Goloubeva, M. Contemporaries’ memoirs about Duchess Dorothea of Courland, the Warsaw episode. Daugavpils Universitātes Humanitārās fakultātes XII Zinātnisko lasījumu materiāli. Vēsture. VI sējums, I daļa. Daugavpils: Daugavpils Universitātes izdevniecība Saule, 2003. 132 lpp.>50.-55.
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[50.lpp.]

Throughout most of the twentieth century, Latvian historiography has operated within the paradigm of national history. This approach, centering on the development of an ethnos into a nation, tended to ignore layers of historical experience not related to the central narrative. Among these layers, often relegated to the margins of historical research, was the political culture of the Baltic (usually referred to as ‘Baltic German’) elite in the early modern period. The present emergence of a strong European dimension, parallel to the renewal of the emphasis on regionalism makes it possible, in my opinion, to see the development of regions such as Courland from a new perspective, European and regional at the same time, rather than anachronistically projecting twentieth-century nation-building into the past.

I have chosen one episode in the history of Courland - the diplomatic visit of Duchess Dorothea, the wife of Duke Peter Biron, to Warsaw in 1791-2, in order to demonstrate the relevance of European political and intellectual climate for the elite of the Baltic lands at the given time.

Dorothea’s first brief but significant diplomatic activity took place in the 1790s [1], during a new stage of the conflict between the duke and the nobility of Courland. This conflict was one of the reasons of Courland’s later incorporation into Russia. At the beginning of the 1790s, Courland was formally still a Polish fief, and both conflicting sides appealed to the Seim and the king of Poland for a resolution of the conflict. During a stay in Warsaw in 1791-2, Dorothea attempted to influence the decision of the Polish legislators, as well as to promote her oldest daughter’s rights to succeed her father in Courland in the absence of a male heir. These plans did not bring any lasting results because of the third partition of Poland, when Courland became a province of the Russian Empire.

Today, I am offering to look at two texts that reflect the perception of Dorothea's activity as a diplomat by her contemporaries from Courland, and to try and put their memoirs of her activity in the context of European political culture of the period. The two texts in question are the memoirs of Baron Karl Heinrich Heyning, one of the representatives of the nobility of Courland at the meeting of the Polish Seim, and the diaries of Elisa von der Recke, a poet and Dorothea's sister, who also accompanied the duchess on her mission to Warsaw. Both texts interpret the events before and during the voting in the Seim which tried to resolve the conflict between the duke and the nobility in Courland. They look at these events, however, from almost diametrically opposite political perspectives.

[51.lpp.]

Heyning speaks of his own position as a defense of republicanism - implying, of course, aristocratic republicanism - that is, republican government in which the nobility as a whole has the right to participate in political decision-making and to control the largely powerless monarch. This model existed in Poland since the sixteenth century [2], and judging by Heyning’s memoirs as well as by his compatriots’ voluminous polemic writings during the same conflict, it was significantly incorporated into the political culture of Curonian nobility. Its ideology is a combination of the Polish tradition of aristocratic republicanism and of the post-feudal self-perception of Baltic German knighthood.

It is impossible, on the other hand, to describe Elisa von der Recke's position as simply defending the duke's prerogatives in Courland. Her description of the events represents rather an Enlightenment vision of public good combined with an articulate patriotism for Courland with which she identifies her own and her sister Dorothea’s political loyalties. In her text we can see a complicated combination of political and social identities, in which personal friendship networks, both in Courland and in Europe, play a central role.

Heyning's memoirs, published in Berlin at the end of the 19h century, were written rather shortly after the Third Partition of Poland and the incorporation of Courland in Russia - that is, only a few years after the events described in them. According to the requirements of the chosen genre of ‘state memoirs’, Heyning describes the conflict around the Courland question at the Polish Seim in terms of interest politics. His characterisation of the parties of the conflict is straightforward: on the one hand he sees the defenders of “republican principle” and “democratic views”, on the other - the friends or the so-called “creatures” of the ducal family, grouped around Dorothea. There is a certain fluctuation between the two groups, as this or that political figure is described by Heyning as 'betraying' the first group for the second.

In such episodes, Heyning usually describes the person in question as selfish and unprincipled, and accuses Dorothea of corrupting influence on politicians, as in the following fragment: “ ...The decisive moment was drawing near. The duchess doubled her efforts... The Vice-Chancellor Kolontay, who received from her three beautiful pictures and 2000 ducats as a gift for decorating his house, proclaimed himself against us despite his earlier repeated assurances (of support)... On this occasion Kolontay betrayed his democratic views as a sheer demagogue, and from that moment on, I perceived him as our certain enemy”[3].

