Gentry Culture and Lifestyle in the 18th-Century Russian Provinces
- Gentry Culture and Lifestyle in the 18th-Century Russian Provinces
Historians rightly reject the possibility of final answers to almost any question. They refer to their conclusions as "perspectives" and think of interpretation as always being tentative. Indeed, already in antiquity, historians had begun to search for methodological innovations, untapped sources of information, and explanatory concepts and theories that would allow them to expand knowledge and uncover lost voices. In the mid-20th century, they self-consciously embraced the aspiration to write "total history" or "history from below"—an endeavor that led away from more "traditional" intellectual, political, military, and diplomatic histories to the "new social history." From there they moved on to the "new cultural history," including subaltern and gender studies; then to transnational and entangled histories; and now to postcolonial analysis of the colonizers and decolonization of the historian's own mind. Through each of these trends, historians have proclaimed the deconstruction of established narratives and the (re)construction of alternative ones. By deploying counterarguments that challenge whichever perspective is deemed dominant or conventional at a given moment, historians endlessly debate key questions and systematically enrich scholarly understanding about both established and understudied topics. This process can go on indefinitely, because, as a mode of [End Page 187] inquiry, history remains inherently creative and is forever broadening intellectual horizons.
However, to diversify the available approaches to big (and small) questions is not necessarily to ask original questions. In modern times, beginning with prerevolutionary historiography, the fundamental questions of Russian history have changed ever so slowly, even though perspectives on these questions have proliferated. Questions related to tyranny and political culture, the prospects for constitutional or democratic politics, the relationship between state and society (or center and periphery), the vitality of civil society, the parameters of social arrangements, the dynamics of socio-economic relationships and development, the impact of state repression, the agency or resistance of communities and individuals, the dominance of the patriarchal household, Russia's place in the world or in European society, the meanings of empire, the subjugation of peoples, pathways to modernity (whether economic, social, cultural, or political), the enduring power of the Russian Orthodox Church, the depth of religious belief, the glories of Russian culture, and so on, and so forth—these basic themes, in variegated forms, define the work of all historians who study Russia.
The fourth volume of Culture and Everyday Life of the Nobility in Provincial Russia of the 18th Century, edited by Olga Glagoleva and Ingrid Schierle, covers several of the themes just described and also falls within the boundaries of multiple historiographical traditions: classic social and economic, local or regional, biographical or intellectual, family, gender, and cultural histories. The book was conceived, researched, and written before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, although given the publication date of 2022, it is possible that in the final stages of editing changes occurred in response to current circumstances. Together with the three volumes previously published and already reviewed in Kritika, this collection of articles grew out of the brief period of academic freedom that defined historical research in Russia from the 1990s to the mid-2010s, before the world became fully cognizant of Russian aggressions against Ukraine.1 The present review is therefore written with feelings of sadness and a touch of nostalgia for a time that, perhaps erroneously, appeared to be heralding the democratic potentialities of Russia and the export of original ideas from Russia. Today, in 2023, it is impossible not to mourn the loss of the collaborative international work represented by the project on the provincial nobility, sponsored by the German Historical Institute in Moscow in 2009–15—a project that can no longer exist in the host country. It also is impossible [End Page 188] not to mourn the lost opportunity for historians living in Russia, able to conduct archival research day in and day out, to formulate fresh questions for the field as...
