory, but for the leadership they provided toward spreading science, perfecting the Russian language, promoting learning, encouraging love of “the true and the good,” and developing the civic virtues.⁹

Professor Pobedonostsev’s accolades for Russian writers also reflect his ambition to elevate learning and good taste in Russia. He praised Lomonosov and Derzhavin as “the Demosthenes and Cicero, the Pindar and Horace of Russia” because of their contributions to advancing knowledge and improving the Russian language. In an essay devoted to his contemporary, Peter Alekseevich Plavilshchikov, a celebrated actor and dramatist, he lauded his patriotism, his devotion to instruction, and his generosity, frankness, and high spiritual qualities. He celebrated “the Russian Homer, . . . the unforgettable Kheraskov,” for the devotion with which he learned foreign languages and practiced his craft, and for the “pure morality” of his writings.¹⁰

Professor Pobedonostsev was by no means an outstanding scholar or publicist, although his pride in his achievement in rising from lowly origins is clearly justified. His journals were not of high quality, his own writing was sentimental and uncritical, and even his own student, Pogodin, triumphed over him in their race for a coveted professorship in Moscow University. Moreover, while he was able to translate five languages, there is some evidence he could speak none of them. He never travelled abroad; indeed, it appears that he did not visit St. Petersburg, Kiev, or Warsaw. His world was purely Muscovite, in fact limited to the city of Moscow, and his knowledge of the rest of Russia was extremely limited.

Moreover, his was a world in which one learned only from reading and the theater. The emphasis throughout his work on reading and on learning via the printed page was one of the characteristics he passed to his son. His range of interests as an omnivorous reader was extraordinary, particularly for that period, from the classics and the patristic writings through Orthodox theology to the literature of France, Germany, England, and Russia. However, his intellectual horizons were restricted by his unquestioning endorsement of what he saw and read and by the absence of any concern with or understanding of general or abstract ideas. His articles are a curious combination of factual data and sentimentalism, with the qualities of an after-dinner speech honoring a distinguished friend. Moreover, while the leading representatives of the Enlightenment constituted one of the staples of his journals and anthologies, the selections are insignificant and anecdotal, such as personal letters from Voltaire to Catherine, descriptions of incidents involving the great men and women of that era, and biographical data. Even the most careful reader of these collections would have learned nothing from them concerning Rousseau’s political philosophy, Diderot’s attitude toward religion, or Voltaire’s views of the Catholic Church. In addition, Professor Pobedonostsev was completely unaffected by the wave of German philosophy which swept over educated Russia after the Napoleonic wars, just as his two most eminent sons were unaffected by the controversy in the I840’s between the Westerners and the Slavophils concerning the nature of Russia and its historical destiny.

Peter V. Pobedonostsev’s personal qualities naturally contributed to creating the values and the atmosphere of the household he directed on Bread Lane in Moscow. First of all, he was patriarchal in his relations with his wife, his children, and his students. His children have left remarkably little direct information concerning their life at home, but some of his students who later became eminent have written most valuable comments about their instructor. Belinsky, for example, could not endure his lectures, which he thought dull and florid, and he was both discourteous and a prankster in Pobedonostsev’s class. Constantine Aksakov was annoyed by his oldfashioned ways and archaic language, and Goncharov considered him “the patriarch of the faculty” and “the man of the old century.” During his last years at the university in particular, Professor Pobedonostsev was the target for student tricks and often the butt of their jokes.¹¹

The students were especially annoyed by Professor Pobedonostsev’s obsession with grammatical rules, by his reverence for Lomonosov, and by his dull lectures and poetry readings. Some asserted that he was using the same notes when he retired in 1835 which he had read when he began to teach at Moscow University in 1814. Years later, the father of the eminent jurist, Anatole F. Koni, entertained his children with tales of his student life in Moscow, regaling his listeners with the gestures of Professor Pobedonostsev as he recited the opening lines of a poem, “From behind the columns a clear moon drank, looking down into the water.”¹²

