Nikolai Polevoy

Who was Nikolai Polevoy?

Nikolai Alekseevich Polevoy was a controversial Russian editor, writer, translator, and historian; his brother was the critic and journalist Ksenofont Polevoy and his sister the writer and publisher of folktales Ekaterina Avdeeva.

Polevoy was from an old merchant family from Kursk but was born in Irkutsk, where his father was director of a Russian-American company, and lived there until 1811, when the family moved first to Moscow and then to Kursk. His father, disappointed in his refusal to take up the family business and disapproving of his interest in literature and history, refused to pay for his education, so he taught himself. In February 1820 he moved to Moscow, where he attended both the theater and lectures at Moscow University; he visited Saint Petersburg and met Alexander Griboyedov, Vasily Zhukovsky, Faddei Bulgarin, and other literary figures, and began a literary career, publishing articles, poems, and translations in the journals of the day.

In 1825 he started his own journal, Moskovskii telegraf, hoping to attract the writers he admired, like Pushkin, as well as emphasize the positive contributions of the merchant class to Russia. Unfortunately, the aristocrats of the Pushkin circle viewed him as a vulgar parvenu, and his attack on Karamzin's reactionary History of the Russian State offended many influential people, notably Pyotr Vyazemsky, who had been Karamzin's ward and whose sister was married to the older historian. When Polevoy wrote his own six-volume History of the Russian People, it was savaged by almost everyone. The brilliant and idiosyncratic critic Apollon Grigoryev wrote in his memoirs, "From our present [1864] point of view it would be impossible to conceive anything more indecent than the article that the editor of the Moscow Herald [i.e., Mikhail Pogodin] hurled against The History of the Russian People, if the articles [by Nikolai Nadezhdin] against it in the old men's European Herald had not been even more indecent... The factions do not seem to have been in their right minds thirty years ago. What was the cause of their being so hostile that they foamed at the mouth?" Polevoy emphasized that history followed laws and did not depend on the actions of particular individuals; he also was one of the first to present Russian history as a confrontation between Europe and Asia.