Personality and Place in Russian Culture—or Not

Marcus C. Levitt

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Volume 14, Number3, Summer 2013, pp. 650-658 (Article)

Published by Slavica PublishersDOI: 10.1353/kri.2013.0043

For additional information about this article

Access provided by Umeå universitet (26 Sep 2013 16:16 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/kri/summary/v014/14.3.levitt.html

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 14, 3 (Summer 2013): 650–58.

Articles

Personality and Place in Russian Culture—

or Not

Marcus c. Levitt

Simon Dixon, ed., Personality and Place in Russian Culture: Essays in Memory of Lindsey Hughes. 435 pp., illus. London: Modern Humanities Research Association for the University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 2010. ISBN-13 978-1907322037. $20.00.

This collection of articles is a tribute to the memory and rich intellectual legacy of the late Lindsey Hughes (1949–2007), professor of Russian history at London University’s School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies (SSEES, now part of University College London [UCL]). Hughes is probably best known for her pioneering biographies Sophia, Regent of Russia, 1657–1704 and the monumental Peter the Great: A Biography, as well as for her interest in material culture as a primary historical source—particularly architecture but also art, clothing, fashion, icons, and ritual.1 As Robin Miller-Guilland writes, “In her many shorter articles, we find a tireless enthusiast for generally disregarded corners of history …, the multivalent, disparate strands that make up the texture of human culture” (22). These interests have been cleverly distilled by the editor of the volume under review, Simon Dixon, Hughes’s colleague at the SSEES and a leading scholar of Catherinean Russia, as a focus on “personality and place,” reflecting Hughes’s “interests in the kaleidoscopic variety of individual motivations and the shifting meanings attributable to particular settings” (13). Dixon’s characterization of Hughes’s scholarship as a “self-denying empiricism” and “not concept-driven” (5) may also be applied to the works in Personality and Place, which do not attempt large-scale statements about Russian culture or forefront theoretical or

1 Lindsey Hughes, Sophia, Regent of Russia, 1657–1704 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Hughes, Peter the Great: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).

PERSONALITY AND PLACE IN RUSSIAN CULTURE—OR NOT 651

methodological problems but focus on “the shifting meanings attributable to particular settings” and on the specific materials under consideration.

That said, it is not easy to identify major themes or issues that tie together this collection of articles by 17 authors on a variety of subjects and periods; the volume also includes an article by Hughes on the Cathedral of SS Peter and Paul and a bibliography of her main works. To some extent, Personality and Place may be taken as a cross-section of contemporary scholarship in English on Russia before the Soviet period, with most attention given to the 18th century. The book also appeared as a special issue of The Slavonic and East European Review, and it retains the look and vestigial traces of a journal (e.g., reference to “this journal,” 14).2 Indeed, the majority of readers will most likely refer to individual contributions in this volume rather than read it in linear fashion. To a greater or lesser extent, all entries deal with “personality and/or place” but with no common understanding of what exactly these mean. That said, we may tentatively break the subject matter down into topics concerning material and print culture, historical sites, expeditions and geography, examinations of discourse in historical context, biographical studies, literary depictions of the self, and tributes to Hughes’s life and work. I will say a few words about each contribution, by group.

Dixon’s introduction to the collection offers a beautiful evocation of the social and cultural world in which Hughes grew up and describes her intellectual formation in postwar Britain. James Cracraft continues with a “personal memoir” of Hughes, centering on her work on Peter I; Hughes’s “exhaustive research” in archives, libraries, museums, and architectural sites, in his words, “yielded an unprecedentedly detailed, complex, and often dark portrayal of the great tsar… . Her book leaves its readers, at Peter’s death, with a Russia that is exhausted, confused, and fearful—not unlike the immediately post-Soviet Russia in which she conducted much of her research” (17).

