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Religion and Enlightenment in Catherinian Russia
This valuable study explores the Russian Enlightenment with reference to the religious Enlightenment of the mid to late eighteenth century. Grounded in close reading of the sermons and devotional writings of Platon (Levshin), Court preacher and Metropolitan of Moscow, the book examines the blending of European ideas into the teachings of Russian Orthodoxy. Highlighting the interplay between Enlightenment thought and Orthodox enlightenment, Elise Wirtschafter addresses key questions of concern to religious Enlighteners across Europe: humanity's relationship to God and creation, the distinction between learning and enlightenment, the role of Christian love in authority relationships, the meaning of free will in a universe governed by Divine Providence, and the unity of church, monarchy, and civil society. Countering scholarship that depicts an Orthodox religious culture under assault from European modernity and Petrine absolutism, Wirtschafter emphasizes the ability of Russia's educated churchmen to assimilate and transform Enlightenment ideas. The intellectual and spiritual vitality of eighteenth-century Orthodoxy helps to explain how Russian policymakers and intellectuals met the challenge of European power while simultaneously coming to terms with the broad cultural appeal of the Enlightenment's universalistic human rights agenda.
Religion and Enlightenment in Catherinian Russia defines the Russian Enlightenment as a response to the allure of European modernity, as an instrument of social control, and as the moral voice of an emergent independent society. Because Russia's enlightened intellectuals focused on the moral perfectibility of the individual human being, rather than social and political change, the originality of the Russian Enlightenment has gone unrecognized. This study corrects images of a superficial Enlightenment and crisis-ridden religious culture, arguing that in order to understand the humanistic sensibility and emphasis on individual dignity that permeate Russian intellectual history, and the history of the educated classes more broadly, it is necessary to bring Orthodox teachings into the discussion of Enlightenment thought. The result is a book that explains the distinctive origins of modern Russian culture while also allowing scholars to situate the Russian Enlightenment in European and global history.
eBook
Images of Otherness in Russia, 1547-1917
Defining the Others, “them”, in relation to one’s own reference group, “us”, has been an essential phase in the formation of collective identities in any given country or region. In the case of Russia, the formulation of these binary definitions – sometimes taking a form of enemy images – can be traced all the way to medieval texts, in which religion represented the dividing line. Further, the ongoing expansion of the empire transferred numerous “external others” into internal minorities. The chapters of this edited volume examine the development and contexts of various images, perceptions and categories of the Others in Russia from the 16 th century Muscovy to the collapse of the Russian empire.
eBook
Totalitarian societies and democratic transition : essays in memory of Victor Zaslavsky
\"Originally published on the occasion of the second anniversary of the death of Prof. Victor Zaslavsky. The book deals with the theory and the history of totalitarian society with a comparative approach. Consists of three sections: Theory and debate; History and society; Beyond Totalitarianism. The authors are among the leading European, American and Russian scholars\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Architecture of Oblivion
Despite attempts to promote the aesthetics of ruins in Russia—from Catherine the Great's construction of fake ruins in imperial parks to Josef Brodsky's elegiac meditations—ruins have never achieved the status they enjoy in Western Europe. While the Soviet Union was notorious for leveling churches, post-Soviet Russia has only intensified the practice of massive destruction and reconstruction. Architecture of Oblivion examines the role of ruins in the development of Russia's historical consciousness from the eighteenth century to the present. Investigating the meaning and functions ruins have acquired in Russian culture, Schönle looks at ideological reasons for the current disregard for the value of ruins and historical buildings, in particular by political authorities, and reveals how ruins have often become a site of resistance to official ideology and an invitation to map out alternative visions of history and of statehood. An interdisciplinary study of Russia's response to ruins has never been attempted, although the topic of ruins has garnered considerable interest in Western Europe and in the U.S. This original work from a leading authority on the subject will appeal to historians of Russian culture and thought, literature and art scholars, and general readers interested in ruins.
eBook
Obshchestvennost§ and civic agency in late imperial and Soviet Russia : interface between state and society
\"In modernizing Russia, obshchestvennost§, an indigenous Russian word, began functioning as an indispensable term to illuminate newly emerging active parts of society and their public identities. This volume approaches various phenomena associated with obshchestvennost§ across the revolutionary divide of 1917, targeting a critic and the commercial press in the late Imperial society, workers and the public opinion in the revolutionary turmoil of 1905, the liberals during the First World War, worker-peasant correspondents in the 1920s, community activists in the 1930s, medical professionals under late Stalinism, people's vigilante groups and comrade courts throughout the 1950s-1960s and Soviet dissidents. Furthermore, focusing on obshchestvennost' as a strategic word appealing to active citizens for political goals, this book illustrates how the state elites and counter-elites used this word and sought a new form of state-society relation derived from their visions of progress during the late imperial and Soviet Russia\"-- Provided by publisher.
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From Empire to Eurasia
The Eurasianist movement was launched in the 1920s by a group of young Russian émigrés who had recently emerged from years of fighting and destruction. Drawing on the cultural fermentation of Russian modernism in the arts and literature, as well as in politics and scholarship, the movement sought to reimagine the former imperial space in the wake of Europe's Great War. The Eurasianists argued that as an heir to the nomadic empires of the steppes, Russia should follow a non-European path of development. In the context of rising Nazi and Soviet powers, the Eurasianists rejected liberal democracy and sought alternatives to Communism and capitalism. Deeply connected to the Russian cultural and scholarly milieus, Eurasianism played a role in the articulation of the structuralist paradigm in interwar Europe. However, the movement was not as homogenous as its name may suggest. Its founders disagreed on a range of issues and argued bitterly about what weight should be accorded to one or another idea in their overall conception of Eurasia. In this first English language history of the Eurasianist movement based on extensive archival research, Sergey Glebov offers a historically grounded critique of the concept of Eurasia by interrogating the context in which it was first used to describe the former Russian Empire. This definitive study will appeal to students and scholars of Russian and European history and culture.
eBook
The Dream That Failed
In The Dream that Failed, Walter Laqueur, hailed by The New York Times as \"one of our most distinguished scholars of modern European history,\" offers an authoritative assessment of the Soviet era--from the triumph of Lenin to the fall of Gorbachev. In the last three years, decades of conventional wisdom about the U.S.S.R. have been swept away, while a flood of evidence from Russian archives demands new thinking about old assumptions. Here, Laqueur conducts an inquiry on a grand scale explaining how the Bolsheviks won their struggle for power and captured the fire in a young generation of Russians, why the idealism faded and the system collapsed, and how western experts could have been so wrong about the Communist system. He reflects on the early enthusiasm of foreign observers and Bolshevik revolutionaries for the new Soviet order, then takes a piercing look at the totalitarian nature of the regime. He demonstrates how Communist society stagnated during the 1960s and 1970s while the economy wobbled to the brink, and how Western observers, from academic experts to CIA analysts, made wildly optimistic estimates of Moscow's economic and political strength. But in underscoring the rot and repression, he also notes that the Communist state did not necessarily have to fall when it did, and examines the many factors that contributed to its collapse. Only now, in the rubble of this lost empire, is it possible to gain a deeper understanding of the Soviet regime, its early achievements, its crimes and its ultimate disaster. In The Dream that Failed, the result of years of research and reflection, Walter Laqueur sheds fresh light on a central episode in our turbulent century.
eBook