A Rosicrucian Utopia in Eighteenth-Century Russia: The Masonic Circle of N. I. Novikov by Raffaella Faggionato (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 349 Bohdan Tscherkeswrites on Stalinistvisions for the urban transformation of Lviv in I939-55; he identifies the important changes that were made to give the city a Soviet visual and ideological orientation,but revealsthat more grandiose Soviet plans for radically altering the city's appearance were never implemented. Similarily, Martin Aberg concludes, in a study of the demographic and social changes in postwar Lviv, that while Soviet policies altered the city's ethno-linguisticprofile, the relativelymodest programme of industrializationenabled distinctUkrainianculturalforms to survive.Padraic Kenney demonstrates in turn how these contributed to Lviv's 'Central European Renaissance' in I987-90 and the role it played in the protests that led to Ukrainian independence. George Grabowicz closes the volume by dissectingthe myths that Polish and Ukrainianliteratureshave projectedinto the city's history. All the articlesare based on an extensiveprimaryand secondaryliterature in half a dozen languages and, in some cases, on archival sources. Despite some overlapping of subject matter, it is a well structured and handsome volume. Indeed, one can thinkof no better startingpoint for any appreciation of thisbeautifulcity'spast and present,and of the influencesthat have shaped its rich culturalhistory. Abingdon School W. H. ZAWADZKI Faggionato, Raffaella. A Rosicrucian Utopiain Eighteenth-Centugy Russia: The MasonicCircle ofN. I. Jovikov. Archivesinternationalesd'histoiredes idees, I90. Springer,Heidelberg, 2005. xiii + 300 pp. Notes. Glossary.Bibliography . Index. ?87.00: ?I26.00. ONE of the outstanding features of Russian historiographysince the fall of Communism is the enormousvarietyof previouslydiscouragedsubjectswhich are now pursued.One of these is freemasonry,which has seen the publication of many works such as, for instance, A. Serkov's,Russkoe masonstvo I73I-2000 (Moscow, 2000), new publications by V. Sakharov, the reprint in I999 of G. Vernadskii'sRusskoe masonstvo v tsarstvovanie Ekateriny vtoroi and, even more strikingly,the translationinto Russian of F. Yates's TheRosicrucian Enlightenment , both in I999. The new materialin circulationor availablein archiveshas also been exploited by non-Russian scholars, such as Douglas Smith in the USA and more extensively in Italy by Raffaella Faggionato, long known to aficionadosas one of the most knowledgeablewriterson the mysteriousworld of Russian Rosicrucianismin the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The present work has been published in differentversions over the years. The earliest came out in I993 in the RivistaStorica Italiana(Anno CV, F. i, PP. 36-179). A second, much fuller,version appeared, also in Italian, in 1997 in Archivio di StoriadellaCultura, vol. Io, and it is this version which has been translated into somewhat laboured English in the International Archives of the Histogy of Ideas(no. I90) and is reviewed here. It benefits from an extensive bibliography and an extensive list of Masonic sources in Russian archives which will enormously assist any future scholar wishing to penetrate these 350 SEER, 85, 2, 2007 arcane mysteries.The footnotes also supplythe originalRussian text of many quotations in English in the text. Faggionato startswith a brief sketch of the emergence of freemasonryin eighteenth-centuryRussia, which does not add much to previouswork. But it illustratesthe complexity of the various trends and the effort to bring order into confusionin Europeanmasonryat the grand convention of Wilhelmsbad in 1782, which elected the Duke of Brunswickas Grand Master. Faggionato then divides her study into three broad sections: in the first she deals veiy skilfullywith the currentswhich flowed into the spirituallife of those who had been arousedto the issuesdeveloped by the early alchemistsand 'magi' of the seventeenthcentury.These were the followersof hermeticlore, devoted to the investigationof nature, which led on to the scientificdevelopments in mathematics , physics and chemistryof the late seventeenthcentury;in her second part Faggionato deals with the originsof the ideological and spiritualcurrents which fed specificallyinto freemasonryby the end of the eighteenth century, exploring in more detail the complex, often quite contradictory,relationships between the Enlightenment, freemasonry in general and Rosicrucianism in particular (not only in Russia). The third part deals with the specifically Russian form of Rosicrucianism, the gradual influx into Russia of German pietism,followedby the mysticismofJohann Arndt,the 'Angelof Silesia',and most important of all, the teaching of Jacob Bohme, the circulation of the Rosicrucian manifestoes, the later political reform programme of the Rose Cross,and the establishmentof the materialbasisfor the propagationof specifically Rosicrucian Masonic ideas by the small group of adepts...