Thus, Dorothea is not seen merely as a representative of her husband, and Heyning's opponent, in Warsaw - she is represented as a temptress luring yet another weak-minded victim away from the republican ideal. What her own political ideas are is of no importance for Heyning. Unlike himself and his colleagues, who in his vision stand for the impartial (“unpartheyisch”) and just principles, she represents sheer personal interest. Thus Heyning sees it as a significant fact that she chooses to ally herself with the party of the [52.lpp.] so-called “elegants” in the Seim, whom he himself describes as influenced by liberal ideas and French clubs. His own allies, on the other hand, are the so-called “moustaches”, the conservative part of the deputies who wore traditional Polish dress and opposed “foreign” values.

This duality of “false” and “true” ideas, represented in Heyning's text, has a far-reaching cultural meaning. The 'moustaches' stand for the old idea of “noble freedom”, Heyning's own brand of aristocratic republicanism. They are conservative and represent the feudal values which are, in his opinion, compromised by modern ideas of the “elegants” The “elegants”, on the other hand, are susceptible to ‘dubious’ French ideas and effeminate French fashion - thus they are, in Heyning’s eyes, natural allies for a deceitful woman meddling in politics. We can see the same attitude in his description of Dorothea's behaviour at the decisive session of the Seim, when the proposal of the commission on Courland, which Heyning opposed, had to be voted: “The duchess was in the gallery in a very elegant dress, surrounded by her friends; she smiled and looked through her lorgnette now at one, now at another (deputy), but was meanwhile very anxious. The majority was clearly for us...” [4].

The topos of Dorothea’s deceitfulness is further explored by Heyning in the episode after the proposal of the commission was voted down: he describes Dorothea fainting - or, he adds bitterly, ‘pretending to faint’. And finally, after part of the deputies leave the premises, Heyning describes a spontaneous second voting arranged by Dorothea's allies, in which the proposal of the commission is accepted. Even though there is no direct way for Heyning to blame the defeat of his party on Dorothea, he creates the image of her invisible presence at the second voting by referring several times to the movement of her supporters between the scene of decision-making and the absent duchess. She is implicated in Heyning’s eyes in promoting an unjust resolution of the Seim.

In Heyning’s eyes, Dorothea achieves her ends by using specifically feminine charms. This vision of female policy presented by Heyning is deeply rooted in Enlightenment culture itself, and present in the works of major writers of the period. According to Rousseau,

“Woman, weak as she is… perceives and judges the forces at her disposal to supplement her weakness, and those forces are the passions of man. Her own mechanism is more powerful than ours; she has many levers which may set the human heart in motion. She must find a way to make us desire what she cannot achieve unaided… without seeming to have any such purpose” [5].

On this point German Enlightenment culture, which Courland’s elite largely shared, did not differ greatly from the views expressed by Rousseau, in his novel Emile and elsewhere. Woman, implicitly inferior, was suspected of being capable to mess up the harmony of family and society at large, if given too much freedom. As Richard van Dülmen has put it, Enlightenment culture was an overtly masculine culture, in which women could participate only passively [6].

[53.lpp.]

Even the women of the nobility, according to van Dülmen, were excluded from public discourse on intellectual and political matters. It remains an intriguing question, to what extent the exceptional status of a woman like Duchess Dorothea made her an exception to this rule, but as we can see from Heyning’s memoirs, it did not prevent largely misogynist stereotypes of feminine behaviour being applied to her.

Elisa von der Recke's diaries, written apparently during the events in Warsaw, were later annotated and perhaps partly edited by the author, but published only in the 1980s [7]. The diaries present a very different vision, both in terms of structure and attitude. First of all, the lack of formal constraints allows the writer to combine several levels in her narrative, thus introducing an entire scope of political, social, philosophical and private discourses of the time. The information provided by her concerning the two sisters’ stay in Warsaw ranges from a discussion of the poverty of the Polish peasants to the discussion of Goethe’s Werther with a Polish lady of the court, and from the events in Courland to the latest news concerning the events in revolutionary France.

