Writing History in Late Imperial Russia

Scholarship and the Literary Canon

Frances Nethercott

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350130425
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

It is commonly held that a strict divide between literature and history emerged in the 19th century, with the latter evolving into a more serious disciple of rigorous science. Yet, in turning to works of historical writing during late Imperial Russia, Frances Nethercott reveals how this was not so; rather, she argues, fiction, lyric poetry, and sometimes even the lives of artists, consistently and significantly shaped historical enquiry. Grounding its analysis in the works of historians Timofei Granovskii, Vasilii Klyuchevskii, and Ivan Grevs, Writing History in Late Imperial Russia explores how Russian thinkers--being sensitive to the social, cultural, and psychological resonances of creative writing--drew on the literary canon as a valuable resource for understanding the past. The result is a novel and nuanced discussion of the influences of literature on the development of Russian historiography, which shines new light on late Imperial attitudes to historical investigation and considers the legacy of such historical practice on Russia today.

1

Between State Patronage and Oversight: Developments in History as a University Discipline

In many respects, the rise of the disciplines in Russia resembled patterns of development across Continental Europe, where, typically, states assumed the role of patron of knowledge in the formation of institutions dedicated to teaching and the advancement of research.¹ As the chief architect of modern Russian scholarship, Peter the Great called upon Western advisors, Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff, to aid in the creation of an Academy of Sciences. Founded in 1724, the Academy initially focused on the natural and mathematical sciences, with history added to the list of subjects in the 1740s during the reign of Elizabeth Petrovna (1741–62). From its beginnings, the Academy’s membership was made up of a large contingent of foreign, predominantly German, scholars, and the early profile of Russian historical scholarship was no exception. Among the ‘founding fathers’ of the discipline were Gerhard Friedrich Müller (1705–83) and August Ludwig Schlözer (1735–1809) whose work in the field established two distinct approaches: source compilation (Müller) and philological analysis (Schlözer). Albeit challenged or rivalled by indigenous and largely self-styled historians, such as Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–65) and Mikhail Shcherbatov (1733–90), this pattern of foreign dominance in Russian scholarship remained generally unchanged for the rest of the century.

It was really due to the consolidation of a rudimentary network of universities in European Russia during the early decades of the nineteenth century that the promotion of native expertise in humanities scholarship became at all possible. However, by the 1830s, the growing number of Russian-born teachers and professors also seemed to validate the rationale behind a state-sponsored initiative in educational reform to promote political and cultural nationalism.² In 1833, the Minister of Education, Sergei Uvarov, outlined proposals for a new university charter, which, he believed, was pivotal to the development and paced modernization of the Russian nation state. Formulated as three interrelated principles – autocracy, orthodoxy and nationhood (narodnost’) – Uvarov’s proposals framed a programme of instruction in which far greater emphasis would be placed on the study of the nation’s past as a means to highlight the specificity and endurance of Russia’s political and cultural prowess as an empire.³ In practice, the ‘orthodoxy’ requirement was met by the decision to make theology, Church history and Church law compulsory subjects, while the creation of several new chairs of modern Russian Law and special chairs of Russian and Slavic Philology and History anchored the principle of nationality firmly at the centre of the humanities syllabus.

The ideological ramifications of national history hardly need stating. Narratives about the nation’s past provided a convenient platform for authorizing accounts of Russian statehood while insisting on her unique path, distinct from patterns of development elsewhere. The first professors of Russian history and literature, Mikhail Pogodin (1800–75) and Stepan Shevyrev (1806–64) (appointed respectively to ‘Ordinarius’ in 1835 and 1847), advocated these principles of cultural originality (samobytnost’) and political greatness, evidenced, they claimed, in the early chronicles which highlighted the place of Byzantine Christianity and Slavic learning from the southwest. Committed to the idea of Holy Russia, they produced triumphalist historical narratives celebrating Russia’s mission on the world stage and her future, thereby bolstering Uvarov’s vision of Russia as a European power while downplaying her dependence on foreign (notably ‘Western’) influence.⁴

The ‘Russian Question’, as contemporaries called it, absorbed the intellectual life of the 1840s and became the main stage for a contest of opinions concerning the defining traits of the nation and her role in world politics. In the salons of Moscow and St Petersburg, competing accounts of collective identity set the terms of possibly the most famous debate in modern Russian history, the so-called Slavophile–Westernizer controversy. While the Slavophiles insisted on a native cultural distinctiveness built on Orthodox confession, a pronounced anti-individualism and political quietism, the arguments of their opponents were largely inspired by patterns of development in west European governance, social organization and law.⁵ University-based historians took an active part in these debates, often siding with one or the other camp. Pogodin and Shevyrev co-opted the Slavophile notion of samobytnost’ to expound on the moral character of the Russian people (unlike, as Shevyrev famously coined it, the ‘putrid West’). In response, westernizing liberal historians harnessed elements of philosophical idealism to challenge both the theoretical foundations of Slavophilism and the doctrine of official nationality premised on the glorification of the political status quo.