Professor Pobedonostsev was quite likely just as grim and determined a supporter of hard work and the search for truth and beauty at home as in the lecture hall. In fact, in his faithful commitment to precise rules and to the observance of established little habits, he must have been the very model of the neat, diligent, and earnest plodder. His record is so impressive in quantity that he cannot have been idle or relaxed. Moreover, it is difficult to believe that he would have encouraged or even tolerated inaction or diversion. His own performance and the known habits of his children suggest that the Pobedonostsev household had the characteristics generally associated with the Puritan and Victorian eras in England: austerity, prudishness, grimness, and fastidiousness. His devotion to his work was such that in March, 1813, while Moscow was in ruin and in chaos, he worried about his possible failure to meet a publication deadline.¹³

Constantine P. Pobedonostsev, in his philosophy, placed heavy emphasis upon the family as a peculiarly significant social institution in all stable societies. In middle age, as a specialist on Russian civil law, he necessarily devoted much attention to the family and to the legal issues and principles surrounding it. Thus, the second volume of his Kurs grazhdanskago prava (Course on Civil Law) concentrates almost entirely upon the family and problems related to it. Constantine P. Pobedonostsev also translated the principal works of two of the outstanding western European advocates of the family as the central social institution, the Frenchman Frederick Le Play and the German Heinrich Thiersch. In the early 1890’s, he wrote an essay describing the family farm, or homestead, as the solution to Russia’s political and economic problems, and in the last decade of his life, the family more and more appeared to him as the institution which could save Russia. Thus, he wrote that the child from birth was weak and evil, that the parental power was “the only power established by God in the Decalogue,” and that God “in entrusting the child to his parents gave to them the choice of raising either a dutiful or a parasitic and destructive child.” He saw the family as “the foundation of the State,” “the eternal element of prosperous societies, and the primary instrument for educating and controlling man.”¹⁴

Constantine P. Pobedonostsev’s reliance upon the family as the institution which assured stability in a society was clearly central, and it is evident that his parents and the life of their family exerted a profound influence upon his thought during his formative years. Some of the interests, habits,qualities,and values of Peter V. Pobedonostsev appear later among all of his children, particularly the two sons of whom we have the most complete knowledge. In the mountain of data available on the large and literate Pobedonostsev family, there is no evidence of any affection or warmth. The hundreds and even thousands of letters of Constantine P. Pobedonostsev which have survived make almost no reference to his father, even though— perhaps because—Professor Pobedonostsev educated his youngest son at home until he was fourteen years old, when he was sent to the School of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg. Even the diary which the young lad kept while in school in St. Petersburg has no reference to any member of his family. In all the materials available concerning the life and thought of Constantine P. Pobedonostsev, we learn of his mother only from one or two minor comments in a spiritual diary he kept in the late 1850’s and the early 1860’s, which was published in 1894, and in a letter to his close friend, Anna Tiutchev, the wife of Ivan Aksakov, in September, 1867, telling of her death. Moreover, the voluminous Pobedonostsev papers provide a total of only five references to Constantine P. Pobedonostsev’s sisters, although two or three lived to be more than seventy years of age. Thus, Pobedonostsev much resembles Marshal Pétain, who was also heavily influenced by Le Play, who came from a large family which he never mentioned later in life, who married relatively late in life and had no children, and who placed the family at the center of his political and social philosophy.¹⁵

Family friends are just as absent. Sergei and Constantine P. Pobedonostsev both retained a slight connection with the historical novelist Lazhechnikov, who had been a student of Professor Pobedonostsev and whose father had helped finance one of the professor’s journals. Both men on occasion visited or corresponded with Professor Michael Pogodin, the panslav historian who had been a student and later a colleague of Professor Pobedonostsev at Moscow University and who lived near Bread Lane. However, these relationships were by no means close or lasting, and the Pobedonostsev household appears to have isolated itself from any neighbors or close friends.¹⁶

Thus, one must conclude that Constantine P. Pobedonostsev was a lonely boy in a severe and gloomy home, quite unlike the relaxed and open mansions of the landed nobility of Russian history and of the Russian novel. Indeed, in Constantine P. Pobedonostsev’s writing the home on Bread Lane itself receives less attention than does his old parish church, Simeon Stolpnik. The impersonal, generally friendless life which he led is surely related to the kind of home in which he was raised and educated.

