Writing Russia

The Discursive Construction of AnOther Nation

Melissa-Ellen Dowling

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000411751
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Histoire
• Thema: Histoire de la Russie

Writing Russia offers the first systematic analysis of Anglophone national histories of Russia. By deconstructing preeminent historical works on the history of Russia, this book provides insight into the hidden ideological underpinnings of the texts and their representations of Russia in the West. It demonstrates that historians employ a range of literary techniques to smooth over contradictions in their narratives of Russia, generating a seemingly cohesive depiction of Russia as a liminal, Other nation. This is a process that this book theorises as "discordus", representing an original conceptual framework for examining national history texts. It identifies patterns in the language and emplotment of Anglophone Russian histories across several defining historical epochs from the Mongol conquests to the Putin presidency, revealing the extent to which historians wield the narrative power to "make or break" nations. Postmodern in approach, the work pushes the boundaries of historiography and calls into question the nature of history.

1 Discourse, Power, Nation

Approaches to Deconstructing National Histories

This book focuses on ‘reverse-engineering’ or ‘deconstructing’ histories of Russia. To that end, it involves assessing the language and narratives of the texts to uncover the deeper tensions inherent in the narratives to see past the literary veneer. The conceptual tools I use to do this shape the analysis. I approach the analysis intentionally searching for patterns with respect to certain types of language (namely, national terminology) and insights into the exercise of discursive power through history writing. Just as historians approach evidence of the past through particular prisms such as the geo-cultural paradigm, I also necessarily interpret information through particular conceptual lenses. In line with my critical approach, I would be remiss not to disclose and define the fundamental concepts through which I view the histories of Russia. In this book, I apply two overarching conceptual perspectives to frame the analysis: critical discourse analysis and nationalism. Both lenses direct the focus of analysis to identify patterns that reveal insights into discursive power dynamics in the context of the geo-cultural paradigm.

Text Selection

Identifying discursive patterns in national histories requires the selection of a sample of texts to serve as primary sources of ‘data’. On the parameters of my focus on Anglophone histories of Russia, the sample selected is necessarily confined to English-language texts on Russian history. This corresponds to the book’s emphasis on discourse of Russian history in the Anglosphere. I analyse six core texts per chapter, but I supplement these texts with other works to support or challenge emerging patterns from the core texts. The same group of core texts is not used for each chapter of this book. This is due partly to necessity. While the texts are all sweeping histories of Russia, the time periods covered in the texts vary. For example, some texts begin their histories with Kievan Rus’, whereas others begin with Imperial Russia. Therefore, the same texts cannot always be used since they do not always contain equivalent chapters on certain periods of Russia’s past. The other reason for mixing the core texts is to provide a balanced analysis and investigate how pervasive certain patterns are across a spectrum of Russian history texts.

The core texts I use are Martin Sixsmith’s Russia: A 1000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East (2012); Geoffrey Hosking’s Russia and the Russians (2012); John M. Thompson and Christopher J. Ward’s Russia: A Historical Introduction from Kievan Rus’ to the Present (2018); Robert Service’s The Penguin History of Modern Russia (2015); Nicholas Riasanovsky and Mark Steinberg’s A History of Russia (2011); Roger Bartlett’s A History of Russia (2005); Michael Kort’s A Brief History of Russia (2008); Charles Ziegler’s The History of Russia (2009); Abraham Ascher’s Russia: A Short History (2017); and Kees Boterbloem’s A History of Russia and Its Empire (2018).¹ These texts were selected based on their ubiquity and general popularity at the time of writing this book. This was determined through reference to Google Ngram, Google Books search results, and availability in mainstream Western English-language book retailers including Book Depository, Dymocks, Waterstones, and Barnes and Noble.

In order to further refine the scope of data and facilitate comparability, sweeping histories form the core body of texts analysed in this project. The research intentionally excludes specialised works devoted to a particular aspect of Russian history, since the inclusion of specialist texts would distort results. For example, analysis of the World War II period of Russia’s history does not include entire works exclusively concerning World War II. This is because the texts are produced in a significantly different style, for a more specialised readership, and for a different purpose. Accordingly, those texts delve into deeper analysis and detail than the general histories, rendering comparison between texts less informative. Since I am particularly interested in investigating the narrative of Russia, analysis of generalist sweeping histories is more beneficial. The ‘big themes’ of Russian history become apparent in such large-scale histories and each chapter of Russia’s history is assembled to produce a broader narrative of Russia. How the events are juxtaposed is of significance for the construction of Russia and for developing further insights into the writing of history.

