Anna Nath is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Rutgers University.
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, by Ingrid Kleespies, may be found here.
We know the “who,” “where,” and “when” of the event: on 14 December 1825, members of a secret society used the period of general confusion surrounding the interregnum that followed the unexpected death of Tsar Alexander I and led troops to the Senate Square in St. Petersburg to demand a constitutional form of government for Russia. A long standstill, a quick dispersal once artillery fire against the rebels began—this was a “non-event.”
The swift and severe punishments meted out against all involved in the secret society, however, reverberated through not only the highest aristocratic families in Russia, but throughout the European continent—five hanged and over a hundred sentenced to a lifetime of hard labor in the Siberian mines.
Over the next two hundred years, the story of the Decembrists underwent multiple transformations. The rebels were cast, in turn, as the first Russian revolutionaries and the rock on which the Russian intelligentsia built its proverbial “church”; as self-absorbed, naïve young men who played games with secret societies; and, most recently, as “foreign agents” seeking to undermine the integrity of the Russian state.
But why did these young men act in the first place? How did they decide to put everything on the line—not just their titles and possessions, but the very survival of their families, who ended up alone in European Russia? Faced with the same choices in similar circumstances, would anyone now become a “ Decembrist”?
I argue that the road to Senate Square began in the distinctive post-Napoleonic temporality of rapid and sweeping historical change and its generation of historical actors. For Russians of the time, this temporality was also punctuated by their country’s victory over France in the Patriotic War of 1812. How one understands his or her own place in the conflation of past, present, and future is crucial to understanding why and how one decides to act.
My article in our special issue, “The Book of Boredom,” is based on the diaries of Nikolai Turgenev (1789-1871), a founder of the first Decembrist secret society in 1816, a life-long supporter of the abolition of serfdom, and an avid diarist. He left Russia in the summer of 1824 for health reasons, but despite being away during the uprising itself, he was sentenced to death in absentia. Turgenev visited his homeland briefly after he was amnestied by Alexander II, while his rich epistolary archive only returned to Russia in the last years of the Russian Empire.
As a young man, he had written about everything, his diaries becoming a way to process both the rapid historical changes around him and the deep personal melancholia and inner pain he experienced. Between 1814 and 1816, Napoleon was defeated; the victorious Russian army entered Paris twice; and the Congress of Vienna, where Turgenev worked on the financial committee, reestablished a peace framework for the entire European continent. And yet Turgenev’s sense of unhappiness and boredom permeated his diary throughout. What an extraordinary time to be bored!
Turgenev was not really “bored,” of course. He was melancholic, a term he used extensively in his own writing. A deep sadness and deep loneliness, melancholy is an experience of loss. The 1810s had loss aplenty—people lost their lives, their comrades, their homes, and their certainty in the future.
Famously, Sigmund Freud regarded melancholy as a pathological state of no return, and a melancholic as a figure unable to act. Meanwhile, the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, influenced by Freud, considered melancholy more than an emotion or a feature of individual psychology. Instead, Benjamin saw it as a philosophical outlook deeply connected to both historical context and time itself, with profound implications for one’s senses of the past, present, and future. Through his diary, Turgenev performed the work of remembering and recollecting, and, in the process, resisting amnesia.
Employing a psychoanalytic understanding of melancholy as a type of mourning, and of the melancholic as a figure “outside time,” my article engages with the diary as a mechanism by which the “working-through” of the melancholic state takes place. Through the pages written during the years 1814-1816, coinciding with the latter part of the Russian army’s European campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars, Turgenev was able to break out of his temporal disequilibrium, re-enter the present, and focus on the future—still melancholic but able to act.
At the start of the ninth volume of his diaries, Turgenev was decidedly resigned. He had given up on the present and the future alike, and dared neither to dream nor to grieve. He dreaded his possible return to Russia, even as he wrote about his deep and unabating love for his fatherland (otechestvo) and felt angry when others dismissed Russia’s role in the overthrow of Napoleon. Turgenev hailed republics as the ideal for humanity and was distraught at examples of “frenzied” autocracy, but still believed that the abolition of serfdom was inevitable. As his time and work in Vienna continued, and the city’s celebratory atmosphere—Austria being part of the coalition that had recently repelled Napoleon—reached ever higher pitches, Turgenev’s diary, by contrast, revealed only darkening feelings.
And then, for six long weeks, there were no diary entries at all.
When Turgenev returned to his diary, having fed on a steady diet of novels and fairytales in the interim, his first thoughts were of people and their actions: those who “serve the fatherland” and those who “drive it.” Merely “serving” one’s homeland was no longer enough for him. Turgenev was still melancholic, but it was his relationship to action as a means of “recalibrating” the present, that the diary now revealed. Turgenev’s political assessments were now also much more forceful than before. He noted that, in Russia, it was dangerous to write from the liberal perspective because liberalism was often conflated with Jacobinism. He wanted, however, to write about improving civic education and people’s readiness for change, along with the need to convince those who were not yet on board with such a program.
In other words, Turgenev had re-engaged!
When he moved to Frankfurt at the end of 1815, and in the months that followed, the pace at which he toggled between his difficult thoughts on the past, present, and future and his plans for Russia accelerated. It was as if he were trying to grasp the present, to break through his position “outside of time.” He pondered staying in Paris, but the desire to feel useful to Russia overcame all. Along with his sadness at not being able to partake in a hopeful celebration of a new 1816, he filled several pages with thoughts and calculations on ending serfdom.
On 29 January 1816, he wrote, “I’m beginning to believe that with such fiery and firm desire to do something useful for the fatherland, I cannot but accomplish it under the right circumstances…having an opportunity.” Action, Turgenev acknowledged, would require sacrifice—yet, he continued (quoting Rousseau’s Confessions), virtue and duty were worth even large sacrifices. What was one to do, then? Although, by his own admission, he did not yet know, he felt compelled, at the very least, not to be silent and bravely speak the truth everywhere.
“The whole purpose of my life, all that is connecting me to life, all that makes it bearable,” he wrote on 18 February, “is hope for the happiness and true greatness of Russia. The beginning of her happiness will form the entire happiness of my personal life.” The Nikolai Turgenev who returned to Russia in 1816 was a radical melancholic. The future was still uncertain and unknown, but no longer precluded as such. Still melancholic, Turgenev was now able to act “for the happiness and true greatness of Russia.”
The Decembrists, Turgenev among them, were famously unsuccessful in bringing a constitutional form of government to Russia in 1825. Yet Turgenev’s diaries shed light on how one young man living through a transformational historical upheaval when “past” crumbled, “present” became unintelligible, and “future” foreclosed, was able to reclaim his temporarily collapsed present and make a decision to act for a future—both his and Russia’s. Melancholia is an often-recorded sentiment at times of rapid and profound historical change, but it is not the end. Purpose and duty to something bigger than oneself rekindles hope, accepts sacrifice, and demands action. The melancholia of hope lives on.
