Petr Viazemskii and the 'Jewish Question' in the Russian Empire

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

Abstract

Petr Viazemskii’s life-long friendship with Aleksandr Turgenev (1784–1845) resulted in a massive corpus of correspondence. Turgenev’s participation in the “Russian Biblical Society” (since 1813) and “Committee for Administration of Jewry” (1809–1818) provoked Viazemskii’s interest in the “Jewish question,” which at the time was actively discussed throughout Europe. Viazemskii was concerned with the matters of Jewish emancipation not only in letters to Turgenev. For instance, he captured the circumstances that resulted in Odessa's first pogrom (1821); and spoke out on the conditions of the Jewish diaspora in Poland; in 1827 he wrote an article “Tal’ma”, where he depicted how Napoleon was inspired by Rasin’s drama Esther (1689) and granted to French Jewry civil rights; in 1849–1850 he took a “Journey to the East” and portrayed the Jewish communities of Jerusalem and Turkey. This paper provides an outline for Viazemskii’s approach to the issue of Jewish political and social liberation. It puts his ideas in the context of European and Russian thought and socio-political issues, such as the Velizh case (1823–1835), Nicholas I’s oppressive policies, the European Jewry movement for gaining civil rights, and establishment of Wissenschaft des Judentums in 1819. I argue that Viazemskii’s approach to the “Jewish question,” though changing throughout his lifetime, reflected at a certain point the idea of a connection between the Jewish civil liberation and the democratization of society overall.

Author

• Elena Petrova-Libgober, U of Southern California