This dissertation examines the lives, works, and careers of Peter Andreevich Slovtsov (1767-1843) and Ivan Timofeevich Kalashnikov (1797-1863). Known today largely for their roles as Siberian “firsts”—Slovtsov as Siberia’s first native-born historian, Kalashnikov as Siberia’s first native-born novelist—their names often appear in discussions of the origins of Siberian regionalism, a movement of the later nineteenth century that decried Siberia’s “colonial” treatment by the tsarist state and called for greater autonomy for the region. Drawing on a wide range of archival materials—including two decades of correspondence between the two men—this study shows that Slovtsov and Kalashnikov, far from being disgruntled critics of the tsarist state, were its proud agents. They identified with their service careers, I suggest, because they believed that autocratic rule was the best system for Russia and because serving the tsarist state provided what they saw as their greatest opportunity to participate in a progressive, world-historical saga of enlightenment. Their understanding of this saga and its Russian reverberations gave form and content to their senses of self.
An exploration of Slovtsov and Kalashnikov’s complex lives through the long paper trail that makes them accessible today offers revealing perspectives on the social, cultural, and intellectual history of Russia—in particular on topics of service, selfhood, bureaucratic culture, education, and the intersection of public and private life—as well as on the history of Siberia and its place in the empire. Kalashnikov and Slovtsov lived during the apogee of the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, a period commonly described as a time of growing dissension between “the state” and “educated society.” But their lives offer a useful reminder that that “the state” and “educated society” were often one and the same. Slovtsov and Kalashnikov saw the tsarist state as a powerful agent of progressive change and argued passionately, both in their published works as well as in their private correspondence, in favor of an imperial narrative of enlightenment. They saw Siberia as a place made whole, improved, and, indeed, made “Russia” by imperial rule.