Men are governed by precisely two systems of thought: Truth or Power/Will. Truth is a fixed set of ideas that, in some sense, correspond with reality. It is static and hierarchic. It does not change at its essence; men must conform itself to it, rather than the other way around. If Truth does not exist, then only Will remains, and, hence, all is power, and might makes right; the very essence of paganism at its root.

Politically, these to ways of life correspond to monarchy and oligarchy. Monarchy, at least in the medieval Christian sense, was many things, but at its most abstract, it was a mirror for the universe. Monarchy imitated the strict regularity and hierarchy of the medieval cosmos: a fixed earth surrounded by a rather small universe. Under the king was the aristocracy, each with a fixed purpose and abode, and under them, a peasant and artisan class. Each group was given a determined role, and each with a specified set of rewards and responsibilities. In general, this was established and maintained by customary law.

Social utility was not the primary notion defending that of monarchy (though this became such after the revolution of Peter), but as a faithful mirror of the eternal reality of the cosmos, or more prosaically, the reality of Truth as a fixed world, one that made sometimes harsh moral demands on the globe’s population. If Truth was incarnated in Christ (in fact, Christ says that He is Truth, as such), then the monarchy was an image of Christ’s reign over the uniform and hierarchic cosmos.

This model was replaced during the Renaissance by a model, for a lack of a better word, of “a-centricity.” The idea of chaos, the idea of a cosmos in constant motion. Out of this motion, order can only derive from Will, the will of the elite with the arcane knowledge of nature and its motions. In the Renaissance, this Will was manifested in a radically reformed monarchy, where the notion of social utility became paramount; sometimes this is known as “enlightened despotism.” It did not take long for a-centricity to force itself on politics, with the notion of “liberal democracy” taking the place of a utilitarian monarchy, and hence, the moneyed classes quickly took power and established themselves in the name of “the people.” If chaos is tamed only by Will, and hence Power, then order was placed upon the chaos of eternal motion by oligarchy. It follows, that is, that if chaos reigns, and Will can place limits on this chaos, then those whose will is the most powerful can then impress their own designs on reality. To put it more vulgarly, rich guys came to run everything.

Will was naked; Will was paramount. Ideology, science, ethics and truth itself became the plaything of the oligarchy, a group of men dedicated to the idea of “social engineering,” based on allegedly “secret knowledge” they alone have received. The “common population” appears not, as it was to the old European nobility, as a series of estates largely to be left alone, but as “masses,” teeming, mindless peons in need of enlightenment–or else. The arcane sciences refer to them as “cowans,” that is, the unenlightened, or the servants of the elite. There is no Truth, only interests, Will and power. It is the ethical substratum of modern “liberal democracy.” This oligarchy, far above ideology or science, international in scope, often secretive in its dealings, is what I have called, throughout my career, the Regime.

What does this have to do with Turgenev? Everything. Turgenev was a westernizer for a short time, but, later in his career, he published the almost unread Home of the Nobility a novel that shows, in powerful and succinct forms, his re-conversion to the ideas of Khomiakov and Orthodoxy. Whether or not he was consistent in this later on is another matter, but this novel, far more than Dostoyevskii, explains the essence of Slavophilism and the dedication to Truth above power.

For Pushkin, Dostoyevskii, Gogol and Turgenev, Power/Will was represented by Petersburg. In this novel of Turgenev’s, as is a common motif among these writers, Truth is represented as Sophia, a woman, the “virginal earth.” Traditional, meek (but not weak) and truly Orthodox, this woman alone can set Russia aright and raise her to be the bulwark against what has come to be known as the ultimate drive of the Regime, the creation of a New World Order. Temporarily, Russia was interrupted in this role by the western-financed Bolsheviki, but today, under Putin, she is beginning to regain her old identity and global role.

In Home for the Nobility this woman is represented by the young woman Liza. Liza is central to the novel, and around her do all the other characters revolve. She is Russia; the Russia of the Old Belief, of the peasant commune, of agrarianism, of the hermitage. She is the Russia that is loved, after tragedy, by the man Fedor, known throughout the novel by his last name Lavretskii. She is unmarried, a virgin, and is being pursued by two men, one, Panshin, representative of the Petrograd elite, and the man Lavretskii, who has himself converted to Slavophilism.