Following Hughes’s lead, Sergei Bogatyrev and Simon Franklin take up what we may classify as problems in material and print culture in order to explore images of Russian rulers. Bogatyrev analyzes the “portraits” of Ivan IV and Fedor Ivanovich on two bronze cannons, the “Lion of Revel” (1559) and the Kremlin’s famous “Tsar-Cannon” (1586), as reflections of “profound cultural changes in the conception of Russian rulership” (48). Bogatyrev places quotation marks around the word portraits because the image taken to be Fedor Ivanovich is a conventionalized Muscovite image (68), while the second image, done in a more realistic Western style by the German

2 Slavonic and East European Review 88, 1–2 (2010).

652 MARCUS C. LEVITT

master Karsten Middeldorp, may only tentatively be identified as Ivan IV. No attested portraits of Ivan the Terrible exist (60), and the attribution here is based primarily on the cap of Monomakh worn by the depicted subject. Still, it remains puzzling why Revel, then at war with Russia, would have commissioned a portrait of “the enemy of Christianity” (71) on an instrument meant to defeat him.

Simon Franklin’s detailed consideration of the frontispiece to the 1663 Bible and its many formal innovations effectively describes the paradoxical historical fate of much of late 17th-century Muscovite “Baroque” culture. On the one hand, the woodcut frontispiece and title page, complete with heraldic verses, “translate” “Ruthenian print culture … into a grand Muscovite experiment” (94), but on the other, the publication’s innovations were superseded or reinvented in subsequent decades and thus turned out to be “irrelevant … for the Petrine age” (95). Despite the fact that the 1663 edition republished the text of the Ostrog Bible of 1581, the front matter was radically new and included emblematic composition; the use of syllabic verse (“the first printed specimens of Russian Court Poetry,” 86); “the first Moscow-printed map of any kind” (88; and “the only printed map of Moscow until 1741,” 94); and “the first Moscow-printed portrait of a Russian ruler, or indeed of any living person” (88). Notably, Patriarch Nikon, already in disfavor, criticized this portrait—Aleksei Mikhailovich in the guise of St. George, under a quotation adapted from Romans 1:23—as “the epitome of the tsar’s blasphemous arrogance” (90), insofar as it implicitly ascribed to the tsar Christ’s role.3

Starting with Hughes’s guide to the Peter and Paul Cathedral, a series of articles in Personality and Place take us forward in time and center on varied loci of Russian culture: Maria di Salvo on Italians in Moscow’s Nemetskaia sloboda (German Quarter); Paul Keenan on the Summer Garden; Anthony Cross on the British Embassy in St. Petersburg; Roger Bartlett on the estate of Ropsha; and Robert Service on London as a refuge for Russian exiles before 1917. Di Salvo describes social life in the foreign quarter of Moscow under Aleksei Mikhailovich and Peter, providing “additional information about the presence of Italians in the Nemetskaia Sloboda” (98), enriching but not trying to challenge the accepted view of the district. She draws on several memoirs, in particular that of the castrato Filippo Balatri (1682–1756), that provide a unique view of life there. The notorious eccentric Cosimo III de

3 B. A. Uspenskii and V. M. Zhivov refer to the clash over this image as evidence for the sacralization of the monarch; see their “Tsar´ i Bog: Semioticheskie aspekty sakralizatsii monarkha v Rossii,” in Uspenskii, Izbrannye trudy (Moscow: Gnozis, 1994), 1:110–218; on the image of Aleksei Mikhailovich, see 1:120.

PERSONALITY AND PLACE IN RUSSIAN CULTURE—OR NOT 653

Medici, grand duke of Tuscany, sent the 16-year-old Balatri to Russia, having traded him to Petr Golitsyn for two Kalmyk children whom he educated as Catholics (104).

In his article, Paul Keenan takes us to St. Petersburg’s Summer Garden between 1725 and 1761, another site where Russians could interact with foreigners and the Europeanized elite. Keenan considers this garden as a forum for social interaction, providing the opportunity and setting for such “social pursuits” as strolling and polite conversation. Keenan examines the various court and noncourt activities that took place in the Summer Garden, although he gives little attention to the theater located there (perhaps because he does not class it as a garden-related activity). He does pay particular attention to the issue of access to the garden, which was legislated and controlled by both social class and dress codes; “a number of social groups beyond the traditional Court elite” were allowed access, “albeit with strict regulations” (155). The Summer Garden thus “provided an essentially non-Russian space (at least in form) within the city that was intended for various ‘new’ forms of interaction, hitherto unknown in Russian social life” (153).

