How the “Hand of the Almighty” dealt with the “Telegraph of Ideas”

On April 3, 1834, by the highest order of Nicholas I, the Moscow Telegraph magazine was banned, which had been published since January 1825 and, according to Vissarion Belinsky, had become “the best in Russia since the beginning of journalism” during its existence.

As reported in the book “The History of Russian Journalism of the 18th-19th Centuries” edited by A. V. Zapadov (Moscow: Higher School, 1973), the Moscow Telegraph magazine, published by Nikolai Polev, was a new and very significant phenomenon in Russian journalism and culture. :

“It was a social-scientific-literary publication with a primary interest in issues of practical life. Shackled by censorship orders, Polevoy could not enter the department of politics and directly discuss political topics. I had to resort to all sorts of tricks, allusions and allegories in order to give scientific and literary materials a political edge. Herzen correctly remarked that “in attacking literary authorities, Polevoy had others in mind as well”, “he used every opportunity to touch upon the most delicate questions of politics, and did so with amazing dexterity.”

Nikolai Polevoy himself called his journal “Telegraph of Ideas”. Indeed, modernity, topicality were the main qualities of the Moscow Telegraph, which favorably distinguished it from the magazines of that time.

As described in the “History of Russian Journalism of the 18th-19th Centuries”, the very name of the journal emphasized the publisher’s attitude to the speed of transmitting various information, new ideas in all spheres of human activity:

“True, as applied to the era of the 1820s, one can speak very conditionally about the “speed” of transmitting news: at that time, an optical semaphore telegraph operated in Europe, and in Russia there was no telegraph at all. The very word “telegraph” was new and took root in Russian thanks to a magazine, on the cover of which Polevoy placed a lithographed picture depicting a semaphore telegraph against the background of a romantic landscape: a lake, sailing yachts, mountains in the distance, shrouded in clouds, in front of a high rock, hanging above the lake, and on it is a tower with a signaling device.

Nikolai Polevoy believed that his publication should “promote the strengthening of the activities of education and the convergence of the middle classes of Russian society with European education.” However, such an attitude literally from the first day became the reason for close attention to the magazine from the side of censorship and the Third Department.

A month before the closure of the journal, in March 1834, in a memorandum, the Minister of Public Education, Sergei Uvarov, reported:

“For a long time already and constantly, the Moscow Telegraph was filled with announcements about the need for reforms and praise for revolutions. Quite a lot of what appears in malicious French magazines, the Telegraph tries to convey to Russian readers with praise. The revolutionary trend of thought, which can rightly be called a moral contagion, is evidently found in this journal, of which thousands of copies circulate throughout Russia, and due to the unheard-of audacity with which the articles published in it are written, they are read with avid curiosity. From time to time there are praises of the government in the Telegraph, but the hypocrisy is all the more vile: the harmful line of thought in the Telegraph, so dangerous for young minds, can be proved by many examples.

The government was just waiting for a convenient excuse to ban the “free-thinking” magazine, and such a reason appeared: in No. 3 for 1834, Nikolai Polevoy placed his review of the just published jingoistic play in verse by Nestor Kukolnik “The Hand of the Almighty Saved the Fatherland.” He spoke negatively about the literary merits of the play and hinted, almost imperceptibly, at the “leavened patriotism” of the author.

“The new drama of Mr. Puppeteer makes us very sad,” it “does not hold water,” Polevoy concluded. The censorship did not find anything reprehensible in the review and skipped the issue. But then it turned out that the tsar was present at the premiere of the performance at the Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg and the Puppeteer was awarded a diamond ring as a reward.

After that, the tsar was presented with a large notebook with seditious extracts from the Moscow Telegraph for many years, after which the “highest command” followed to close the magazine. After all these events, in an educated society, for a long time, an epigram composed by an unknown person went around:

The hand of the Almighty performed three miracles:

Saved the fatherland

The poet gave a move

And she strangled Polevoy.

After the closure of the Moscow Telegraph, the name of Polevoy as a publisher was banned for some time. He was not allowed to publish the scientific and literary illustrated magazine “Picturesque Review”. In 1835 – 1838. Nikolai Polevoy collaborated irregularly in the Moscow Observer and the Library for Reading.

Sergei Ishkov.

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