The Russian Jesuit Myth
Résumé
By analyzing both political events and intellectual texts, the autor of this article shows the content of the Russian Jesuit myth, its origins, the mechanisms of its construction, its Russian and non-Russian intellectual influences,
and its specific features. Of particular significance is also how “men of letters”
became “men of action”: how, on the one hand, some thinkers sought to put
their knowledge and expertise at the service of the imperial government to
achieve the state’s objectives (or indeed actively formulated those objectives),
and how, on the other hand, that government, to some extent attentive to
public opinion, agreed to “collaborate” with representatives of this “societyin-
the-making.” Not least, the article makes it possible to understand how
this myth, as part of a more complex ideological construction, was used in
Russian policy to solve one of the “great imperial questions”—the Polish
Question—after the 1863 uprising.
More broadly, then, this story, which belongs to the history of relations
between the Catholic and Russian Orthodox worlds, shows the connections
between the history of ideas and the history of imperial governance in non-
Russian, non-Orthodox territories throughout the 19th century. Like other
stories connected to mythology, it is an attempt to understand how a myth
is born, persists for decades, indeed centuries, transforms, and then partly or
completely disappears.