Abstract
In this wide-ranging and well-informed study of Russian historiography of the late imperial period, Frances Nethercott demonstrates the high value placed on the creative imagination and literary prowess in historical scholarship in Russia, even as positivistic, science-based approaches to the past were being adopted by academic historians there. Increasing respect for verifiable facts and quantitative data did not lessen the demand for literary craftsmanship. Russian historians were fascinated by historical fiction and were deeply affected by works of classical Russian literature. Some of them produced works of imaginative literature or examples of non-fictional prose themselves.
Nethercott focuses on three generations of historians. In her monograph, these generations are represented principally by Timofei Granovsky (1813–1855), who was active in the 1840s and early 1850s, during the repressive reign of Nicholas I (1825–1855), Vasilii Kliuchevsky (1841–1911), whose career began in the age of reform under Alexander II (1855–1881), and Ivan Grevs (1860–1941), who flourished in the periods of reaction under Alexander III (1881–1894) and revolutionary upheaval under Nicholas II (1894–1917). Her examination of these ‘master historians’ is enriched by substantial reference to at least a dozen other historians of various kinds, including Fedor Buslaev, Mikhail Gershenzon, Nikolai Kareev, Nikolai Kostomarov, Pavel Miliukov and Mikhail Pogodin.
Nethercott's approach to her subject is strongly thematic. Her first two chapters deal with the political and institutional conditions, literary conventions, and philosophical themes which helped to shape the development of history as a discipline in late imperial Russia. She then turns to the literariness of historical writing there and consideration of the status of Russian historiography as art or science. She rightly dwells, in Chapter 3, on Nikolai Karamzin, whose 12-volume History of the Russian State (1818–1829) may be read as either history or literature. Karamzin brought to historical writing the literary art that he had displayed in his early career as a writer of Sentimentalist prose fiction and provided an influential ‘template for historical narrative’ (58). (It is worth mentioning, though, the sharp contrast between Karamzin's highly literary text and the drily informative nature of his voluminous endnotes on his sources.) Chapter 4 addresses historians’ use of literary portraiture and their attempts to tackle such vexed questions as the capacity of the individual to shape history and the relationship between individual and milieu. Chapter 5 concerns the use made by historians, especially Kliuchevsky and Grevs, of poetry and prose fiction as historical evidence. Chapter 6 is devoted to the ‘excursion history’, that is to say the study of people's affinity with their habitat, that was developed by Grevs and his pupil Nikolai Antsiferov in the late Tsarist and early Soviet periods. In Chapter 7, Nethercott explores historians’ writings on seminal literary works by the great classical authors Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Ivan Turgenev and Lev Tolstoy and the ways in which deep and sympathetic engagement with those works informed the historical understanding of her subjects. Chapter 8 focuses on the rise of literary history as a notable sub-genre of historical writing. In a brief epilogue, Nethercott suggests that the cultural turn in Russian historical scholarship following the collapse of the Soviet Union is only the most recent of such turns. In fact, ‘the accent on culture and mentality’ and the importance attributed to the historical biography of both real and literary personalities ‘as a catalyst for grasping broader socio-political reality’, she has argued, had been ‘a constant of Russian historical enquiry’ since the early nineteenth century (19).
Given the thematic organization of the book, a brief conclusion drawing all its threads together might have been helpful. Thematic treatment also makes for much cross-referencing and occasional repetitiveness. One might carp at other presentational flaws. The frequent inclusion of transliterated words or phrases from the Russian original in translated quotations may seem off-putting. There are rather numerous errors or inconsistencies in transliteration of Russian words. The index is quite selective. More importantly, though, the book has considerable merits. Nethercott examines the ways, for example, in which historians’ work was affected by their backgrounds, personal lives and conceptions of their professional identity. Crucially, she shows how the notion of public duty upheld by the Russian intelligentsia encouraged the use of historical writing as a tool of public enlightenment and even popularization. Viewing themselves as public figures, historians were bound to express opinions on topical issues and momentous questions of national destiny, such as Russia's relationship to the West. The 72 pages of endnotes attest to the author's extensive knowledge of Russian historiography and intellectual life and scholarship on them. In the broadest perspective, this monograph presents a fresh account of history-writing in late Tsarist Russia as a nationally distinctive dialogue of different genres in which the rigid boundary between history and imaginative literature was dissolved and in which the study of biography, agency, mentality and culture took precedence over the search for impersonal forces and socio-economic laws that would occupy Soviet historians.