Peter V. Pobedonostsev had eleven children, of whom Constantine was the youngest son. We have information concerning seven of the other ten children and can assume that some of the other three died in infancy or while young. Concerning Nicholas Pobedonostsev, we know only that he was alive in Moscow in 1847. The other six of whom we have any knowledge were all interested in writing and publishing, an extraordinary record even for the children of a university professor who translated and edited extensively. One son, Alexander, was a student of Russian literature at Moscow University, became a member of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature in March, 1829, presented a paper on Quintilian at that time, and died in June, 1890. Constantine Pobedonostsev’s only mention of either of these brothers is in an 1856 letter referring to the desperate illness of one of them.¹⁷

Four daughters demonstrated some interest in writing and publishing. Catherine, probably the oldest, who taught at the Ekaterinskii Institute, published an article on the Tartar conquest of Russia in the Russkii vestnik (Russian Herald) in 1819, eight years before her distinguished brother was born. She apparently died in Moscow in December, 1863, leaving two daughters, one of whom became insane in 1878. Another daughter, Olga, a blind spinster still alive in Moscow in 1890, but not living in the family home, published a letter from Lazhechnikov to her father in Russkaia starina (Russian Antiquity) in 1891.

A third daughter, Maria, contributed in the 1840’s to Pogodin’s Slavophil journal, Moskvitianin, and at the same time to the rival Westerner publication, Otechestvennyia zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland). She served as a French translator for Moskvitianin, her principal contribution being the translation of Rudolf Tepfer’s romantic and sentimental novel, Presbytère, published in the journal in 1852 and perhaps also as a book later in the same year. A fourth daughter, Barbara, was born in Moscow in 1810, was graduated from a girls’ school in 1828, contributed translations from French and English and at least one original article to the Damskii zhurnal (The Ladies’ Magazine) between 1830 and 1833, and was still alive and unmarried in 1880. Pobedonostsev in letters to his closest friend, Catherine Tiutchev, referred in 1878 and in 1881 to a sister in Tambov province; this was either Maria or another sister of whom this is our only information. From careful examination of all available evidence, it seems Pobedonostsev, his brothers, and his sisters together produced a total of only three children.

The most distinguished of Peter V. Pobedonostsev’s sons, except for Constantine, was Sergei, who was born in Moscow on November 8, 1816, and who before his death in 1850 had achieved some repute as a government official, particularly in Kazan, Novgorod, and St. Petersburg.¹⁸ Sergei received his primary education at home from his father, who then obtained an appointment for him in the First Cadet Corps. After serving in Moscow and in an engineering battalion in Poland, he retired from the army in 1842 and worked briefly in the special commission for Kazan under Governor Sergei P. Shipov, an old friend of his father’s under whom he had served in Warsaw in the army. He was transferred briefly to Novgorod and then to the Ministry of State Property in St. Petersburg. He retired in 1848 and died a bachelor in Moscow two years later, after suffering from poor health for several years. He read German, French, Italian, English, Czech, and Polish, and he could speak Polish and French. In the 1840’s, he was probably the most important Russian specialist on Polish literature. He translated a number of Polish novels, tales, and plays into Russian, published critical articles in the Russian press on Polish literature, especially drama, was a correspondent for several Polish newspapers, and translated one of Lazhechnikov’s novels into Polish. He had a strong interest in Russian history, hoping at one time to write a history of Russia’s military campaigns, and he was also an important supplier of ancient manuscripts and weapons to Pogodin and his Slavophil friends in Moscow.¹⁹

