In 1864 the journalist Maksim Antonovich wrote that “ ‘soil’ was the philosopher’s stone for us, a journalistic elixir, an inexhaustible goldmine, a cash-cow, in a word, everything.”1 As Antonovich testifies, Slavophiles and Westernizers, journalists and gentlemen farmers, mystics and materialists all used their broadsheets to sort out various dimensions of Russia’s “soil question.”2 Soil (pochva) was figured as both a source of the nation’s ills and a solution to them, and it was placed at the center of models of national identity, history, political economy, and even realist aesthetics. This chapter charts the discursive and symbolic construction of Russian soil in the work of a range of influential figures in nineteenth-century Russian literature and intellectual history, focusing on a particular complex of ideas: the organic analogy of nation and plant. This pervasive discourse of the organic, rooted nation forms the basis of all later Russian and Soviet cultural myths and discourses of soil, and many important cultural phenomena only become legible in light of this symbolic complex—whether the commonplace understanding that Peter the Great “transplanted” Western culture to Russia or the mystical nationalism of Fedor Dostoevsky’s pochvennichestvo movement (often translated as the native soil movement). An investigation of this analogy, which served different writers as pure rhetoric, natural fact, and everything in the blurred spaces in between, will also establish a mode of reading for later discourses of the soil, suspended between metaphor and materiality.
The Romantic age was characterized by an intense interest in the ontology of the nation and the basis of national difference. Where did nations come from, what shaped their development, and what was their purpose? Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, Schlegel, and other German philosophers offered answers to these questions in the framework of their own philosophies of history. Fundamentally shaped by the French Revolution and Napoleon’s trajectory across Europe, the Romantic nationalism of these thinkers was largely a counter-Enlightenment rejection of false universals and mechanistic approaches to nature and history.3 They preferred to take a more holistic approach to systems as “living” organisms. These organicist and primordialist theories naturalized the nation through allusion to native soil, claiming that the material substance was the source of national, racial, and cultural differentiation and identity. In this political philosophy, social and cultural phenomena were transferred into the domain of organic and natural law according to the analogy that nations, like plants, “grew” out of their “native soil.”4
The forerunner of the Romantic nationalists and a founder of the discourse of the organic nation was Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), an important figure in comparative philology and aesthetics, as well as a theorist of nationality. Herder’s impact was significant throughout Europe, but there were several reasons that Herder found a place within multiple Russian intellectual currents of the early nineteenth century. Herder lived in Riga from 1764 to 1769, a period during which he developed a special interest in Russia. As a champion of the diversity and peaceful plurality of national cultures, Herder predicted that Russia was destined to “awake from its long and heavy slumber,” and to take its place among other self-realized nations.5 The influential critic Vissarion Belinskii called Herder a “prophet,” and Apollon Grigorev wrote of his admiration for Herder’s “desire to embrace all the peoples of the world with love” and to undertake the “broad contemplation of the fates of humanity.”6 Writer Nikolai Gogol called Herder one of the “great architects of world history” and praised his lofty ideas about humanity (although he noted that Herder had no sense of the everyday life of the common person).7 While Herder’s name is often cited among other influential Western thinkers in nineteenth-century Russia, there is limited scholarship closely tracing the diffusion of his ideas.8
Herder’s main contribution to the theorization of the nation (and the source of his appeal to many Russian readers) was his pluralistic, nonhierarchical model of national forms and cultures. Rather than judging a nation’s level of development according to universal standards, Herder asserted that each nation, like a flower, had its own distinctive form, took its own path of development, and uniquely contributed to the beauty of the world garden. Each nation aspired to its own perfection, and a nation that might otherwise be judged “backwards” was, in Herder’s vision, simply unfolding at its own pace according to the plan set out by nature.9 The botanical image of each nation as a flower in the world garden was more than simply a pleasing trope. In Herder’s model the nation is a living organism formed by its unique natural environment—and most particularly by the soil in which it is “rooted.” This understanding of national development was grounded in organicism, an important trend of German Romantic science that emerged as an alternative to Cartesian and Newtonian reductionism. Organicism was primarily concerned with the synergistic relation between parts and wholes—specifically between external forms, internal structures, and the emergent properties observed in higher organisms.10 Organicism is often reduced to a stylistic strategy, with metaphors understood to serve rhetorical purposes and to illustrate principles to a lay reader. But as Amanda Jo Goldstein helpfully notes, Western Romantic materialism, including organicism, was a mode of thinking that “granted substance to tropes and tropic activity to nonverbal things.”11 Even further, in Herder’s work organicism must be understood as a hermeneutic strategy, central to his approach to naturalizing social phenomena.12 That is, the geographical specificity of soils was a material fact that determined national character. It was precisely this analogic, organic method that Immanuel Kant found objectionable in Herder’s Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (1784–1791), when he noted that Herder possessed an “accomplished sagacity in the discovery of analogies, but a bold imagination” rather than “logical exactitude.”13 However “imaginative” Herder’s analogic method, it produced what many readers of his time considered nontrivial conclusions about important sociopolitical and cultural questions. In the case of the Russian reception of Herder, discussed below, some of Herder’s followers adopted the plant-nation analogy merely as a productive fund of metaphors, while others embraced organicism as a universal hermeneutic applicable to human development.
To understand Herder’s model of the organic nation, it is useful to pause briefly with his Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, which opens with a natural history of the Earth, illustrating the “Great Chain of Being” that “descends from the creator down to the germ of a grain of sand.”14 All of the Earth’s creations, inanimate and animate, “possess a form and fashion dependent on eternal laws.”15 Universal principles of organization may be discerned in everything from soil and stones (“the smallest and most unfinished things”), to higher biological organisms like plants and animals, and finally, to humans. Herder relies upon analogy as a fundamental hermeneutic tool, proceeding from the understanding that universal laws give order to all organic form. He makes empirical observations about the natural world and from them abstracts principles that determine human historical and social development. As a superorganism ranged above the individual subject and below humanity, the nation is the fundamental unit of human history in Herder’s scheme. “Nationality is a plant of nature,”16 on which “fruits grow according to the climate and care.”17 The genius of the nation is specifically vegetative because it is rooted in place; nations grow, evolve, and are fixed in “native soil.” As Mark Bassin has discussed, the German concept of Bodenständigkeit—the state of being rooted in one’s native soil—was both metaphorical and literal: “a Volk could be genuinely integrated into the matrix of the natural world only to the extent that it was literally anchored in the earth or soil and attuned to their natural rhythms.”18 Thus it is to the plant kingdom that Herder turns to understand the nature and life cycle of the national organism.
