Abstract
American ideas about Russia in the late nineteenth century exhibited all of the contradictions of the Victorian culture from which they emerged, while at the same time revealing some of the significant (and growing) differences between American and continental European thought. American writers and especially the scholars discussed in this essay-carried Victorianism’s sense of optimism, faith in individual improvement, and belief that character was defined by the ability to overcome nature and natural urges. While holding on to notions of cultural hierarchy rooted in personal virtue, American Victorians adhered to the principle that individual people and perhaps even entire peoples could improve. At the same time, though, American scholars in the Victorian era adopted concepts and language from continental European (and especially French) writers that envisioned unchanging and essential national characters. American scholars’ discussions of late nineteenth-century Russia, therefore, reveal what a leading historian called
“one of the most tragic contradictions within American Victorian culture”: the tension between the prospect of change and the rigidity of hierarchies or, perhaps, between the plasticity of individual nature and the permanence of national character.1