Sergei, like his father and his brother Constantine, was an energetic author, translator, and editor. He contributed consistently to the leading journals on both sides of the controversy between the Slavophils and the Westerners in the 1840’s, concerning whether Russia was a unique and superior society which should guard and maintain its special characteristics or whether western Europe was the norm of all societies and Russia should adopt Western ideas and institutions as rapidly as possible. Thus, between 1843 and 1848 he published six articles or stories in Otechestvennyia zapiski, which was edited and published between 1839 and 1858 by A. A. Kraevskii, who made it a popular and successful center for the views of the Westerners. All of Belinsky’s writings between 1839 and 1846 appeared in this journal. Herzen, Nekrasov, Granovskii, Dostoevsky, and Saltykov-Shchedrin were among the other prominent contributors. In the 1840’s in particular, Otechestvennyia zapiski was known as an organ of Utopian socialism, printing translations from the works of Thomas More, Cabet, Louis Blanc, and the Saint-Simon socialists, as well as from Hegel and Feuerbach.

Sergei also was close to Pogodin and to the Slavophil circle. Thus, in 1842 and 1843 he contributed eight articles or stories to Moskvitianin, which Pogodin edited from 1841 until 1856 and which reflected the views of the Slavophils. Moskvitianin was also an unofficial or informal representative of the point of view of the Minister of Education, Uvarov, whose formula of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality it defended. As if to prove his impartiality, Sergei also contributed to other journals, including Biblioteka dlia chteniia (A Reading Library), which had inferior contributors and no apparent political or philosophic position, and the Repertuar i Panteon russkago i vsekh inostrannykh teatrov (Repertoire and Pantheon of Russian and of All Foreign Theaters), formed in 1842 by the merger of two other theater journals, which avoided politics and which published Russian plays and critiques of the European theater for a very limited circle in St. Petersburg and Moscow.²⁰

Sergei P. Pobedonostsev’s writings are of three types or varieties: translations of and articles about Polish literature, particularly the theater; sentimental novels and short stories; and articles concerning the French theater and Paris, which he visited in 1847. The publications concerning Polish letters are remarkable for the thorough knowledge they reflect and their spirit of friendly objectivity. Moreover, several of Sergei’s novels have Polish settings and characters, and the Poles and Poland are always treated with respect and even affection. Thus, Constantine P. Pobedonostsev’s contempt for the Poles was not acquired from his brother Sergei or from his father, who never alluded to the Poles or Poland.²¹

Sergei’s interest and enthusiasm for things Polish once led him to commit several egregious errors for which Herzen roundly criticized him. In 1843, on the three hundredth anniversary of the death of Copernicus, a quarrel broke out between Germans and Poles, each claiming Copernicus as a son. Sergei, impressed by the Polish case, especially by a pamphlet by Professor Adrian Kryzhanovskii of Warsaw, wrote an essay in the September, 1843, issue of Moskvitianin summarizing the known facts and concluding, correctly, that Copernicus was “of the Polish nation.” However, Sergei drafted his articles carelessly, and, in his rhapsodic description of the abilities and achievements of Copernicus, gave the impression that he was a contemporary of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. He also placed Regensburg on the Rhine. Herzen in Otechestvennyia zapiski, the Westerner rival of Moskvitianin, identified these simple errors and then attacked Sergei as “ultra-Slavic” and as an opponent of the West who ignored “logic, chronology and even decency.”²²

Sergei’s novels and short tales, most of which were published in Otechestvennyia zapiski, were generally sentimental love stories providing a pleasant and attractive picture of Russian provincial town life. He often used quotations from Pushkin, Byron’s Don Juan, or Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as chapter headings, and his tales usually involved “star-crossed lovers,” the early death of a beautiful and loved bride, or the rescue of an old warrior by a young valiant, whose grandfather had been aided by the old man. The principal character in one typical novelette was a faithful family nurse, who had sheltered a child from her jealous stepmother and raised the youngster in love and security. When her lovely young charge’s fiancé was accused of theft, the old governess made her way to Moscow, discovered that the young man in fact had become a hero during a cholera epidemic, arranged the marriage of the young couple, and then-died, happy and alone, on her return from Mass one Sunday morning. Another tale had a Chekhovian touch, for it described the life and marriage of a hard-working scientist and bureaucrat, who ignored the flirtations and escapades of his beautiful wife, provided her jewelry and finery, and died alone while she danced at a party.²³

