Abstracts
Science on Display in Eighteenth-Century Russia
The cultural and political history of eighteenth-century Russia has been greatly enriched in recent years by works studying everything from the semiotics of everyday behaviour to the rituals of Freemasonry. I have been particularly interested in historical studies which make manifest the ways that culture, spectacle, theatricality and performance served social and political ends in imperial Russia. For example, the works of Stephen Lessing Baehr, Priscilla Roosevelt, and Richard Wortman on the governing ‘scenarios of power’, have cast new light on each reign in eighteenth-century Russia. These studies have, however, had little to say about the sciences, technology, and engineering. My work seeks to demonstrate how closely integrated the sciences were with the politics of spectacle in this period. The history of science can thus serve to enrich social and political history and vice versa.
This integration becomes apparent through two examples: firstly by looking at the early years of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences and its efforts to find legitimation in the 1730s; and secondly by looking at the first Russian circumnavigation of the world at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Both of these events involved an intimate integration of science, spectacle, and imperial politics.
The historiography of the early years of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences has often focused on questions of nationalism, regarding the relative balance of Russians and foreigners in the institution. But in my view, before exploring the issue of nationalism, we need to understand how the Academy managed to become a secure institution in Russia. Around 1730, the administration of the Academy feared that it would close due to apathy from the nobility and scepticism from the government and court. Ultimately, however, they succeeded in making the Academy endure – how did they do it? The answer lies in the patronage strategies of the Academy, following the work of Mario Biagioli on Galileo and patronage at the Florentine court in the seventeenth century. The Academy spent much time in search of a patron or protector during the 1730s and geared its activities towards achieving this goal. The key person in this process was Johann Daniel Schumacher. Although traditionally vilified in histories of the Academy, Schumacher was an astute go-between, who could translate the resources of the Academy to serve the interests of the court and government and so secure a place for the Academy in St. Petersburg as a valuable and useful institution. Schumacher did this by hiring artisans and scholars able to produce works suited to the growing court being built by Empress Anna Ivanovna.
In addition to jewellery, engravings, snuffboxes, architectural designs, panegyric poetry, and portraits, the Academy also served the court by designing fireworks displays for its festivities on a regular basis throughout the reign of Anna (and in fact until the reign of Catherine II). Fireworks provide an example of how such work ingratiated the Academy to the court. Academicians such as Jacob Stählin and G. F. Juncker designed allegorical fireworks which shaped the image of the Empress as variously a benevolent patroness, protector, and ruler. This was a gift to the Empress, akin to what Margaret McGowan calls ‘praise literature’. It celebrated the Empress with an idealized image but there was an expectation the Empress would live up to her exalted image. Some fireworks presented Anna as Minerva, as a patroness of the arts and sciences, and, in at least one case, Anna sought to reciprocate this gift by supporting scientific investigations at court. Thus a fireworks display showing the Tychonic and Copernican world systems staged in January 1735 not only educated Russians in new theories of the cosmos but also may have led Anna to have telescopes brought to court to conduct astronomical observations shortly after the display.
The effort to legitimate the Academy and secure its position was therefore simultaneously the effort to create a new ‘scenario of power’ for Anna’s reign; scientific and political endeavours were one and the same. Fireworks, meanwhile, worked as court spectacle, not only for their allegory and poetry but also because of the drama of pyrotechnic effects. In the early modern period, such spectacles were believed to be compelling because they artfully imitated cosmic and meteorological phenomena such as suns, stars, comets, thunder and lightning. Elites tended to believe that the lower orders were unable to distinguish artificial fires from natural ones because they did not understand the technology involved, and so would be astonished into reverence for the powers who could command such effects.
Exactly the same logic operated in displays of scientific instruments made by the officers on voyages of exploration. Turning to the story of the first Russian circumnavigation of the world, it becomes apparent that ‘scenarios of power’ and their intimate connection to the sciences extended to the edge of the Russian empire. The first Russian circumnavigation of the world took place in 1803-1806 in the ships Nadezhda and Neva under captains Adam Johann von Krusenstern and Yuri Lisianskii. Their mission was to supply the Russian American Company’s outposts in Alaska with food, and to travel to Japan to secure a trade agreement, for which purpose the RAC’s director Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov travelled with Krusenstern as a Russian ambassador.
