ARHIVELE OLTENIEI - Universitatea din Craiova

Eminescu writing about Russia and our Independence War 139If the Europe’s great states “work in a casuistic way, changing in outsideonce with every change from inside”, in the case of Russia he remarked “anenergetic fixity”, being the only European power that “when it defeated becamewider and when it was defeated understood nothing, or almost nothing, becauseinside the country every process was a slow one, without any leap; a lost battledidn’t make it forget the one thousand years old target, it can’t look throughother eyes than those it has been having since the beginning of its great power” 9 .So, the evolution of the Russian Empire had the same route as itsconception about the act of governing and that was slow, fluently, with a certaininternal cohesion, unlike the other European powers, where the fighting betweenthe political parties was equivalent with “the bone of contention” 10 .Russia’s old wish “the everlasting dream of the northern Slavs” was “thenew Rome or the Tsargrad”, the Napoleonic Wars “were steppes of a greatladder ascended by the Russians” and “if, according to the 1856 peace, Russiawas sent away from the Danube, once with the 1878 war, it gained almost allthat had lost before” 11 .Eminescu commented the ideas of some “political annalists” from thatperiod regarding the Orient’s problem. He extracted from N. I. Danilevski’sbook, Russia and Europe (Petersburg, 1871) 12 , opinions about the externalpolitics and the perspective plan of “our giant neighbor”, picking, from all thesolutions proposed to solve the Orient’s crisis, the one that aimed theconstituting of a “Slav confederation under Russian hegemony” 13 .The ideas from N. I. Danilevski’s book “didn’t represent the dreams ofsome philosopher, but the ideal of a historian descending from the great northernpower”, they are “an accurate copy of Russia’s public opinion”, they “have certaingrandeur” and are watching “the history of the universe in a specific Slav way” 14 .Eminescu promptly and objectively observed the fact that Russia, alongwith the Austro-Hungarian Empire, tried to get profit from the Oriental crisisand to divide the spheres of influence in Balkans, this attitude being specific toany empire, in which case can be used the term of “mobile frontiers ”, as thesociologist Ilie Bădescu consider. Russia also wanted the maintaining of itsfrontiers settled before 1856.Attentively observing the evolution of the European politics, Eminescudragged pieces of news regarding the Oriental crisis from different European orOttoman sources, synthesized these pieces of information about the battles from9 Ibidem.10 Ibidem.11 Ibidem.12 N. I. Danilevski (1822-1885) was in the same political circles as the writerDostoievski, who propagate a utopian socialism, a criticism of the tsarist autocracy and militatedfor social and political changes in Russia.13 Art. cit.14 Ibidem.