Young Viazemsky Takes on the Censorship Apparatus, 1821–1824

• In Event: Peter Viazemsky: Liberation as Ethic and Aesthetic Praxis

Abstract

In 1821, the St. Petersburg Censorship Committee was joined by two new censors, the reactionary A. I. Krasovskii and the secret policeman K. K. Fon Pol'. This minor personnel change had outsized impacts on the literary life of the capital. Within the year, Viazemsky was plotting the downfall of the new censor in his correspondence with Pushkin and trying to help Zhukovsky evade the Petersburg censorship by working out back channels to publication in Moscow. As we can see from their correspondence, the leading lights of the so-called "Arzamasian Brotherhood"—including highly-placed officials—were immersed in the minutiae of censorship law, policy and practice. And they were debating how best to challenge and overcome the censorship regime. In this paper, I will provide an account of Viazemsky's appeal (zhaloba) of the Censorship Committee's decision to block his polemical article "O dvukh stat'iakh, napechatannykh v Vestnike Evropy" in 1822. To do so, I rely primarily on the appeal case file that was preserved in the censors' archive at the Russian State Historical Archive. These unpublished materials make it possible to compare Viazemsky's legalistic-bureaucratic approach to dissent with the very different approaches of his closest associates.

Author

• Joseph Peschio, U of Wisconsin-Milwaukee