Roger Bartlett takes us outside Petersburg to the estate of Ropsha, demonstrating that it had a richer history than as merely the place where Peter III was killed. The “wall of silence” (160) that subsequently surrounded Ropsha and its “enduring metaphysical gloom” are “not wholly appropriate and it has several other claims to fame” (161). These include its “little-known history as a site of social and economic innovation” (ibid.), in particular, Grigorii Orlov’s short-lived experiment there which aimed to put an end to serfdom in the 1760s under the supervision of Pastor J. G. Eisen. “However unsuccessful,” Barlett writes, this was “the first step towards abolition in Russia” (171). Bartlett also chronicles Ropsha’s other many owners, residents, and uses, including as a rural branch of the Foundling Home, part of the imperial properties, a battleground in the Civil War, a Soviet fish farm, and a rest home. Having been occupied by the Germans during World War II, the remnants of the palace complex are in great disrepair, although Ropsha has been included on the UNESCO list of world heritage sites, and there have been plans put forward for its redevelopment (cf. nearby Strel´na’s renovation as a “palace of congresses” or the fabulously recreated Tsaritsyno complex in Moscow).

Among the most evocative treatments of place in the volume is Anthony Cross’s history of the buildings at no. 2 and 4 Palace Embankment in St. Petersburg, home of the British Embassy from the post–Crimean War period through 1918. Cross traces their many inhabitants, renovations (or lack of

654 MARCUS C. LEVITT

them), furnishings, daily life, and social events. Among other things, during the Pushkin era the mansion housed the salons of Countess Ficquelmont and E. M. Khitrovo. On 31 August 1918, after the departure of the ambassador, the Red Guard raided and sacked the embassy and killed its defender, the naval attaché F. N. A. Cromie, who was “shot dead at the foot of the grand staircase” (352). It subsequently became a repository for confiscated art works and valuables, then the home of variously named Soviet educational institutions, and today houses the St. Petersburg State University of Culture and the Arts. While Cross chronicles the British Embassy’s adaptations to the political and cultural life of St. Petersburg, Robert Service describes the early 20th-century Russian colony in London, where Russians (expatriate revolutionaries) were singularly oblivious to place. Lacking any interest in English life and culture, they lived their own insular existence, “turned their homes into little Russias,” and “might just as well have been in Africa” (371 and 368). “From this complacent and dogmatic frame of mind,” Service concludes, “came some of the outbursts of fanaticism that afflicted Soviet Russia in the early years of the October Revolution and later” (376).

Two studies on Russian expeditions and geography provide perspective on modern Russia’s assimilation of its own broad expanses and raise the question of the connection between landscape and identity. David Moon considers Academy of Sciences expeditions to the steppes in the late 18th century. Their goal was “to describe and catalogue” (234), and they carried out encyclopedic investigations of (among other things) the climate, trees and vegetation, wildlife, soil, and drainage. Moon considers how expedition members—Russians, Germans, Baltic Germans, and Swedes—came to “an understanding of the steppe environment through the lens of their homelands, backgrounds, education, culture, experience, and personalities” (235). He demonstrates how they focused on what was new and different in relation to European science, in this way “laying the ground work for later Russian scientific research into the steppes as a distinct and integrated ecosystem” (235). Nikolai Przheval´skii (1839–88) and his explorations of Central Asia and the Far East in the later 19th century, the subject of Peter Waldron’s article, to some extent continued in the earlier tradition, although here the interests of science were far more wedded to military and imperial goals. Waldron locates Przheval´skii’s idea of a Russian conquest of China fully within the tradition of 19th-century Russian nationalist ideology and empire building (323–24). “At a time when Europeans were exploring Africa, Przheval´skii gave the Russians their own heroic figure to idolize” (312). Przheval´skii’s primary allegiance was to the imperial regime,

PERSONALITY AND PLACE IN RUSSIAN CULTURE—OR NOT 655

as “geography, science, and jingoism drew him back time and again to the harsh and difficult lands on Russia’s southern border” (327). Waldron sees a parallel between Russian expansion and that of the United States as described by Turner’s famous “frontier hypothesis,” remarking that whereas the American case glorified the individualistic pioneer spirit, in Russia state interests came first (312–13).

Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter and Gary Marker examine particular 18th-century texts in order to explore contemporary discourse on the Enlightenment and on empire, respectively. Wirtschafter examines several sermons of the leading 18th-century cleric Platon (Levshin), not only demonstrating how he “recast religion in an Enlightenment idiom” (201) but also arguing that “the strength of the Orthodox tradition” itself constituted one of the “deeper reasons for Russian receptivity to Enlightenment culture” in the first place (198). Her work aims to show that “churchmen [like Platon] played a critical role in assimilating Enlightenment ideas into Russian culture” (196). Gary Marker contrasts two narratives “casting Mazepa’s legacy,” those of the more or less official historiographer Feofan Prokopovich in his draft History of the Early Years of Peter the Great, and a letter from Pylyp Orlyk—Mazepa’s “successor among the rebel Cossacks, languishing in exile” (112)—to Stepan Iavorskii, seeking a pardon (127). Marker notes that “competing tales and legacies of Mazepa never seem to end” (111), and in examining this material he “might go so far as to suggest that Ukraine was the main soil on which ‘empire’ would take shape, the discursive and physical battleground of political allegiances” (131). Despite their sharply differing political allegiances, Prokopovich and Orlyk both condemned Mazepa, although while Prokopovich demonized him, Orlyk suggested his all-too-human side and his honorable motives, and both “agreed that the rights and freedoms of the Cossacks were important to maintain” (133).

A major part of Hughes’s legacy as a historian—especially clear in her monograph on Peter the Great—was the demonstration of the virtues and vibrancy of biography as a mode of historical writing and an appreciation of the ways in which quirks of personality shape history “from above.” Simon Dixon’s and Patrick O’Meara’s contributions to the volume take an explicitly biographical approach to two quite different public figures: General Pavel Kiselev (1788–1872), who was forced to hide his liberal sympathies in a repressive political context, and the “Mad Monk” Iliodor (S. M. Trufanov, 1880–1952), who took demagoguery in Russian political life to new levels. Kiselev walked a political tightrope. A one-time aide-de-camp to Alexander I, he went on to a brilliant career under Nicholas I, notwithstanding his

656 MARCUS C. LEVITT

liberal sympathies and his direct ties to many of the Decembrists. Specifically, O’Meara examines Kiselev’s years in Tul´chin (1819–29), the center of the Southern Society. Historians have traditionally been divided about the question of Kiselev’s knowledge of the developing conspiracy. O’Meara, author of a monograph on Pestel´ (2004), concludes that the general adopted “a highly dangerous strategy of a double game” (286), keeping his knowledge and sympathies close to his vest.4 Among other moments, O’Meara offers a brilliant dissection of Kiselev’s duel with I. V. Mordvinov in 1823, which had complex and ambiguous political overtones. “Kiselev’s behavior shows us that he was considerably clearer about the obligations of honor, to the extent of dueling (and killing) to uphold them, than he was about the imperative need to avoid compromising associations with dangerous ‘freethinkers’ ” (279).

Dixon tells another gripping biographical tale with his article on Iliodor, a major reactionary demagogue and scandalmonger, known as the ally and then enemy of Rasputin. Virulently antisemitic and protofascist, his “intellectually negligible” demagoguery was nevertheless “subversive of both the Synod … and the pseudo-constitutional regime” after 1905 (390). Following a series of public scandals in which he “deployed strikingly modern tactics in the cause of his pre-modern beliefs” (415)—for example, by cleverly manipulating the media—Iliodor was exiled and then defrocked. He left Russia for New York, where he played himself in the 1917 silent film The Fall of the Romanoffs. He returned to Russia for a time to try to found his own religious community, but in 1922 he emigrated for good to the United States, where he “retreated into obscurity” (413). His amazing and horrifying persona, which Lenin described as an “extremely original and extremely important feature” of the Russian Black Hundreds, embodied (in Lenin’s words) “dark, peasant democracy of the crudest but deepest kind” (384).

