A Retired Brigadier Caught between Feelings and Social Hierarchy. The Concept of Friendship in a Late 18th-Century Epistolary Exchange

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. 2020. Vol. 21. No. 2. P. 293–317.

Lavrinovich M.

The paper examines social differences in the understanding of the concept of ‘friendship’ in late 18th – early 19th century Russia deployed in the unpublished correspondence of Count Aleksandr Vorontsov, a member of the social elite of the Catherinean Age, and Aleksei D´iakonov, an obscure official who was Vorontsov’s client. While letter exchange was a kind of freemasonic practice, and both correspondents were members of a Masonic lodge, Vorontsov used sentimentalist language and addressed his client as “friend,” trying to erase or at least obscure the social boundaries between them. Social equality, even as a rhetorical formula, was progressively becoming possible between an aristocrat and an educated commoner such as D´iakonov, and it unfolded in rhetorical terms. D´iakonov adopted vis-à-vis his patron an attitude that reflected their respective positions on the hierarchical ladder, thus conforming to the traditional behavior of a Russian official and avoiding Western (Masonic, or sentimentalist) rhetoric of equality.

Keywords: социальная иерархия, переписка, social hierarchy, Россия XVIII века, friendship, history of emotions, история эмоций, 18th century Russia, сентиментализм, дружба как социальный феномен, correspondence, Alexánder Vorontsov, Александр Романович Воронцов, Алексей Малиновский, Aleksei Malinovskii, freemasons, sentimentalism

Publication based on the results of: Formal Institutions and Informal Practices in the Russian Empire in the Second Half of the XVIII – Beginning of the XIX Centuries: Interdependence, Mechanisms, Languages of Description (2017)