‘If parts live organically, then the whole does too’.⁶ The terminology associated with the philosophy of Schelling, alluded to here, provided Timofei Granovskii with an apt analogy for exploring the history of European nations and peoples as an ‘organic whole’. Much like Leopold von Ranke, his elected master under whom he had studied in Berlin (1836–39), Granovskii believed that the goal of history was the ‘morally enlightened individual’ and a society corresponding to the demands of such an individual. To his mind, this balance was assured once the laws and policies of a state and/or the idea of monarchical power were ‘invested with the moral radiance of incorruptible justice’.⁷ However, if one effect of the idealist philosophy that he embraced was to alert the Russian audience to their country’s position as a ‘world-historical nation’ whose past was, indeed, intimately related to that of her European counterparts, another, as Priscilla Roosevelt has suggested, was to issue an indirect but clear warning regarding her present and future. Granovskii’s assertion, for example, that Roman slaves and medieval serfs eventually undermined their respective economic structures of empire and feudal order was intended and, indeed, recognized by his audience as a thinly veiled critique of Nicholas I’s reluctance to abolish the practice of serfdom at home.⁸ ‘History’, he wrote,

should, more than other sciences, take on board contemporary ideas. We cannot but look at the past from the point of view of the present. In the destiny of our fathers, we are above all seeking explanations about ourselves. Each generation turns to the past with its own set of questions; the diversity of historical schools and trends is testimony to the profound thoughts (zadushevnye mysli) and cares of the age.⁹

As the official hallmark of Nicholas I’s reign, then, Uvarov’s tri-part principle had far-reaching consequences for the historical discipline. But it also had some unintended ones, too: if, on one level, it placed considerable demands on historians that would test their professional and intellectual calibre as scholars and public enlighteners, and, as I discuss below, affect their status as members of a fledging scholarly community in its relations with the government, it is also true that the minister of education’s extensive reorganization of the faculties and appointments of a young generation of professors specifically trained for the purpose in west European universities facilitated an important shift away from the old-style ‘professor-encyclopaedist’ towards greater subject specialization. The upshot was to generate new tasks for historical study.¹⁰ Using current methodologies and philosophical systems originating in Western Europe, historians on both sides of the debate shifted their attention away from ‘the picturing of the individual achievements of different heroes’ (the case, for example, of Karamzin, author of the first ‘modern’ history of the Russian State) to what Alexander Kiesewetter later described as an engagement with the ‘logical disclosure of universal reason in the successive appearance of historic peoples on the scene of world history’. Accordingly, the historian’s attention became ‘fixed on the discovery of the fundamental principles of national life and the study of those forms of state order in which these principles were expressed as they developed’.¹¹ In practice, as Kiesewetter argued, the impact of German idealism merged with the Russian question to produce two fairly distinct fields of historical enquiry: historians sympathetic to the idea that Russian (and more generally Slavic) culture rested on principles entirely opposed to those of civilization in Western Europe privileged ‘the study of the inner content of national life, of national beliefs, of national creation, of national customs and of national economics’. In addition to Pogodin and Shevyrev, principal authors engaged with these questions included Iurii Samarin (1819–76), Ivan Zabelin (1820–1908), Nikolai Kostomarov (1817–85) and Mikhail Koialovich (1828–91). By contrast, the first generation of historian-Westernizers, writing in the 1830s and 1840s, focused predominantly on state formation, while their successors active in the age of reform and counter-reform turned their attention to the study of social and economic structures. Applauded by Western peers as significant contributions to the field, the analyses of medieval and modern Europe that they produced nevertheless continued, albeit tangentially, to fuel the debate on Russia’s historic mission. The work of the medievalist, Pavel Vinogradov (1854–1925), for one, provides a telling illustration of the political and ideological registers of historical scholarship well into the late nineteenth century.

Specializing in Continental European and English feudal practices, which he studied through the lens of socio-economic relations combined with law, one of Vinogradov’s most celebrated works was a social history of thirteenth-century England published in Russian and English in the early 1890s. In it, he challenged certain existing premises concerning the organization of the English village community under the manorial system. Vinogradov argued that although the growth of common law on its soil was a decisive factor in subordinating society to the feudal system of private law and management, older principles of communal activity, the logic of which stemmed from the open-field system, remained intact. The continuing practice of fielding strips of land scattered across the village territory necessitated what he called ‘mutual guarantees/responsibilities’, thereby exhibiting a communal mentality that stood in glaring contrast to the current acceptance of private rights throughout most of Western Europe.¹² ‘Equal partnership among free members’ ensured that fellow villagers received equal shares of the arable ploughed: ‘It is’, he wrote, ‘evidently communal in its very essence. Every trait that makes it strange and inconvenient from the point of view of individualistic interests renders it highly appropriate to a state of things ruled by communal conceptions’.¹³ The point that Vinogradov wanted to emphasize here was that if these primordial forms of social organization were long since lost in England’s distant past and ultimately eclipsed by the rise of the manor and the legacy of Roman individualism in judicial affairs, ‘at the present time in the East of Europe, the absence of perpetual enclosures and the intermixture of strips have continued to be normal practice. Despite differences in climate and soil conditions, and in spite of all the obvious inconveniences, nations have consistently adopted the open-field system’.¹⁴

