Ingrid Kleespies is Associate Professor of Russian Studies in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Florida. Her interests include early nineteenth-century Russian literature and culture, history of emotions, and Romanticism. She is the author of A Nation Astray: Nomadism and National Identity in Russian Literature; The Necessary Man: Petr Chaadaev and the Invention of Russian Literature (forthcoming); and the co-editor (with Lyudmila Parts) of Goncharov in the Twenty-First Century.
This post is part of a series dedicated to new research on the Decembrists and their legacy that appeared in a recent special issue of Canadian-American Slavic Studies 59.4 (2025) edited by Alexander Martin and Emily Wang: The Decembrist Bicentennial: New Perspectives on Russia in the 1820s. Work by Yasyn Abdullaev, Mikhail Belousov, Anna Nath, Stanislav Tarasov, and Ingrid Kleespies examines Decembrist emotional culture; the complications, legal and otherwise, of the interregnum that galvanized the Decembrists’ decision to act in December 1825; and the formation of the Third Department in response to the uprising. The introduction to this series of blog posts, also by Ingrid Kleespies, may be found here, while the previous post in the series is here.
In October 1820, the soldiers of Russia’s elite Semenovskii regiment mutinied in response to harsh conditions. In the weeks after the mutiny’s suppression, the young officer Petr Iakovlevich Chaadaev (1794-1856) was entrusted with the task of delivering an official report about the incident to Alexander I at the Congress of the Holy Alliance. By all accounts Chaadaev completed the mission successfully, which placed him in line for promotion. That December, however, Chaadaev unexpectedly submitted a request for retirement from military service. The retirement was granted in February 1821, but without the expected promotion—a form of punishment.
On the surface, a young aristocrat’s decision to quit military service hardly seems remarkable, yet this incident attracted attention and earned Chaadaev a rebellious reputation. It was the origin of what became “Chaadaev,” a seminal cultural sign that crystallized in the nineteenth-century Russian imagination around his 1836 First Philosophical Letter, a scandalous denunciation of Russian history and identity.
Why was Chaadaev’s 1821 retirement so notable? What does it illuminate about the liberal political-emotional milieu of the Decembrist era? While awaiting retirement, Chaadaev sent a letter to his aunt. In it, he expressed contempt for the promotion and for authority as such. In keeping with official practice, the letter was read by the censors, and the contents were deemed concerning enough that they were reported to the tsar.
It may seem surprising that Chaadaev, a promising officer, would express such sentiments—and that he would he do so in a letter he knew was likely to be read by the very authorities he denounced. Two hundred years after theDecembrist Rebellion, however, it is important to reexamine the central role emotion played in liberal elites’ understanding of themselves as political actors, an understanding in which a seemingly offhand expression of sentiment in a personal letter could constitute a legible political act.
Chaadaev wrote to his aunt that he found it “more amusing to disdain [the promotion] than to obtain it” and that it further amused him “to show scorn to people who scorn everyone.” His words are apparently directed at his commander, but contemporaries and later commentators have always understood them as a veiled barb aimed at Alexander himself.
The tone of the passage is jarring, both in comparison with Chaadaev’s usual style and in terms of expectations around discussions of senior officers. Chaadaev expresses explicit contempt for authority, and if that authority is understood to be the tsar, then this contempt is directed at the one individual traditionally understood not only to be above contempt, but uniquely entitled to display contempt toward others. Moreover, Chaadaev rhetorically places himself as equal, and even superior to, the highest authority in the land, and as entitled to display an emotion—contempt—traditionally reserved for this authority.
Chaadaev’s expression of scorn should be situated within the broader emotional milieu of the age of revolutions, in which expression of popular contempt for the monarch was an important rhetorical position. In the period leading up to the American Revolution—a key political and emotional model for the Decembrists—the colonists’ ire was especially provoked by a perceived tone of disrespect from King George III and Parliament. As the poet Philip Freneau (1752-1832) put it, colonists strived to “[pay] in the coin that was paid,” treating the monarch with the very scorn he had directed at them.
As historian Nicole Eustace argues, scorn and contempt, which monarchic subjects once accepted as a marker of royal power in relation to the ruled, now gradually became offensive. Demonstration of disdain for authority, and a concomitant lack of fear or refusal to perform subservience, was a potent gesture. Further, following literary scholar Angela Esterhammer’s discussion of the Romantic performative, there was a firm conviction that utterance could affect sociopolitical relations. In other words, speech came to be understood as a form of action that had the power to alter reality.
Chaadaev and fellow Decembrist-era elites were well versed in the changing Western political norms of the era. The old model of unconditional loyalty to the crown no longer seemed acceptable, and many previously loyal subjects felt antipathy toward the autocratic regime. This situation was amplified by Alexander’s political shift in the 1810s, which saw him stepping back from liberal reforms. It was around this time that those who were particularly disillusioned founded the secret societies that would become the Decembrist circles, of which Chaadaev was initially a member. These elites looked to the American system of government as a model and believed that some sort of constitution was necessary for Russia. Many advocated for a constitutional monarchy in which the monarch would become “the first among equal citizens.” As historian Stanislav Tarasov describes, the Decembrists and others resented Alexander for what they perceived as his contempt for them and for Russia. These feelings were especially pronounced in 1820-21, when Chaadaev wrote his letter.
Legal scholar William Ian Miller offers a critical insight about the place of contempt in a democracy. The permissibility of “mutual contempt” is an essential component, an equal-access “strategy of indifference in the treatment of others” available to all members of a democratic society. Chaadaev’s letter points directly to the importance of this issue in the Decembrist milieu. The young officer writes as if he is a citizen entitled to show disrespect toward authority.
The punishment he faced for this utterance, meanwhile, exposed his subjecthood. Like other “petty” feelings, contempt is arguably intrinsically related to power dynamics and perceptions of what literary scholar Sianne Ngai, in her first book, Ugly Feelings, terms “obstructed agency.” Such feelings are of critical importance to modern “models of subjectivity, collectivity, and agency” because they arise from “predicaments posed by a general state of obstructed agency with respect to other human actors or to the social as such – a dilemma […] charged with political meaning regardless of whether the obstruction is actual or fantasized, or whether the agency obstructed is individual or collective.” What makes the figure of Chaadaev particularly resonant is that his performance of scorn for authority in a personal letter is at once a demonstrably rebellious, equalizing act and an expression of the very complications he and his contemporaries faced in terms of political agency.
Chaadaev’s retirement from the military, and utterance of contempt for authority, left a lasting imprint on Russian culture in a way that the many other resignations, firings, and retirements of the time did not. He enacted a uniquely resonant emotional model complicated by the fact that contempt is a generallynegative feeling. Moreover, rhetorical performance is always subject to diverse interpretations: was Chaadaev’s retirement a vain gesture aimed at impressing his liberal friends—or a deeply meaningful and creative use of the limited tools (micropolitics) available? These are lasting questions, as is clear in the enduringly ambivalent presence of “Chaadaev” in Russian culture.