In Herder’s vision the emergence of national difference was a natural process akin to speciation among plants and animals. National difference was produced by the physical environment and affected, in turn, by cultural adaptation and interactions with other nations. Herder asserts that each nation has a distinct Volksgeist, certain features of which, like genetic inheritance, remain relatively stable through time, even when the organism is uprooted from its original environment (he cites the Jews as an example).19 Herder is less interested, however, in physical anthropology than in celebrating the variety of cultural forms—the highest expression of the Volksgeist—that obtain from different environmental conditions. In his consideration of “the bonds of love that tie us to the Fatherland [Vaterland],” Herder rejects the idea that patriotism could be grounded in “the soil [Boden] of the country … all by itself. It would, rather, be the heaviest of all burdens if man, viewed like a tree or a plant or a beast, would have to belong, inherently and eternally, with all his soul, body, and powers, to the soil where he was born”—a kind of belonging that he compares to the “harsh laws” of serfdom. Rather, reason, culture, and other historical forces “lead towards a gradual unshackling of these slaves, born of a mother’s womb or of the mother-earth [Muttererde], from the hard scrap of land that they are expected to fertilize with their sweat in life and their ashes in death, and instead ties them with more gentle bonds to a fatherland [Vaterland].”20 Writing in 1795, when proposals for the abolition of serfdom were intensely debated across Germany, Herder thus distinguishes between a “natural” citizenship—which reflects a primal and material relationship to soil and which he compares to enslavement—and a “cultural” citizenship, in which native soil is understood as a matrix of shared cultural values and history. Herder enlists a series of terms to illustrate: “soil” (Boden), “land” (Land), “mother-earth” (Muttererde), and “fatherland” (Vaterland). Herder deliberately arranges these terms into meaningful binaries. Material “soil” may evolve into the more abstract and polysemous “land.” Herder likewise genders these values, asserting that national citizens must transfer their attachment to the primitive symbolic terrain of “mother-earth” to the higher cultural topos of the “fatherland.”
It is through this process that individuals articulate their relationship to native soil, transforming from natural slaves into national subjects. Herder clarifies these semantics in his account of the historical process by which nomadic peoples, “dwelling in deserted places for periods of time and burying their fathers there,” became attached to this burial place, which they came to think of as a fatherland. “ ‘We shall await you at the graves of our fathers,’ one would call out to the enemy: ‘Their ashes, too, we shall protect as we defend our land.’ Thus the holy name emerged, and not as if human beings had sprung from the soil. Only children can love the fatherland, not serfs born of the soil or slaves captured like wild animals.”21 Herder associates material soil with abjection and the state of biological enslavement, while land is defined by symbolic mastery over nature and biology. The act of burial unites the material and symbolic domains, producing feminine and material “mother-earth” through the decay of bodies, and masculine and cultural “fatherland” through public rituals of memorialization. Burial and agriculture are two means of investing and exchanging value through the medium of soil. Herder’s image of the bodies of the “fathers” fertilizing a particular patch of soil is a striking figure for the birth of national consciousness: burial ground becomes a battleground that conationals are prepared to defend, as well as the source of their sustenance through agriculture. Following this line, Michel Serres identifies this nexus of plow, gun, and tomb as the source of our primal “object bonds to the soil.”22 Herder’s binary terms (soil and land; mother earth and fatherland) correspond further with the assertion that while a national organism grows from material soil, a national spirit (or Volksgeist), is cultivated in a cultural land.23 This opposition of a material mother-earth and a cultural fatherland prefigures Otto Schlüter’s later theory of cultural landscape, or Kulturlandschaft, which reflects human values in contrast to an original material Urlandschaft.24
Herder’s Russian readers found the plant-nation analogy an extremely productive apparatus for understanding national form, possible paths of national development, the process of cultural transfer, and the relationship between individuals and the nation and between the nation and humanity. From the plant-nation analogy, a string of propositions could be explored: the nation is an organic product of its environment with roots in the native soil; nourishment from this soil allows it to grow, blossom, and produce fruits; and finally the nation withers and dies, thereby fertilizing the ground for subsequent growth. Herder’s vision of the organic nation fed into multiple nationalist discourses in nineteenth-century Russia and provided a framework for understanding the ontology of the nation and its development. Here, a survey of the plant-nation analogy will provide background for subsequent close analysis of several Russian organicist thinkers who develop those tropes in more complex ways.
By the close of the eighteenth century, Herder’s ideas were making their way into the Russian world of letters through figures like Nikolai Karamzin, who produced translations of Herder’s work into Russian and frequently drew (without credit) on Herder’s ideas.25 Karamzin’s “On the Love of the Fatherland and National Pride” (1802), for example, directly paraphrases Herder’s discussion of the cultural fatherland as a higher object of attachment than the material earth. Karamzin writes: “This love for fellow citizens … is a second, or moral, love of the fatherland, as general as the first, local or physical.”26 Karamzin’s description of the relationship between the nation and its environment also closely parallels Herder’s exposition in the Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man. Herder writes that “all plants … arrive at much greater perfection in their proper climes. With animals and with man it is the same.”27 Herder continues: “Every soil, every sort of mountains, every similar region of the atmosphere, as well as a like degree of heat and cold, nourishes its own plants.”28 Karamzin, in turn, writes that “every plant has more energy in its own climate: this is a law of nature, and for humans it doesn’t change.”29
The nation is shaped by environment, and “every soil … nourishes its own plants,” according to Herder. “Does not this prepare us,” he writes, “to expect similar varieties in the organic structure of man, so far as he is a plant?”30 Herder understands the proposition that nations grow within their natural environment like plants literally, and it is this proposition that yielded the root as a fetish of Russian nationalist discourse. In Russia the fear that the nation was rootless, or ungrounded, took hold in the nineteenth-century Russian imagination following Peter Chaadaev’s “First Philosophical Letter,” published in the journal Telescope in 1836. Chaadaev, typically considered the locus classicus of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia’s anxiety of influence and identity, wrote (in French) that Russians were like “nomads” in their own land, not rooted to native soil and that “not a single useful thought has grown in the sterile soil of our fatherland.”31 Chaadaev criticized the Europeanized Russian gentry (rootless nomads) and yet also suggested that Russia itself was a poor environment for the development of a national culture.
