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The edict of 1762 did not in fact result in the armyor government service of one kind or another ceasing tobe the usual career for most of the landowners. It wasoften lucrative, and it was in general considered 'theright thing to do.' But the edict did result in governmentservice occupying less of their time, and in manycases not being entered at all. It marked the beginningof the modern differentiation between the landowningclass and the bureaucracy, and was also accompanied bythe beginning of that critical spirit among the upperclass which became so distinctive a feature of Russiancultural life in the nineteenth century.From the time of Catherine the Great, in combinationwith her reforms of 1775 and 1785, a provincial societydeveloped of a kind almost unknown before in Russia.It was too often a society of ' backwoodsmen' or cardplayersand languid readers of French novels; but itsbetter representatives were men of strong character andculture. It should not be forgotten that the serfowningupper class in Russia, partly in service, partly inthe two capitals, partly in their country estates, contributedmore than any other class to the unmatchedoutflow of Russian literature in the nineteenth centuryand threw up an astonishing variety of outstandingpersonalities of the most diverse gifts and views, fromPushkin, Turgenev, and Tolstoy to Bakunin, Herzen,and Kropotkin.Catherine the Great (b. 1729; reigned 1762-96), byher much-publicized ideas of ' enlightenment' and byher encouragement of education and, until her closingyears, of literature and the arts, greatly influenced thedirection and standards of culture in Russia; but herreign in general must be accounted a capitulation to thelanded class as regards serfdom, and her deliberateencouragement of the idea of separate 'estates' of thenobility and gentry, of the merchants and townsmen, andof the peasants accentuated the divorce between each ofthem, especially of the first from the other two. Thenobility and gentry failed only to win the concession thattheir 'estate' should be a closed one, though enjoymentof its full privileges was severely limited, and to debar144