The majority of the texts selected were published between 2000 and 2018. This time period is widely represented in the Anglosphere as an era of increased economic prosperity but also growing authoritarianism in Russia under the leadership of Vladimir Putin. This preliminary assumption of the political context within which the texts were produced serves as a basis for testing and evaluating representations of Russia in history texts. It supports my inquiry into historical discourse and, therefore, whether the apparent contemporary narrative infuses the writing of history. It also refines the scope of what I have deemed to be ‘the contemporary context’. Since only a relatively small number of sweeping histories were published during this time frame, texts published outside this time frame are included but analysed in a comparative style with consideration of their temporal contexts. The only other exception to the sweeping history approach concerns the case study of the history of the Putin era itself. Due to a lack of availability of Anglophone sweeping histories including sufficient material on the Putin period, I examine some works that deal exclusively with this part of Russia’s history. However, these texts are analysed under the proviso that they are ‘different’ from the core texts and provide comparative value.

Conceptualising Critical Discourse Analysis

Analysis of the texts is informed by the research program of critical discourse analysis (CDA) within the tradition of critical theory. It is best described as a research program rather than a bona fide theory because a plethora of theoretical and methodological approaches are employed within CDA. Nonetheless, there are several core assumptions of CDA shared by each school of CDA thought. Most CDA perspectives consider discourse as social practice, language as ideologically driven, and discourse as constructing social reality.² CDA research fundamentally concerns revealing dynamics of social power and, in particular, is concerned with investigating the role of discourse in shaping, sustaining, or challenging entrenched practices of inequality or discrimination.³ CDA operates as an intermediary between thought and action. It is aimed at exposing ideological and power disparities between social actors, and thus it is ideally suited for guiding analysis of the underlying power dynamics emanating from and infusing Anglophone histories of Russia.⁴

As an offshoot of critical linguistics, CDA is primarily concerned with the analysis of texts as constituents of discourse. According to Wodak, discourse is ‘a complex bundle of simultaneous and sequential linguistic acts, which manifest themselves within and across social fields of action as thematically interrelated semiotic, oral or written tokens, very often as “texts” ’.⁵ Accepting this definition, one of the key distinctions between a text and discourse is that discourse consists of interrelated texts on a particular subject. It is, according to its standard dictionary definition, a conversation. A discourse is composed of a number of texts which function in relation to each other, giving rise to intertextuality as texts become thematically linked to other texts.⁶ Although a variety of texts can form a discourse, often, a dominant discourse emerges, and a ‘normal’ way of talking about or writing about a certain topic develops within groups, institutions, or society more broadly. Discourse serves as, but also produces, practices which become ‘accepted as “obvious” or “natural” in social context’.⁷ CDA involves identifying patterns of language use within specific social contexts.⁸ This analytic provides a framework for investigating whether discursive patterns exist in the way in which historians represent Russia in the Anglosphere.

As a form of communication, discourse is unequivocally a ‘social practice’.⁹ It is, as Van Dijk describes, a ‘situated interaction’ because a discourse occurs within a certain ‘social, cultural, historical or political’ context.¹⁰ More specifically, discourse involves the interpretive process of producing and consuming, or reading and writing texts within contexts. Contexts are crucial for the process of making meaning out of texts.¹¹ Language, as a part of discourse, acquires meaning only within social contexts.¹² This is because language is a semiotic system of representation and communication dependent upon shared codes to produce common understandings of texts, discourses, and reality. As Wodak explains, ‘readers … are not passive recipients in their relationships to texts’.¹³ The reader interacts not only with the text, but with the discursive (intertextua...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Introduction: Writing Russia
• 1 Discourse, Power, Nation: Approaches to Deconstructing National Histories
• 2 Othering Russia in Historical Accounts of the Mongol Conquest
• 3 Romancing Russia and Questioning the Applicability of the Oriental Paradigm
• 4 The Language of Nationality in Histories of World War II
• 5 Securitising Putin’s Russia
• 6 A Discordic Narrativisation of the Russian Nation and the Necessity of Tragic Emplotment
• 7 A Short Annotated History of Russian Authoritarianism
• Conclusion: Representing and Reifying Russia
• Index