From Chaadaev’s provocation many Russian authors took up the question of rootedness and whether Russian soil was “sterile.” Discussing this line of discourse in Russian intellectual history, Nikolai Berdiaev later noted that “groundlessness [bezpochvennost’] could be a Russian national trait.”32 The first-generation Slavophile Aleksei Khomiakov wrote that “it is a shame when the earth makes itself a tabula rasa and rejects all the roots and offspring of its historical tree.”33 Khomiakov attempts to clarify his use of biological analogy; by national “roots,” he specifies “the Kremlin, Kiev, Sarov Monastery, folk life with its songs and rituals, and the predominantly rural community.”34 In short, the nation was rooted in folk culture, which had become a new subject of study and curation in Russia, inspired by a similar awakening of interest in German folk culture led by figures like Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and the Brothers Grimm.35 The second-generation Slavophile Ivan Aksakov (son of Sergei Aksakov) worked further within this topos: “Outside of our native soil there is no foundation, outside of the national there is nothing real or living, and every well-intentioned idea and every enterprise not connected by its roots to our historical native soil, or not grown organically out of it, does not bear fruit and turns to mulch.”36 The vital economy of the nation depends upon exchanges between life-giving soil and the national organism: soil feeds the nation, and the soil is fertilized in turn by the products of the nation. Aksakov extends this organic metaphor to the “rooting” of national identity in what he calls “historical native soil.” Aksakov’s historical native soil, like that of Khomiakov, is constituted from Russian folk culture, material practices, and vernacular language. For Aksakov, this “historical native soil,” rather than rootless foreign influences, should be the basis for all later cultural developments. Aksakov understands the Herderian valuation of national particularity in a conservative political sense as a limit on the transfer of ideas from one environment, or soil, to another.
The life cycle of the Herderian organic nation is also vegetative: “It is obvious that human life, insofar as it is vegetation, has the fate of plants…. Our ages too are the ages of a plant: we spring up, grow, bloom, wither, and die.”37 Karamzin takes up the idea in his essay on Russian patriotism with an extravagant botanical image inspired by this model of the life cycle of nations: “We are still in the middle of our glorious course! The observer everywhere sees new branches and development; sees many fruits, but even more blossoms.”38 Karamzin’s analogy suggests uneven development: Russia has borne fruits already, but simultaneously new blossoms promise an even greater cultural harvest ahead. Karamzin’s purpose is primarily to encourage patriotic sentiment, and his use of the analogy of national and botanical life cycles is so conventional that it hardly attracts notice, although even this cliché can be traced genealogically to Herder.
Once the nation has flowered and borne fruit, it stands to reason that it withers and fertilizes the ground on which it grew. Khomiakov was disturbed to think that he and his Europeanized compatriots, “divorced from their vital foundations,” might not fertilize Russia’s growth and development, but like so much dry brush, would only obstruct new organic growth: “At the moment when the vital beginning of Rus is strengthening and blossoming, will we be merely dry and barren brush, hindering new vegetation?”39 The notion that national soil was fertilized and manured by one’s ancestors became a common trope, signifying one’s sacrificial duty to the future, the sense that the current generation must enrich the ground so that the future nation can bloom and bear fruit.40 Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin railed against his compatriots who fell back on this formula when rationalizing their own political inertia. He imagines them throwing up their hands in defeat: “We are manure [navoz], and history is manure, and our children are manure!”41 Much later, Petr Stolypin gave the idea a tone of civilizational decline when he spoke before the Duma: “Nations sometimes forget about their national duties, but those nations perish, they are turned into manure [nazem], into fertilizer [udobrenie] from which other, stronger nations will sprout and grow strong.”42 The figure of manure in these contexts was a creative extrapolation of the plant-nation analogy that served as a model for the transmission of a cultural legacy through time.
The topos of cultural exchange as “transplantation” was a durable concept for understanding the movement of bodies and ideas across Russia’s borders. It was so pervasive, and its tropes so routinized in Russian nationalist discourse by the end of the nineteenth century, that its origin has become obscure. It first took on critical mass in the historiographical literature on Peter the Great. Voltaire’s History of the Russian Empire (1759–1763), may, in fact, be the locus classicus of the figure of Peter as gardener: “The arts, which he transplanted with his own hands into countries till then in a manner savage, have flourished and produced fruits.”43 Voltaire’s image was grounded in the Enlightenment exultation of the garden as a rationally organized space that exemplified human mastery over the natural, the savage, and the uncivilized.44 Herder also writes about Peter’s cultivation of the “half-wild” Russian nation.45 Both Voltaire and Herder take a positive view of Peter’s legacy, although for reasons that suggest their different positions along the spectrum between Enlightenment and Romantic thought. Voltaire extolled Peter’s embrace of universal civilizational values, while Herder made the more tortuous argument that Peter helped foster the development of a uniquely Russian national spirit. Russian commentators took up the notion of transplantation with varying degrees of ambivalence about Peter’s legacy. Nikolai Karamzin writes of Peter’s reforms that “we looked at Europe, so to speak, and with one glance appropriated the fruits of her long-term labors,” a process that he calls humiliating, but ultimately salutary.46 Vissarion Belinskii also drew on this discourse of the organic nation in assessing Peter’s influence on Russian culture. In his “Literary Musings” (1834), he writes of Peter the Great’s transplantation of foreign ideas into Russian soil: “He saw miracles and wonders overseas and wanted to transplant them to his native soil, not thinking about the fact that this soil was still too harsh for foreign plants, that they have not experienced the Russian winter; he saw the fruits of centuries of education and wanted to appropriate them for his people in an instant.”47 Like many of his Russian contemporaries, Belinskii uses the apparatus of Herder’s organic nation primarily as a fund of metaphor, with soil standing in for the generative matrix of national culture. Belinskii and Chaadaev agree that Russia is a harsh environment for foreign transplants, but Belinskii rejects the conclusion that Russian soil is so harsh and “sterile” that it cannot produce or sustain a vital culture. He writes that although Russian literature was the result of an “artificial transplant,” it has thrived and developed further in Russian soil. Belinskii follows Herder in praising Peter as the gardener of the “young” nation and the source of a distinctive Volksgeist, expressed in Russian literature, which was the “fruit of artificial transplants. And that is why it was first imitative and rhetorical, with poor content and meager vitality. If it had stayed that way, it would not be literature but scribalism, and would deserve no attention whatsoever. But perhaps in our literature above all else and more than in any other terms, we find the fertility and vitality of the artificial reforms of Peter the Great.”48 Belinskii notes that, although Peter’s “artificial transplants” initially lacked vigor, they later succeeded in taking root, producing new forms that were fertile; Russian literature evolved new, distinctive forms that produced equally vigorous and fertile offspring.