Professor Pobedonostsev himself taught several foreign languages to his children. Sergei’s interest in and facility with western European languages was probably no greater than that of his brothers and sisters, although he and Constantine were probably the only ones who could read Polish and Czech and Sergei alone could speak Polish. However, Sergei’s brief residence in Warsaw and his knowledge of Polish culture may have made his curiosity concerning western Europe greater than that of his brothers and sisters. In any case, he translated two articles about the French theater, and he was the first Pobedonostsev to travel to western Europe. He spent the summer of 1847 travelling along the Main and the Rhine, enjoyed several days in cities such as Cologne, Coblenz, and Brussels, and was especially impressed by Paris, where he remained several weeks. His notes on the size of the cities, the measurements of the cathedrals, and the costs of construction and of living remind one of his father, the precise and busy professor.²⁴

Thus, Constantine P. Pobedonostsev was born in a large Muscovite family of intellectuals, one which apparently lacked affection and warmth; as the youngest son in a home where there were no grandparents or other relatives and which few friends visited, he came to accept the rigid rules laid down by his father. Later in life, when he reminisced about his boyhood, the pleasures he remembered were morning church bells, religious music, and church services. In March, 1880, he wrote to Catherine Tiutchev:

O, sacred quiet! How distant you are now! How I remember Povarskii street, my dear native street with all its churches, all known to me from childhood. I so loved Lent in Moscow. Every morning in my walks, I went first of all to pray in our parish church, where there were morning services and all stood in blessed quiet. On Saturdays in Lent, I loved to go to your neighborhood to the Rzhevskaia church for Mass. There was an especially devout priest in that church, and I shall never forget those Saturday masses.²⁵

The Pobedonostsev family was as patriotic as it was devout, and Pobedonostsev grew up with profound respect and veneration for Russia’s rulers, institutions, and history, and with a deep faith in the justice and permanence of the world he saw and about which he read. At the same time, his Orthodox Muscovite realm was also one in which everyone, except probably his mother, read several foreign languages and in which the classics and west European literature held about the same status as the native Russian faiths. While the range of learning exhibited in the Pobedonostsev family is most impressive for the era of Nicholas I, however, information from the West was more swallowed than absorbed and understood. In particular, the Pobedonostsevs did not accept any of the political or social ideas which had influenced Europe significantly over the previous century, and their definition of European letters and intellectual life was quite shallow and primitive. B. H. Sumner’s perceptive comment on Peter the Great probably applies to the Pobedonostsev family in the first half of the nineteenth century as well as to the great emperor and to others in less developed countries attracted later by the immense achievements of the West:

He did not explore the springs and motives of this Western achievement; he did not seek to understand the workings of financial, political, or administrative institutions; and he had little or no conception of the slow and varied stages by which England or Holland had grown to be what they were. What never left his mind was the forest of masts on the watersides of Amsterdam and London, symbols of enriching trade reaching out to the Indies and all parts of the world; the clusters of busy towns, the creation of that industrial middle class, rich in invention, industry, and initiative, which his own country so much lacked.²⁶

Moreover, the Pobedonostsev family was one in which every member had a deep respect for the immortality conferred by the printed word. Just one generation removed from village life, the Pobedonostsevs clearly lacked the depth of learning, position, and sense of assurance of families such as the Adamses or the Trevelyans, but knowledge was admired and imitated, and continuous study, writing, and publishing were considered important achievements to which an educated man naturally devoted much of his life. Indeed, Professor Pobedonostsev assumed, as did his sons and daughters and most literate men and women of his generation, that Russia would continue to progress and that those who wrote and taught had an especially important role and responsibility in advancing the cultural level.