Wendy Rosslyn’s provocative contribution to Personality and Place considers place as an organizing factor in women’s memoirs, as changes of location prompt “reflection on the identity of the self ” (238). For Rosslyn, “memoirs” (or, perhaps better, “life-writing,” as in the article’s title) includes letters, diaries, travel notes, and autobiographical fragments, in Russian and in French. On the one hand, Rosslyn demonstrates that all such documents “involve the construction within the text of an image of the self ” (239), indeed often of many constructed selves within one text. On the other hand, tension arises in Rosslyn’s narrative concerning the individual writer’s degree of awareness of these constructions. She suggests that they may be transcended 4 Patrick O’Meara, The Decembrist Pavel Pestel: Russia’s First Republican (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

PERSONALITY AND PLACE IN RUSSIAN CULTURE—OR NOT 657

and that “a single, complex, more stable unified self ” may be achieved, one that “is largely immune to changes of circumstance” and that “disputes the culturally imposed group identity for women” (260). Thus Rosslyn creates her own well-constructed analysis of women’s writings from the late 18th through the early 19th centuries (by V. Bakunina, A. Kolechitskaia, and V. Sheremeteva), which describes “the rising curve of challenge to cultural constructions of femininity” (241). Although “construction of the self ” may serve as a neutral way of speaking about life-writing as culturally conditioned, always to some extent conventional, and inevitably reflecting social roles, it also seems to take on axiological baggage, as something to be criticized (and, consequently, to some extent transcended).

The final article I discuss explores “disorientation” as a theme in Russian culture. Robin Aizlewood frames the problem of the Russian disoriented personality in terms of landscape, based both on a reading of Pushkin’s “Besy” (Demons) as an originary text in Russian literature and on a broad survey of “the philosophy of the person in Russian thought” (292) from Chaadaev to Vekhi. However, “philosophy of the person” as used here—and perhaps in 19th-century “Russian thought” as well—hardly seems to rise to the level of “philosophy,” and in general the texts analyzed treat the concepts of place and personality loosely and metaphorically or in “broad rhetorical brushstrokes,” as Aizlewood notes (296). According to Aizlewood’s thumbnail survey, only Rozanov and Bakhtin gave substantive importance to actual place and to “a person, crucially, that is thoroughly embodied” (299). In Aizlewood’s reading of “Besy,” Pushkin first “foregrounds a sense of place” and then disrupts it, metapoetically “deconstructing his ever-favoured poetics of situational rhyme” (301–2). This interpretation is weakened, for this reader, by the fact that he does not see the “topography of landmarks” allegedly established in the poem, while, on the contrary, situational rhyme seems very strong, insofar as the same situation (of being lost) and language are continually repeated.

Aizlewood’s essay suggests a theme that may unite much of the collection. It seems to this reader that the issue of “disorientation” might be better framed in terms of a Russian devaluation of personality and place, something that might plausibly be taken as a chronic weakness of modern Russian culture. As Aizlewood testifies, Russian “philosophy of the person” has been significantly underdeveloped. This point may be seen on a broad canvas by such disparate phenomena analyzed in the volume under review as the manipulations of history in the mythologizing and demonization of Mazepa, General Kiselev’s perilous negotiation between the harsh demands of honor and political reliability, the limitations of “culturally imposed group identity”

658 MARCUS C. LEVITT

affecting Russian women, Russian explorers’ prioritizing of patriotism over individual achievement, or “Mad Monk” Iliodor’s demagogic manipulation of the public sphere. Spatial disorientation—weakened sensitivity to place—

may also be seen as a chronic deficiency in Russian culture. Here one could cite Russian intellectuals’ “nomadism” and rootlessness decried by Chaadaev and Dostoevskii, Richard Pipes’s critique of Russian patrimonialism, Kliuchevskii’s view of internal colonization, the violent displacement of populations, and so on—as evidence of disrupted connections to place. In Personality and Place in Russian Culture one might consider the fate of Ropsha as a case study of the loss of historical continuity; geography subsumed to national interest; and Russian expatriates in London who “might just as well have been in Africa.” Many of the articles in this collection thus both suggest the value of rediscovering various “generally disregarded corners of history” and at the same time lead one to meditate on the reasons and circumstances for such disregard.

Dept. of Slavic LanguagesDornsife College of Letters, Arts, and SciencesUniversity of Southern CaliforniaLos Angeles, CA 90089-4353 USAlevitt@usc.edu

When the publications of a Kritika staff member are reviewed, that person is excluded from all editorial decisions associated with the review.