This repertoire of organicist tropes, used by Russian intellectuals across the political spectrum, took on particular importance for the writers affiliated with pochvennichestvo, or the native soil movement of the later nineteenth century. In the announcement for his new journal Time (Vremia) in 1860, Fedor Dostoevsky sketched his own theory of Russian historical development from the time of Peter. He marks 1812 as a critical moment, when the intelligentsia were united with the people in a mystical consummation of national identity and purpose. In his famous Pushkin speech, Dostoevsky gives an ex post facto grounding for pochvennichestvo that follows Herder’s and Belinskii’s arguments that Petrine reforms and subsequent Westernizing efforts furthered, rather than hindered, Russia’s unique organic development. Dostoevsky argues that the intelligentsia’s period of separation from the Russian pochva was a necessary stage of development that allowed for an ecstatic return to the soil and a renewed appreciation of the distinctive values of Slavic culture. As Victor Terras observes, the pochvenniki, like Belinskii before them, endeavored to “salvage the idea of Russia’s ‘organic’ development without rejecting the reforms of Peter the Great.”49 The pochvennichestvo movement that emerged from the journal Time advocated a middle course between the Slavophiles’ apotheosis of the Russian people and their fetishization of Russian soil on the one side, and the Westernizers’ embrace of modernization and the importation of European values and ideas on the other. The former sought a reconciliation of East and West, as well as a metadiscursive rapprochement between the Slavophile and Westernizer movements.
Pochvennichestvo focused on national particularism and was fundamentally conservative in its politics and nostalgic in its cultural tastes; Wayne Dowler even translates “pochvennichestvo” as “native soil conservatism.”50 In addition to Dostoevsky, its notable proponents included Nikolai Strakhov and Apollon Grigorev, the latter of whom developed a literary-critical apparatus from pochvennichestvo that he called “organic criticism.” Although pochvennichestvo was originally concerned with political, intellectual, and literary questions, by 1862 the elaboration of pochvennichestvo in Time had taken a mystical turn. Like Herder, who had argued that the Slavs would take up the Christian mission, the pochvenniki infused the discourse of native soil with Orthodox religious significance. Dostoevsky writes, “We have finally seen that we, too, are a distinct nationality, highly original, and that our task is to create a new form, our own native form, drawing on our own soil, drawing on our national spirit and national source.”51
The most developed aesthetic statement of pochvennichestvo was attempted by Apollon Grigorev, whose organic criticism is grounded in the Herderian model: literary creations and writers, like nations, evolve from native soil like plants. This is why the very essence of literature is the national. Grigorev writes of “faith in the ground, the soil, the people”52 and calls for judgment of all “artistic work according to its connection with the soil.”53 He approves of Karamzin as a “man of his soil”54 and Nekrasov as a “poet of the soil” in whose works “a deep love for the soil resounds.”55 The longer Pushkin lived, Grigorev wrote, the “more tightly he grew together with the soil of his land,”56 and Turgenev’s characters Lezhnev and Lavretskii have “internal physiological connections with the soil that produced them.”57
Aleksandr Blok understood Grigorev’s “organic criticism” as little more than an attempt “to clad himself in the armor of science.”58 But Grigorev’s critical apparatus has a wider philosophical reach than Blok allows, and it fits within a continuous genealogy reaching back to Herder and his earliest Russian interpreters.59 Like Karamzin, Grigorev had translated Herder into Russian, specifically his poetry.60 In his autobiography, My Literary and Moral Wanderings, Grigorev shares the origin of his concern with the soil as the basis of the organic nation: “at the beginning of the fifties at the time my second and real youth began, at a time when there arose in my soul a new, or rather renewed, faith in the ground, soil, people, at a time when everything immediate was recreated in the mind and heart, everything that reflection and science had only seemingly erased in them.”61 Grigorev elsewhere explains that “one epoch believed exclusively in development, that is, in forces and drives. Another epoch believes exclusively in nature, that is, in the soil and the environment.”62 In narrating his own intellectual Bildung, Grigorev describes his evolution from a mechanistic to an organicist worldview, the latter grounded in the symbolic values of pochva. He evokes Friedrich Schiller’s distinction between mechanical and organic processes of formation—be they of literature, soil, or nations—in order to distance himself from what was seen as the reductive materialism of the Enlightenment, later revived by the Russian materialists. Grigorev’s personal evolution shows how eclectic, pragmatic, and asynchronous the Russian reception of European intellectual influences often was. However outmoded in German intellectual circles, figures like Herder or Schiller might offer Russian thinkers just the right answers to the most topical problems of their own society.
Reading Grigorev in the context of Herder’s framework of the organic nation can clarify some of the opacities in his understanding of the relations between the organic, the vegetative, and the national. We can take, as an example, Grigorev’s term rastitel’naia poeziia (vegetative poetry), explicated in A Few Words on the Laws and Terms of Organic Criticism. The essence of “vegetative” poetry is not its slow growth but rather its national character. Grigorev clarifies his term further: the laws of vegetative poetry are “strikingly similar to the laws of plant life.”63
It is worth performing a close reading of Grigorev’s vegetative poetry to clarify its relation to Herder’s organic analogy. Grigorev gives the example of the folk song, which “lives like a plant, precisely like a plant that germinates in favorable soil.”64 The folk song has no single identifiable origin in time or space and no known author; it spontaneously grows and takes root, unfolding organically, without any design or intention imposed upon it from the outside. These spontaneous manifestations of the Volksgeist spring up and grow like plants, but they also wither and become—in a further botanical analogy—the fertile soil on which succeeding national plants grow: “A song is not only a plant—it is the very soil on which layer after layer has settled; by removing the layers and comparing variations you can sometimes get down to the first layer.”65 Through the succession of individual specimens (variants of the song or plant) from generation to generation and across space, the song in abstract, like the plant as a species, evolves as an organic type. While each of these organic phenomena carries its own blueprint for development, the plan is mysterious, internal, and irreducible, and the organism must be studied as an integral object that is more than the sum of its parts. Just as the higher-order categories of a botanical species or genus are an abstraction built from empirical observations of individual specimens, so too is the song a speculative object that only takes form in individual instantiations—in specific performance events and in multiple variations that, nonetheless, are recognizable to the listener as a single song. Observing the characteristics of an “organic” phenomenon like the folk song is a method for Grigorev, as for Herder, by which general laws may be discerned.