Unlike Heyning, Elisa does not clearly show who exactly are her sister’s and her own political allies. In fact, throughout the Warsaw diary she avoids speaking definitely of Dorothea’s concrete tactics in the given situation. Instead, she repeatedly identifies their mutual goals with ‘happy fatherland’ or ‘all the best for our fatherland’, always joining the concern for the future of Dorothea’s daughters to her more general patriotic aspirations. She does not represent Dorothea’s goals as identical to those of her husband, Duke Peter, and does not see Dorothea as an instrument of his policy. On the contrary, she tends to present him obstructing her sister’s plans and trying to ruin the links of sisterly solidarity existing between Dorothea and herself, as in the following passage: “The duke wrote a very dissatisfied letter to Daria about me, in which he says he wishes that I did not meddle in any affairs because I only spoil everything… To be misunderstood and badly judged is the fate of all those who act impartially. The duke’s ingratitude towards me should not anger me and prevent me from doing him good, when I can do so without harm for my fatherland” [8].

Elisa’s representation of her own and her sister’s impartiality is further enhanced by the distance she maintains regarding inner struggles in Courland. She repeatedly stresses Dorothea’s and her own disinterested position regarding the interests of concrete political and social groups inside Courland. Thus, after describing a visit of a deputy of the Bürgerstand from Courland during which he attempts to ensure Dorothea’s support for the complaint against the Curonian nobility to the Polish Seim, she comments: “How rare are the people who completely forget, to which estate they belong, and who completely impartially look only to the good of the whole!” [9]

The only persons described by Elisa as capable of impartial approach (she uses the same word as Heyning - unparteiisch) are Dorothea and herself. Like some sort of caring mother-figures, they are represented to settle the complications created by the men, as in the following passage: “I have great hopes that our plans… will proceed happily [a [54.lpp.] reference to the marriage plans for Dorothea’s eldest daughter], if only our duke does not spoil this and other opportunities for himself…” There follows a long description of the duke’s contradictory instructions to his deputies in Warsaw and these deputies’ troublesome characters, after which von der Recke adds: “Future will show, whether Daria will manage to bring the matters back in good form”[10].

It is, thus, only Dorothea who can, according to Elisa, influence this difficult situation for the better. When their male co-players show themselves incapable, in Elisa’s words, of understanding their best interests, she constantly refers to Dorothea and herself as the guarding spirits of Courland’s future: for example “we do not see it fit that the duke and the nobility should reconcile themselves before the decision of the Seim”, or (another example) “after the decision, according to our plan, the duke must do more for the land”.

To summarise Elisa’s vision of her sister’s diplomatic activity, it can be said that she sees it simultaneously in the light of a particularist patriotic concern, and in the light of the late Enlightenment ethic of common good, tinged with sentimentalism. In any case, in Elisa von der Recke’s perception, politics has sentimental rather than interest-oriented goals. Throughout her diary, the references to friendships, both in aristocratic and literary circles of Europe and in Courland itself, play a central role. Elisa von der Recke sees politics as an enlightened search for ‘the good of the land’ and as a game between several networks of friends and associates at the same time.

Both texts discussed in this paper show, in my opinion, the interplay of local political circumstances and European trends, captured at a moment when feudal and Enlightenment ideologies coexisted in the culture of the elite both in Poland and in Courland. As documents of political culture, both present valuable evidence for the history of Courland - and for that of Europe.

Autores uzmanības centrā ir Kurzemes vēstures fragments - Kurzemes hercoga Pētera Bīrona sievas Dorotejas diplomātiskā vizīte uz Varšavu 1791.-1792.g. Balstoties uz diviem vēstures avotiem - laikabiedru atmiņām, rakstā tiek analizēta tā laikā politiskās apziņas un politiskās kultūras specifika, kā arī tiek parādīta feodālās ideoloģijas un apgaismības iezīmju līdzāspastāvēšana Kurzemes un Polijas elites apziņā.
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[1] The period of her diplomatic activity of greater significance was before and during the Congress of Vienna, and largely unrelated to Courland. See Valda Kvaskova (ed.), Briefe der Herzogin Dorothea von Kurland.- Riga, 1999.- Introduction.

[2] On the ideology and main principles of the republicanism of Polish nobility, see Norman Davies, God’s Playground. A History of Poland, Columbia University Press.- 1982.- Chapter 10.- Anarchia: The Noble Democracy.

[3] K.H.Heyning, Aus Polens und Kurlands letzten Tagen.- Berlin, 1897.- p.371.

[4] Ibid., p. 373.

[5] Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile, transl. By Barbara Foxley.- London, 1974.- p.105.

[6] Richard van Dulmen, Kultur und Alltag in der Fruhen Neuzeit.- Munich, 1999.- p.259.

[7] Elisa von der Recke, Tagebücher und Aufzeichnungen.- Munich, 1984.

[8] Ibid., p.190.

[9] Ibid., p.183.

[10] Ibid., p.192.

Satura rādītājs

Ievietots: 03.03.2003.

HISTORIA.LV