Lavretskii was, as a young man, given an education by an “Anglomanaical” father, an obvious scion of the westernizers. The education, complete with beatings and malformations, ends up being useless to the young Fedor. Trained to serve Power, he marries a wealthy woman who quickly wants to move to the “western capital” of Paris. The coupe move, only to be swept up in the chaotic life of France. Through a series of parties and balls, Lavretskii’s wife begins an affair. Lavretskii quickly moves back to Russia to an old family estate called Vasiliskoye, a name meaning the “royal place,” and meant to give some sense of the Russia of Basil III. France is represented as a liberal chaos, serving only money and one’s personal passionate drives. This estate is one of peace and natural order.

Fedor’s return to his estate is a powerful symbol of the “return” of the nobility to their roots. The western, i.e. Anglo-French world is evil, in that it revolves around Power, represented by money and avarice. Of this Turgenev leaves the reader no doubt. It is chaos. But the scene of the homecoming is designed to make an agrarian out of anyone. Here, Turgenev shows his superiority to Dostoyevskii as a writer: in the depiction of nature, specifically a nature charged with ethical and historical insight.

The very notion of “nature,” here understood as the soil, sky, plants, flowers, birds, etc., as saturated with historical import is itself a Slavophile and ruralist idea. Nature is not, in the realm of Power, a mere blank slate, just waiting for “development,” a perfect metaphor for the “cowans.” Here, Locke and his followers viewed nature the same way they viewed the “masses” as blank slates waiting for enlightenment. Nature, like humanity, was naturally dead. Only Will can “resurrect it,” bringing it back to life, and this Will is based on “science,” though a science serving the interests of Power.

In the realm of sacredotal royalism and ruralism however, nature is not this. Experience has impressed nature, without harming it, with meaning, memory and moral lesson. This impress is mental, the formation of a community of material objects and the ideas and memories that unify it into a whole, a “home.” This vortex is what produces the vivid sensations of Lavretskii as he returns to his ancestral estate after many years. The nobility, seeing the emptiness of the west (i.e. of modernism and the Regime), seek their roots. For the readers of Turgenev, it’s Vasiliskoye. And even for Herzen, it is the commune (after a sort).

At Vasiliskoye, the vegetation is overgrown, though is still possessed of beauty; it is meant to evoke a sort of feral freedom, a lack of structure, a schedule so common to modernity. The birds “speak” to him, a la Gogol. Memories begin to flood is psyche, some good some bad, but most certainly, the experiences of his ex-wife have now left him (for the moment), and he is altered. The servants at the estate, like in Chekhov and Gogol, are treated well, a little lazy, but by and large lead an easy life without any schedule or rigidity. The only labor is agrarian, the demands are few. Only modernization forces peasants to work like slaves, even of they are receiving wages in the modern sense. Immediately after drinking all this in, the agnostic Lavretskii enters his home to venerate the ancient icons, something he has not done in years. The connection is unmistakable.

Liza enters the picture. Everything about her radiates femininity in a beauteous, though not sensuous, sense. She is pious, meek and beautiful. She is strong in her religious opinions, but is fully aware of man’s limitations in “changing the world,” and even bringing about his own happiness, a topic returned to again and again. Soon, Lavretskii receives a newspaper report about his ex-wife’s death, and he is now free to pursue Liza, though he does so only with trepidation, as he is much older than she.

Liza, as it turns out, was raised by a neglectful father, one who was always out “on business,” worried about “accounts” and money, like a good westernizer. Making money was his prime occupation, and, in general, he was good at it, though always at his children’s expense. At his deathbed, he seems to regret he spent his life on such non-noble occupations. Liza is brought up by a governess, one Agafya Vasneova, who herself was married to a man who had seen many ups and downs in his financial career. Agafya was very much like the older Liza, and certainly marked herself as attentive and affectionate and, at the dissolution of her marriage, religious. Both Agafya and Liza saw the emptiness of “financial” life, the life dedicated to Power, the worship of dead matter; they both, early on, realized the fact that the world cannot provide security. Liza’s governess saw to it that she received religious instruction, and Liza’s ethical worldview was shaped by this. Throughout, Liza strongly believes that man cannot create his own happiness, an idea which itself, is in opposition to modernity and individualism.