One senses in Grigorev the urgency to document and understand folk phenomena before they are irretrievably lost or hybridized by “foreign” contact. He writes that “nothing can hide the sad truth that close to capitals, in big cities, along major trade routes, the best or more poetic songs are disappearing more and more, replaced by bad factory romances, desecrating with their meaningless interpolations.”66 Once original, uncontaminated cultural forms go extinct, lost is the opportunity to study the unique principles of organic form that they embody.
As a close reading of Grigorev’s ideas on vegetative poetry and the folk song demonstrates, “organic criticism” relies on the Herderian framework of the organic nation for its main support. Herder’s theory of the particularity of national culture—including art, literature, and even science—suggested to Grigorev, as a theorist of pochvennichestvo, a national style of criticism and, implicitly, of art. According to the principles of the Herderian organic nation, every work of art must be judged as an organic expression of the nation. It is this axiom that accounts for the interest in types in Russian literature as the purest expression of the Volksgeist.
This discourse of the organic nation and the rhetorical inflation of pochva drew critical fire from some contemporaries of the pochvenniki. The journalist Maksim Antonovich charges them with mystifying the concept of pochva: “Suddenly a new phrase appears: ‘soil’ [pochva], even more indefinite and therefore, more convenient, than ‘nationality’ [narodnost’].”67 In a heated response in Time, Nikolai Strakhov took issue with his opponent’s contention that the rhetoric of the “soil” was vacant. Strakhov writes:
Let’s start at the beginning. Mr. Antonovich writes about soil. The first proposition, which he tries carefully and at length to convince his readers of, is that all the talk of soil is empty phrases. This is his starting point. Some journals, he says, incessantly repeat it in different ways: soil, soil, soil…. Hearing this, Mr. Antonovich wittily decided to respond by repeating another word: phrases, phrases, phrases, phrases….“We held in our hands,” writes Mr. Antonovich, “a printed page, on which nothing remained, not one thought or word, after we struck out phrases about soil.” … Why talk about phrases? We need to talk about action.68
Antonovich was a “man of the sixties,” a literary critic and translator of works of natural science, who assumed editorship of literature for the journal Sovremennik after Dobroliubov’s death in 1861. Like many of his generation who were oriented to philosophical materialism, Antonovich had studied the physical sciences (in his case, geology), and perhaps he felt he had a special mandate to rescue pochva from symbolic dematerialization. Nikolai Strakhov was, however, no mystic: he did advanced graduate work in biology (writing a thesis on comparative anatomy) and taught natural history at a Petersburg gymnasium.69 Russian intellectuals with both conservative and progressive politics were occupied with the study of biology, agricultural chemistry, and practical agronomy at the same time that they were engaged in the discursive construction of native soil in the public sphere.70 What is crucial here is the evolution of the Romantic materialism of Herder into an increasingly diversified field of natural science beginning in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Herder attempted a materialist explanation of the origin of nations, but it would become increasingly outdated as the natural and social sciences disaggregated, as discussed in the next chapter.
In response to the pochvenniki, Antonovich deconstructs their central sign. For all that he is an avowed materialist, Antonovich also turns out to be a witty discourse analyst. In this response to the pochvenniki, Antonovich exhausts the journalistic declensions of “soil,” referring to the six grammatical cases in the Russian language:
It so happens that for a critical article of one and a half broadsheets you just need to sit yourself down quietly and without any great mental strain or invention, just decline soil into all of its cases and your article is done. It’s like this. The nominative: the soil is unknown to us, a Sphinx, a riddle, terra incognita, and so on—that’s about two pages. The genitive: we do not know the soil, do not understand it, do not love it, are disconnected from it, etc.—that’s a total of three pages. The dative: we owe everything to the soil—our being, our spirit, our life, and therefore soil deserves our sympathy, empathy, passion, etc.—that’s a total of four pages. The accusative: we must not fertilize and remake the soil, but fertilize ourselves through a return to the soil, the penetration into it, and so on—that’s a total of five pages. The vocative: O soil, who has penetrated and understood you?—only Pushkin, and us too, but not any of those theorists who … etc.—there you have a total of six pages. The instrumental: the soil should never be neglected, even if nothing grows on it but thorn-apple and henbane, etc.—a total of four pages. The prepositional: soil can be endlessly written about, because we can always continue into the next book. That altogether totals twenty-four pages, exactly one and a half broadsheets, and all this without the slightest difficulty; well, that’s it!71
We can see political and material phenomena transforming into pure discourse before our very eyes. Antonovich’s absurd grammar of “pochva” attempts to neutralize the symbolic nationalist discourse of soil that had been developing in Russia since the beginning of the nineteenth century but, in the end, merely generates more discourse. The battle waged by materialists like Antonovich to demystify soil in the discourse of the organic nation is the topic of the next chapter.
Grigorev built a literary-critical apparatus from the Herderian concept of the organic nation, but perhaps the fullest expression of Herder’s influence on Russian nationalism emerged in the work of Nikolai Danilevskii, a theorist of pan-Slavism in whom there has been a resurgence of interest in postsocialist Russia. Danilevskii collaborated with Nikolai Strakhov on Dawn (Zaria), the last journal to emerge from the ground of pochvennichestvo. Both Danilevskii and Strakhov were trained in the natural sciences and both wrote anti-Darwinian works.72
Danilevskii drew on his direct knowledge of botany in formulating a theory of “cultural-historical types” in his signal work Russia and Europe (Rossiia i Evropa), published serially in Dawn. The influence of French naturalist Georges Cuvier on Danilevskii has been well documented, but his botanical model also draws on the German discourse of the organic nation.73
Danilevskii’s national organisms (narodnye organizmy) were relatively stable, just as Herder’s nations were fixed. Danilevskii identifies five laws of these cultural-historical types. Each type: 1) is defined by a common language, 2) is politically independent, 3) possesses its own “principles of civilization” that cannot be transferred, 4) has diverse “ethnographic” constituents (depending on “environmental” conditions), and finally, 5) reaches a peak of cultural development before perishing.74
To further schematize Danilevskii’s “laws,” we could say that they define and set classification boundaries for each national type (laws 1 and 2), describe the relationship between national types (law 3) and between the whole nations and its parts (law 4), and finally, describe the life cycle of each national type (law 5). Several of Danilevskii’s laws clearly respond to either immediate or inherited intellectual and political concerns. For example, his emphasis on language as a key feature defining the nation was in step with developments in the emerging field of comparative philology, which grew out of the work of Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt. Danilevskii’s insistence on the political independence of each type, and the relative independence of the diverse nations loosely affiliated within a civilizational type appears to be a reworking of Herder’s preoccupation with the unification of Prussia and its effect on the autonomy of its constituent “nations.”
