Abstract

The article is an attempt to write the frst intellectual biography of Ivan Grigorievich Kulzhinsky (1803-1884), a neglected Russian conservative author and educator, known only to researchers of N.V. Gogol’s biography. His literary work is usually divided into two stages: the period of romantic “Nationality” and dealing with Little Russian ethnography and the time of upholding the “Uvarov’s triad” and serving the interests of the “reactionary” government policy. Te author studies Kulzhinsky’s publications and letters and reveals a direct continuity between these two stages and his ambiguous attitude to class conservatism. In his journalistic novels Emerit and Te Uyezd Judge of Our Uyezd (District), Kulzhinsky epitomizes the principles of the ethics and worldview of Nicholas I’s intellectual civil servant. Tese ideas later signifcantly infuenced the Great Reforms and their social atmosphere. Kulzhinsky thought that the main objective of literature was not “aesthetics”, but rather moral preaching and criticized lefist trends in literature, criticism, pedagogy and public life in the second half of the 19th century. He also justifed censorship and considered postreform “progressivism” to be “regressive” and leading to the decay of Christian civilization. Kulzhinsky saw the emerging Ukrainophilism, which imposed the peasant dialect “spoiled by Polonisms” on the Little Russian people, as rejection of true social progress. However, in the second half of the 1860s, he entered into the polemics with the supporters of class conservatism and proved himself an upholder of the “Muravyev’s system” that was being implemented in the Northwestern Krai. For many decades Kulzhinsky advocated the principle of national identity and called for the refusal to speak foreign languages in everyday life. Nevertheless, unlike the Slavophiles, he never criticized Tsar Peter’s reforms and believed that the latter did not touch the foundations of Russian identity, i. e. the church and autocracy. Kulzhinsky called for the creation of a system of women education, which would be consistent with the national spirit, and later, in the 1870s, for the transfer of primary schools under the full supervision of the church.