Liza is a common character in Russian literature. In turn, she represents the earth, virginity, purity, Orthodoxy and Russia. She represents youth, not in the chronological sense, but in the sense of Prince Mishkin in Dostoyevskii’s Idiot, a representative of a younger, earlier Russia. The Russia of the Old Belief, of the sacerdotal monarchy, of simplicity in agricultural occupations and few wants. After experiencing Paris, and the cheating ways of his ex-wife, Varvara, Liza is something unspoiled, fresh and pure. She is Old Russia, Orthodox Russia; Varvara is Petrine Russia, where the multiplications of the wants, needs and responsibilities of the nobility force them to work their peasants harder and harder. Lavretskii is the older nobility, having lost its way, but realizing that the way of Peter means its own destruction, as well as that of Old Russia.

Lavretskii wins the love of Liza not by his looks (which he does not have), nor by his manner (which can be awkward), but by the fact that in a political debate with the westernizer Panshin, the latter is defeated by Russian nationalist arguments. The nature of the arguments is left out, but the basic structure of the two positions would have been well known to the average literate man of the day. After that exchange, nothing is the same. After Liza declares her affection, Lavretskii plays music better and embraces his friends without restraint. All is sweeter, Russia looks stronger. Soil, love, music, brotherhood; all of this can come from the union of Liza and this much older man.

Politically, this is the coalition of Slavophile lower nobility and the Russian Orthodox agrarian tradition, represented both by the peasants and the clergy, especially the monastic clergy. It is the possibility represented by the young Peter II, who, had he lived, would have led the Orthodox Russians to rebellion against the new apparat and some of the Petrine reforms. But, Peter II died young, dying, ironically, at the blessing of the waters at Epiphany at the age of 17. But as the rebellion of Peter II never materialized, the relationship of Liza and Lavretskii never materialized either. In the 19th century, the decline of the lower nobility, the nobility that was the most loyal segment of the elite population against the upper boyarin and the new bureaucracy was an established fact. This, the nobility mobilized by Boris Gudenov against Shuiskii and the Poles, the lower nobility that mobilized the lower orders against the oligarchy that sought to control the Empress Anna, the lower nobility that preserved Orthodox Russia and royalism, had progressed too far, its state of decay far too advanced, its debt overwhelming, and its “worldliness” inferior to that of Peter’s New Men. There was to be no unification of forces between Orthodoxy, lower nobility and peasantry, a union that could have reversed Petrinism, restored the Old Belief, dismantled the bureaucracy and restored Old Russia. Turgenev masterfully lays out that sad trajectory, and trajectory that Turgenev both predicted and mapped.

Therefore, it seems proper that Turgenev is creating a situation where the two people, Liza and Lavretskii were made for one another. Politically, the groundwork, in theory, was present. The reality was far too complicated. In a skillful twist, Turgenev takes a slap at the corrupt media of his day and has Varvara Petrovna reappear, alive and well. The newspapers had merely repeated a rumor. Hence, Lavretskii’s ex-wife, possibly representing the reign of Catherine and the defeat of Pugachev, and of the forces that tried to mobilize around Empress Elizabeth, makes the union of Liza and Lavretskii legally and religiously impossible. Liza, courted by the bureaucrat Panshin and the neo-Slavophile Lavretskii, decides to enter a monastery, where the “sins of my father and those like him can be expiated.”

Old Russia then, exists among the monastics and the Orthodox Church. After the revolution, of course, Old Russia was purely represented by the Orthodox Synod Abroad, eventually basing itself in New York; the royal tradition found its only refuge in the church in exile. Politically, the reign of Catherine and the defeat of the anti-Petrine forces made certain that any sort of political union of patriotic forces would be ineffective. Their strength was destroyed under Pugachev, and the lower nobility was destroyed by Alexander II. By the time the holy Nicholas II attempted to put the pieces back together, it was far too late. And hence, characters such as Prince Mishkin or Liza, not to mention the last Tsar himself, take on a powerful poignancy for later readers. Later works like Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard or Ward No. 6 make more sense when placed in this context. Those works tell the story of what happens, so to speak, after Liza has spent her days in a monastery, and Russia is left to Panshin.

At the end of this novel, Lavretskii, 8 years later, returns to Liza’s old house, where her relatives, all except the youngest, have died. The house has been repainted, but remains the same otherwise. He realizes that he has no place there, remembers the ways things used to be, and quickly leaves. All is lost. The church remains the only scion of Old Russia, while the old lower nobility ends up like Lavretskii, homeless, without purpose, seeking happiness realizing that man cannot make such a life happy. He becomes Prince Mishkin. What is the home for the nobility? It is Liza, Old Russia. By the time Turgenev was writing, it was already too late.