Yet Danilevskii’s laws are primarily derived from abstractions based on botanical principles and empirical observations of nature. From such organic laws a distinctive political vision emerges. If a cultural-historical type is united by a common language, then Russians must speak Russian, learn its history, and develop it as a literary language (literature, as Belinskii had argued, was the highest expression of the Volksgeist). If each type is defined by political independence, then Russia “cannot be a member of the European political system,” nor can it adopt modes of European governance that are alien to its own civilization, according to the third law (if we accept the proposition that hybrids are “sterile”).75 Russia’s breadth and diverse physical and cultural environment suggest that it is a rich civilization, with many diverse “ethnographic” constituents in a loose affiliation.76
The rise and fall of civilizational units is also correlated with a very specific botanical life cycle. Danilevskii explains in his fifth law that “the course of development for cultural-historical types closely resembles that of perennial plants that bear fruit only once, whose period of growth is indefinitely long, but whose period of flowering and bearing fruit is relatively short and exhausts its vitality once and for all.”77 As Stephen M. Woodburn notes, Danilevskii is referring specifically to monocarpal plants, which die after bearing fruit.78 As a rise-and-fall narrative, we might discern the general influence of Hegel’s philosophy of history (in which nations bear the spirit of civilization for an epoch, then degenerate), but the specific articulation of Danilevskii’s “law” more closely evokes Herder, who also explicitly cites monocarpal plants (the American aloe and the fan palm) as organisms that—like human civilizations—blossom, produce fruit, and then immediately die. Herder writes that “so long as the young plant produces no flower, it can resist the winter’s cold: but that which bears too soon, soonest decays. The American aloe frequently lives a hundred years: but when once it has blossomed, no process, no art can prevent the superb stalk from decaying the next year. In five and thirty years the great fan palm grows to the height of seventy feet; it then grows thirty feet higher in the space of four months; when it blossoms, produces fruit, and the same year it dies. This is the course of nature, in the evolution of beings one out of another.”79 Herder concludes that “in the dissemination and degeneration of plants there is a similitude observable that will apply to beings of a superior order, and prepares us for the views and laws of Nature.”80 Danilevskii’s own vision of the nation as a monocarpal plant was a source of optimism, as it had been for many of his predecessors including Karamzin: while other nations had already flowered and borne fruit, and were now declining into senescence, Russia was just on the verge of blossoming.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of Danilevskii’s elaboration of his system of types is his discussion of cultural influence. His third law addresses the kinds of contact that are possible between civilizational types; he offers three possible models, each correlated with a botanical phenomenon: transplantation (or colonization), grafting (or parasitization), and fertilization.81 Danilevskii observes that the “simplest means of dissemination is transplantation from one place to another by means of colonization.”82 Whereas Herder concluded that colonialism is usually a harmful transplantation of organisms from their original natural environment to another, Danilevskii endorses colonization, even by violent measures, if it means that a “universal” civilization may thrive. He compares this process to clearing “weeds” for the sake of agriculture.83 At the moment that Danilevskii articulated this biological justification of colonization, Russia was expanding its empire into Central Asia—a policy that his fellow pochvennik Dostoevsky also endorsed.
The discourse of cultural transplantation, as discussed earlier, often thickened around the subject of Petrine reforms, and Danilevskii, like his predecessors, offers his own take on Peter as the gardener of the state. Echoing Karamzin, Danilevskii writes of Peter: “Seeing the fruits borne by the European tree, he concluded the plant itself was superior to the still fruitless, wild Russian variety.”84 Too impatient and too passionately enamored of Europe, Peter did not see that the “wild tree’s fruitful time had not yet come.”85 Here Danilevskii clarifies the difference between influence and transplantation. Peter undertook change on two distinct fronts. The first was innovations in “state activity,” borrowing technologies and administrative techniques, and this was the positive side of Peter’s activity. The second, negative, side was his reform of “lifestyle, manner, customs, and ideas.”86 Acts of transplantation, according to Danilevskii, can be judged by whether they “proceed from the internal needs of the people” and therefore take root on Russian soil, or “wither” like sickly plants.87 In this defense of Peter’s gardening skills, one feels the limits of Danilevskii’s hermeneutic. Like Herder, Belinskii, and his fellow pochvenniki, Danilevskii goes to great lengths to reconcile a model of organic national development with the Europeanizing influence of Peter the Great.