Both European and Russian voyages of exploration between the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries commonly used displays of artifice in the belief that they would astonish non-European peoples into submission and respect, an ideal situation for a colonial enterprise. As early as 1585, Thomas Harriot, visiting Virginia, wrote of how he showed magnets, lenses, fireworks, automata and mathematical instruments to the people he encountered there, making them believe the English were gods. Lisianskii, on the Russian circumnavigation, made similar performances and similar claims about their effects. Just as the Emperor or Empress in Petersburg could stage grand fireworks as a sign of civility, distinction, and power, so explorers might stage their own small-scale spectacles to the same ends in overseas encounters. Indeed, Grigorii I. Shelikhov reckoned such displays allowed him to take control of Kodiak island.
It was Shelikhov’s nephew, Rezanov, who led the circumnavigators on their expedition to Japan. In fact, the whole expedition was intended to be something of a display. Rezanov modelled himself, according to the diary of one of the crewmembers, on Earl George Macartney, who in 1793 had travelled with a British embassy to China to try to secure a trade agreement with the Chinese. Macartney took with him a large consignment of scientific instruments, decorated in Chinoiserie, in the belief that these would impress the Chinese emperor and seal the trade agreement. But he was wrong; the Jesuits had been taking scientific instruments to China for centuries, Macartney’s gifts were considered trivial, and the trade agreement was refused.
Despite this, Rezanov sought to replicate the Macartney mission on his voyage to Japan, carrying a cargo of instruments and artful objects for the Emperor of Japan. As it turned out, the Russian visit to Japan – from September 1804 until April 1805 – also failed. The Japanese had the Russians wait months for an audience with officials, keeping them contained in an encampment on a rocky cape near Nagasaki. When the audience took place, the Japanese, like the Chinese meeting Macartney, refused to extend trading rights to the Russians and requested Rezanov to leave.
During the lengthy negotiations, Rezanov presented the Japanese emperor with gifts valued at 300,000 rubles. These were presented as demonstrations of Russian technical virtuosity and as encouragements to the emperor to accept the Russians’ terms. But there is some indication that Rezanov also saw these gifts, which included clocks, muskets, an electrical machine and a microscope, as artifices that would astonish the Japanese into submitting to Russian terms. But the Japanese did no such thing, as some of Rezanov’s crew suspected. Displays of electrical machines, a novelty still in Europe, and a hot-air balloon failed to impress the Japanese, and the Russians were sent home without the desired trade agreement.
The moral here is that in traveling east, the Russians expected to be able to demonstrate their own civility and superiority in contrast with the peoples of the Pacific and Asia. Displays of scientific instruments and new inventions offered an occasion for performing such claims of distinction. But what the Russians found was that in fact, these expectations were confounded – easterners were not as ‘savage’ or ignorant as the Russians imagined. Of course the irony is that the Russians themselves had frequently been in this situation in the eighteenth century – witness western European attitudes to Russians as a backward and superstitious people. This was perhaps something that motivated the attitudes of individuals like Rezanov at a time when Europeans were in fact becoming more sensitive to the complexity of non-European cultures. Another irony is that ultimately, the people who were really impressed by the displays of the Russians were the Europeans, because reports of the voyage later published in Europe received rapturous reviews, many of which praised the level of civilization which the voyage attested Russia had obtained.
These two stories reflect some of the ways that the ‘technical life’ of eighteenth-century Russia was intimately interwoven with the politics and culture of the court and the empire. Scientific and technical practitioners were not peripheral to these activities but played important roles in defining the ‘scenarios of power’ that shaped the life of the court and the boundaries of the empire. The lesson is that the history of science in Russia should not be seen as a sub-discipline or specialization to be pursued only by people who know a lot of mathematics, but is something that can be explored in all areas of Russian history in the eighteenth century. The Russian case shows us a different side of science – the aesthetic and political uses of science become clearer in the academy and the circumnavigators’ performances. Science is not just about knowing nature but forms a part of the complex ways people have sought to exert power and distinguish themselves in history.
- Simon Werrett, University College London
s.werrett@ucl.ac.uk
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