In the preface to the English version of this study, Vinogradov explained the fascination with medieval English documents for the Russian scholar:

I do not think that anybody is likely to maintain at the present day, that, for instance, a study of the formation and dissolution of the village community in the West would be meaningless for politicians and thinkers who have to concern themselves with life at present in village communities of the East […]. Social history, study of the economic development of other nations, their class divisions, forms of cooperation hold for us Russians a very special interest.¹⁵

Vinogradov believed that research into the formation and dissolution of the village commune in the West was key to resolving the problems confronting the Russian government and society in the wake of the Emancipation Act: both its socio-political repercussions and its impact on culture and morality were relevant to the dramatic changes that Russia was currently experiencing.¹⁶ At the same time, these experiences enhanced an understanding of the European ‘other’, allowing Russian scholars, as outside observers, to dismantle accepted ‘national’ canons of interpretation, in some instances lifting the veil from what otherwise appeared as intractable problems for their west European counterparts. Thus, in much the same way that Granovskii’s audience had detected a thinly veiled critique of Nicholas I’s Russia in his history of Western Europe, so too, Vinogradov’s study of feudal England functioned as a mirror onto modern-day Russian socio-political reality caught between tradition and reform. Of course, between the two generations of historians there were significant substantive and methodological differences: the move away from the study of political institutions to aspects of society and the economy was accompanied by a decline in the historicist approach in favour of a comparative and inductive method as a tool to establish laws of development.¹⁷ But it remains that Granovskii’s and Vinogradov’s findings relating to a distant west European past positioned them as both measured critics of Slavophile and National Conservative doctrines of Russian specificity, together with the Official National glorification of empire built on traditions of peasantry and orthodox beliefs.¹⁸

In recent scholarship there has been broad agreement that the Russian state’s endorsement of enlightenment as a tool to modernize Russia was rewarded by significant advances in historical scholarship and the institutionalization of knowledge.¹⁹ But it is equally the case that these advances encouraged a sense of scientific vocation within the professoriate, which, under circumstances of close government scrutiny, took the form of a civilizing mission more typically associated with the intelligentsia tradition. In other words, historical knowledge could function as a powerful critique of the political conjuncture.²⁰ During periods of reaction, in particular, ‘westernizing’ ideas about individual freedoms, rights and civic duties that the liberal professoriate upheld as part of their professional ethos were tested in clashes with the government, on occasion resulting in the dismissal or suspension of professors or, indeed, walkouts by members of the professoriate themselves in protest against government infringements on collegial liberty that many believed was rightfully theirs.²¹ Vinogradov famously left Russia for England in 1901 after an initiative by a joint faculty–student committee at Moscow University to discuss student grievances foundered on account of the government’s second thoughts on the matter. As I discuss below, at the root of these clashes regarding institutional organization and management were competing modern and classical views of higher learning: the pledge of the professoriate to advance specialist knowledge was repeatedly thwarted by the government’s priority to provide humanities students with a ‘general culture’.²²

The academic community and the state

The tensions between science and ideology arising from Uvarov’s educational reforms had lasting implications for the corporate identity of the professoriate in its relations with the Ministry of Education. Specialists in the history of education generally situate the underlying cause of a contest of interests between the academic community and the state in the co-existence on Russian soil of French and German university models. The Napoleonic model with its system of specialist grandes écoles provided a training ground for state service; by contrast, the German Humboltian–Schleiermacher inspired model was predicated on collegiate and scholarly autonomies, and, accordingly, conceived the university as a setting for the development of free, critical thought and for the advancement of scholarship.²³ While the tsarist reform of education at the beginning of the nineteenth century ostensibly rejected the French model for the German (indeed, privileged close ties with German universities by sending its best students there to complete their studies), its commitment to this model was, never...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Library of Modern Russia
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Between State Patronage and Oversight: Developments in History as a University Discipline
• 2 The Scholar-Artist: Master Historians and their Literary Muses
• 3 Style: The Literary Cadences of Russian Historical Narrative
• 4 The Historian’s Literary Toolbox: Portraiture
• 5 Literary Evidence: Realist Aesthetics and Historical Enquiry
• 6 Place: Excursion History and the Question of Literary Sites
• 7 The Historian’s Literary Compass: Modern Poets and Novelists
• 8 Historical and Literary Historical Scholarship: A Hybrid Science?
• Epilogue: The Forgotten Legacy
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint