Imperial Guard

The Imperial Guard is the elite military corps in which Dmitri Ivanovitch Nekhludoff serves after graduating from university, and its culture of idleness, luxury, and sanctioned debauchery is the primary mechanism through which he undergoes a moral transformation from an idealistic young man into a selfish, pleasure-seeking officer. The Guard's institutional ethos—combining complete freedom from useful work, absolute power over subordinates, and intimate proximity to the Imperial family—systematically erodes Nekhludoff's youthful convictions about justice, land reform, and sexual purity, replacing them with a chronic mania of selfishness that directly leads to his seduction and abandonment of Katerina Maslova.

Identity and Structure

The Imperial Guard is a chosen regiment of the Guards in which all the officers are rich and of good family, enjoying nearness to and intercourse with members of the Imperial family. This proximity to the Tsar and his circle creates a perfect mania of selfishness in those who succumb to its influence. The Guard's military life in general depraves men by placing them in conditions of complete idleness—the absence of all useful work—and freeing them of their common human duties, which it replaces with merely conventional ones to the honour of the regiment, the uniform, and the flag. While giving officers absolute power over other men, it also puts them into conditions of servile obedience to those of higher rank. The Guard's officers have no occupation whatever except to dress in splendid uniforms, ride to reviews on fine horses bred and fed by others, and wave swords or shoot guns—all while squandering large sums of money that come from some invisible source.

Nekhludoff's Transformation

Nekhludoff enters the Imperial Guard just after war with the Turks has been declared, and the prevailing attitude among officers is that because they are prepared to sacrifice their lives at war, a gay, reckless life is not only pardonable but absolutely necessary. This reasoning allows Nekhludoff to stifle the inner voice that demands something different from his former ideals. Before joining the Guard, as a university student, he had been an honest, unselfish lad who read Spencer's Social Statics, was impressed by the injustice of private landholding, and gave the small piece of land he inherited from his father to the peasants. He had looked on his spirit as the true self. After entering the Guards, however, he becomes depraved and selfish, thinking only of his own enjoyment. The allowance of 1,500 roubles a month from his mother no longer suffices, and he has already had unpleasant talks about money with her. He now looks upon his healthy, strong animal self as the true I. The change comes about because he ceases to believe himself and takes to believing others—believing others means everything has already been decided in favour of the animal self and against the spiritual, and it brings the approval of those around him.

The Culture of Debauchery

Within the Guard, the approved pattern of life consists of eating and drinking in officers' clubs or the salons of the best restaurants, then theatres, ballets, women, then again riding on horseback, waving swords and shooting, and again the squandering of money, wine, cards, and women. This kind of life acts on military men even more depravingly than on others because a military man is proud of such a life, especially at war time, whereas any other man leading it would be ashamed in the depth of his heart. Nekhludoff's mother and aunts, who had once called him "notre cher philosophe" for his serious talk about God, truth, and poverty, are not grieved but rather pleased when they find out he has become a real man and gained over some French woman from his friend. When Nekhludoff enters the Guards and spends and gambles away so much that his mother has to draw on her capital, she is hardly pained, considering it quite natural that wild oats should be sown at an early age and in good company.

Consequences and Thematic Significance

The Guard's culture directly enables Nekhludoff's betrayal of Katerina Maslova. When he visits his aunts on his way to join his regiment, the animal man inside him, which has been cultivated by his life in Petersburg and the army, rules supreme and completely crushes the spiritual man. He seduces Katusha, gives her a 100-rouble note, and abandons her, an act that sets in motion her descent into prostitution and eventual wrongful conviction for poisoning. The Guard's ethos also shapes Nekhludoff's later moral awakening: the contrast between the pure, idealistic student he had been and the depraved officer he became is so enormous that when he confronts Maslova in the courtroom, the recognition of his own degradation becomes the catalyst for his spiritual resurrection. The Imperial Guard thus functions in the novel as the institutional embodiment of the corrupting power of privilege, idleness, and sanctioned vice—a system that systematically destroys the moral sense of those who enter it and inflicts lasting harm on those beneath them.