E. Heier – författare

Ludwig Heinrich von Nicolay (1737-1820) is virtually unknown in our time. Yet at the close of the eighteenth century he enjoyed a considerable reputation as a German poet of the French neo-classical orientation. He was esteemed as tutor to the Russian Emperor Paul I, as Russian State Counciller, and as President of the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences. Moreover he was a friend of the most prominent eighteenth century minds that left their imprints on modern thought. As such a man, Nicolay may be studied from several points of view, as a writer, as an educator and as an intellectual. My first preoccupation with Nicolay was of a literary natur- which resulted in a doctoral dissertation presented to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (1960), under the title "Ludwig Heinrich von Nicolay (1737-1820) as an exponent of neo-classicism. " The existence of the Nicolay archives, now in the possession of the Countess von der Pahlen in Helsinki, was not known to me at the time. Having later gained access to the same, I discovered a vast amount of un pub­ lished documents and a treasury of correspondence with the leading intellectuals of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Much of this material was to be published in conjunction with the late Count N. von der Pahlen, who unexpectedly and unfortu­ nately died in 1963.

My research in the intellectual and spiritual sphere of nineteenth­ century Russia revealed that ever since the penetration of the fashion­ able anti-ecclesiastical views of the Encyclopedists into Russia, the aristocrats had grown indifferent to religion. The spiritual vacuum created as a result of such conditions could not last, however, for a prolonged period of time; least of all during the decades following the r860's when Russia's moral, socio-political, and religious problems were most acute. The subsequent quest for salvation and the general religious inquiry among Russia's elite, as they were known in the West, manifested itself chiefly in the writings of such profound religious and philosophical thinkers as V. Solov'ev, K. Leont'ev, N. Fedorov, Dos­ toevskij, and Tolstoj. They constitute, however, only a fraction of those tormented by the longing for religious truth and guidance in an age of transition and uncertainty. There existed among Russia's aristocracy in the second half of the nineteenth century a widespread socio-religious movement known as Radstockism or Pashkovism, which aimed for a religious renovation and with it a transformation of Russia on an ethical and moral basis. These aristocrats were men and women who in their youth were in­ different to all faith, but who had never abandoned the search for a solution to their own and to Russia's problems. The solution to these problems they believed to be based on moral and religious principles found in Evangelical Christianity.