Danilevskii’s second model of cultural contact is grafting. In horticulture, grafting entails joining the tissue from one cultivar (the scion) to a rootstock that supplies it with water and nutrients. In an echo of Antonovich’s objection to the discourse of pochva, Danilevskii complains that the term “grafting” is used in the cultural domain in a “mysterious, mystical sense by people unacquainted with physiological theory or practical gardening.”88 Clearly Danilevskii takes seriously the botanical analogy, not as a system of metaphor or a way of speaking about culture whose substance lies elsewhere, but as a hermeneutic model. The very substance of Danilevskii’s civilizational system is the organic law that he obtains from biological givens. Danilevskii observes that this “mystical” understanding of grafting (imputed to his opponents) is “neither true among plants nor among cultural-historical types.”89 He describes the relationship between the scion and the rootstock in a tone of horror, as a parasitization, in which each retains its own character. The graft draws “from its host plant only the sap it needs for growth and development and converts it according to its specific traits. The wild rootstock becomes the means or servile instrument for the cultivated cutting or scion, like an artificial parasitic growth for whose benefit all the branches from the top to the base are cut off so they will not crowd it out. This is the true meaning of grafting.”90 The graft, from this perspective, is a parasite that sucks the vital juices from a rootstock that, once mutilated by the gardener, will never have the opportunity to produce its own flowers and fruit. Danilevskii notes that such grafting shows that the gardener appraises the rootstock to have no value in itself and no potential for further development. Grafting is used to produce consistent results and uniform fruits and to limit the operations of chance; Danilevskii calls this a “useless repetition of the old” that hampers free organic development.91 He further expands on the idea of the parasitic organism, although it is somewhat ambiguous whether he means Russia or Europe:
Is it possible for an organism, which for so long has been nourished by its own juices extracted by its own roots out of its own soil, to latch on with its suckers to another organism, leaving its own roots to dry out and make itself a parasite instead of an independent plant? If the soil is exhausted, that is, if it is missing any components required for full growth, it should be fertilized, to deliver these missing particles, to loosen through deep plowing those already in it so that they are better and more easily absorbed, rather than to parasitize, leaving its own roots to dry out.92
Danilevskii refers to plant suckers, or haustoria, that tap into the roots of other plants to extract nourishment. In the Slavophile discourse of rootlessness, Russian identity is generally represented as an “ungrounded” or “rootless” plant. However, if this passage is consistent with Danilevskii’s arguments elsewhere, then he is making a very different point indeed. It is not Russia that is rootless but rather Europe. European soil—the cultural matrix that nourishes its civilization—is exhausted. The very fact that the degenerating organism sends out suckers shows that Russia’s soil, on the other hand, is rich and vital—indeed, Danilevskii refers to Russia as a “virgin” land.93 Further drawing out the analogy, Danilevskii recommends fertilization and deep plowing, most likely meaning a revival of native folk culture.
Fertilization is the only unambiguously positive form of cultural contact that Danilevskii discusses. Nations, like plants, fertilize the ground in which they live and die, enriching it: “Among them [nations] we must distinguish the isolated types from the sequential types, the fruit of whose activity passed from one to another as fodder or fertilizer (that is, enrichment by various absorbable, nourishing substances).”94 Danilevskii remarks that those nations that do not rise to become cultural-historical types are (in his private idiom) “ethnographic” material for subsequent nations. They decompose, and their remains fertilize the ground on which yet greater civilizations arise.95 Among the ten civilizational types that Danilevskii identifies, he notes that six were successive rather than isolated, meaning that they successfully “fertilized” the ground for later civilizations: “Egypt and Phoenicia acted upon Greece, Greece upon Rome … and both Greece and Rome on Germanic-Roman Europe.”96 Danilevskii calls this “free interaction” among civilizational types, although it proceeds from the death of the donor culture. “Only in this way should the peoples of a certain cultural type become acquainted with the products of foreign experience,” he writes.97
By tracing the analogy of plant and nation over the course of the nineteenth century, it is possible to see how Russian national soil came to be seen as threatened—symbolically and materially—by alien forces. Just as Danilevskii regarded cultural influence as parasitization, his fellow pochvennik Dostoevsky also expressed fears of the organic nation under threat from hostile organisms invading Russia’s native soil. In his later work environmental threats were racialized and figured as invasions from ethnic outsiders. In this sense Dostoevsky’s national chauvinism and anti-Semitism are organically and fundamentally linked to the fetishization of native soil. Dostoevsky’s pochvennichestvo resembles other nationalist ideologies in which rootedness in the organic nation is the sine qua non of national belonging. Placing Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitism in the context of organic nationalism shows how entwined the symbolic and material significations of pochva are in pochvennichestvo. In his Writer’s Diary (July–August 1876), Dostoevsky writes about ethnic threats to Russian territory and the related ruin of its fertile soil. Writing on the cusp of the Russo-Turkish war, Dostoevsky asserts that Russian colonists should replace the Tatars in the Crimea, because of the latter’s “inability to work the soil properly.”98 Dostoevsky quotes a Ryleev poem to illustrate the Crimea’s former splendor: “Where bounteous meadows, fertile soil / Demand but trifling, easy toil, / Reward the plowman and restore, / His seed a hundred-fold or more.”99 But Dostoevsky fears that this national wealth is being squandered: he cautions that if Russians do not occupy this space and properly take root, then “Yids will certainly fall upon the Crimea and ruin the soil of the region.”100 Elsewhere Dostoevsky elaborates further on the perceived Jewish threat to the actual material soil that anchors the organic Russian nation: “Now the Yids are becoming landowners, and people shout and write everywhere that they are destroying the soil of Russia.” He rails against the capitalist “exhaustion” of both the soil and the Russian peasant: “A Yid, they say, having spent capital to buy an estate, at once exhausts all the fertility of the land he has just purchased in order to restore his capital with interest.”101 Jewish acquisition of farmland stands in for the capitalist rape of Russia’s fertile soil and the rooting out of the organic nation from its native soil. Dostoevsky writes that Jewish landowners “sucked the juices” (vysosali soki) from the peasants, using a botanical figure, rather than the more conventional topos of Jewish “blood-sucking” (vysosali krov’). His lexical choice echoes Danilevskii’s plant analogies, specifically the description of how an organism that is no longer nourished by its own “juices” (soki) parasitizes another by “latching on with its suckers” (prisosalsia sosal’tsami).102
Dostoevsky’s native soil conservatism excludes not only Jews, but other unrooted or nomadic peoples of the Russian Empire, like the Crimean Tatars referred to above. In The Adolescent (1875), one character associates deforestation and the ruin of the soil with the incursion of nomads: “They are depleting the soil, turning it into the steppe and preparing it for the Kalmyks.”103 As David Moon has shown, deforestation in Russia in the nineteenth century was already understood to be a factor in climate change.104 In this case, Dostoevsky suggests that deforestation will transform Russia into a barren steppe and Russians into rootless nomads. In the work of the philosopher Vladimir Solovev, climate change also became a discursive site in which old fears of nomadic invasions from the East were revived. Drawing on studies from agronomy and soil science, Solovev attributes climate change and drought to several factors: first, the external threat from the sukhovei (a hot wind originating in Central Asia); second, the internal threats of deforestation and “predatory agriculture,” which disturb virgin soil and vegetation. He describes the “slow desiccation of our soil, including chernozem [black earth]” and explains that “due to poor care, inadequate nourishment, excessive labor straining and exhausting its powers, the organism, no matter how well built, no matter with what high natural abilities it is gifted, is no longer able to function properly.”105
It is difficult to discern which “organism” Solovev has in mind; he appears to be no longer talking about soil, but about the Russian nation (narod) as the organic product of the soil. Indeed, Solovev asserts that desertification is not only caused by nature, it is also caused by social imbalances. He lists three issues that must be addressed to avert the threat to the native soil of Russia: raising the cultural level of the masses, channeling aid from the urban elites to people of the countryside, and addressing the “increasing desiccation of the Russian soil and the impossibility of leaving agriculture in its present form.”106 Solovev sees an imbalance in Russian society within the mirror of nature, and he proposes that desertification, the “enemy from the east,” can only be countered by a reconciliation between society and the narod; between city and country. Asia, both as an external force and as a figure for Russia’s own backwardness, is the enemy that Solovev seems to have identified, and only the general lifting of “the intellectual and cultural level of the masses” might neutralize the social factors leading to the desiccation of Russian soil.107
Soil science provided new ideas and ground for national mythmaking. Dostoevsky and Solovev were not wrong to warn of the degradation of Russian soil, although their translation of soil science into the cultural domain became the stuff of xenophobic myth. The scientific authority that Solovev drew on in his discussion of the degradation of the national soil was Vasilii Dokuchaev, one of the most important figures in soil science. His first major work on Russian soil, Russian Chernozem (Russkii chernozem, 1883), imported the peasant term for the Russian Empire’s rich, black soil into the domain of science as a natural object of national pride and universal scientific interest.108
In Russian Chernozem, Dokuchaev proposed that soil was not merely an inorganic mass of rock and mineral deposits but a unique organic body formed under particular climatic, topographical, and biological influences.109 Dokuchaev stressed the exceptionalism of Russian soil, asserting that many other countries “could last millions of years, but never, under the present climatic conditions, see the bountiful soil that is the native and incomparable wealth of Russia, and which is, I repeat again, the result of a surprisingly fortunate and terribly complicated complex of physical conditions!”110 Dokuchaev further notes that because of the unique properties of Russian soil, “we should be ashamed of having applied German agronomy in Russia to true Russian chernozem, without taking account of conditions of climate, vegetation, and soil conditions.”111 Dokuchaev’s emphasis on the particularity of Russian soil echoed the ongoing discourse of the Herderian organic nation growing out of its distinctive native soil. Dokuchaev validated the idea that Russian soil was special and further that only a distinctly Russian approach to soil science could capture its complexity; soil science became a privileged site of national science (otechestvennaia nauka).112
Accordingly, the national character of Dokuchaev’s work had a folkloric dimension, drawing on vernacular soil terminology and local folk knowledge of soil conditions.113 As he studied local soils, Dokuchaev spoke with peasants across Russia, sharing their stories and quoting them in his work. In Russian Chernozem, after describing the sinkholes along the P’iana River, for example, Dokuchaev relates a story passed on by local peasants: “Not infrequently the local population witnesses the formation of sinkholes…. About ten years ago, a house was ‘swallowed up’ in the village of Vorontsovo, about three versts east of Edelevo. The local inhabitants point out sinkholes that were formed ‘last summer’ or ‘the summer before last.’ This phenomenon is familiar to the local peasants, who say that all their land along the entire P’iana bank is of this kind.”114 Although Dokuchaev’s subject was natural science, his work entailed the gathering of oral history, local mythologies, and ethnographic data about the ways that people worked and managed the soil of their own regions.
It was in this way that Dokuchaev came to document the national “soil crisis” referred to by Solovev. In 1891 the Volga and central regions of Russia experienced one of the most serious droughts in recorded history, and by the summer the extent of the catastrophe was becoming clear as crops withered in the heat; 12.5 million people were in need of food aid by December, and the number would grow steadily over the following year.115 The Russian government was widely blamed for inadequately responding to the crisis, and public frustration was projected into the discursive sphere, where everyone from scientists to mystics proposed solutions for preventing future drought and famine. A charity volume for the victims of the famine was produced, including literary works and essays by such figures as Solovev, Lev Tolstoi, and the climatologist Aleksandr Voeikov.116 At every level of society, there was a new urgency to the ongoing discussion of climate change and soil management; the extensive social and political debates around pochva of the earlier decades were supplanted by debates about human effects on the environment, the fitness of steppe soil for cultivation, and the potential for reversing or mitigating erosion of soil, climate change, and drought. Dokuchaev was among the first scientists to publish a serious response to the crisis, Our Steppes, Past and Present (Nashi stepi prezhde i teper’, 1892), in which he proposed “improvements” to the steppes of southern Russia. Dokuchaev had apparently been considering the problem of steppe erosion even before the drought; visiting Gogol’s Dikanka estate in 1888, he lamented the destruction of the virgin steppe described in the novella “Taras Bulba.”117 Even for Dokuchaev, soil represented both a natural resource and a cultural patrimony that was under threat.
This chapter has charted how, over the course of the nineteenth century, a distinctive Russian discourse of native soil, or pochva, developed. Its origin was the German organicist tradition, particularly the Herderian concept of the organic nation. Herder’s analogic method of deriving universal laws of human historical and national development from the natural sciences, frequently from botany, produced both metaphors and methods that were used by Russian intellectuals to address critical questions about the nation. Intellectual movements like pochvennichestvo drew on the resources of organic nationalism in formulating an approach to Russia’s history and its immediate sociopolitical problems. While pochvennichestvo has been largely treated as a symbolic discourse of nationality, Dostoevsky’s descriptions of the Tatar and Jewish threats to the soil show that such symbolic discourses have both material counterparts and political implications. In folk and agrarian ideologies, rootedness is the defining feature of national belonging: as Dostoevsky’s pochvennichestvo, Danilevskii’s Pan-Slavism, and other nineteenth-century Russian nationalist discourses came out of the Herderian discourse of the organic nation, so, too did German Volkisch movements and, later, the Nazi ideology of Blut und Boden.118 Although Herder himself rejected national chauvinism and celebrated the distinctive virtues of each nation, his vision of the primordial nation rooted in native soil was put to a variety of political purposes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.119 The discourse of the organic Herderian nation in the writings of the Slavophiles, the pochvenniki, and others would be questioned by political radicals and philosophical materialists like Nikolai Dobroliubov, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and Dmitrii Pisarev. In the writings of these “men of the sixties,” soil also became a central symbol—not of national character, but of a materialist worldview. The contest between these mystical, national, and material discourses of soil is a subject of the next chapter.