Hartley , Janet M. Shaw , Denis J. B. Magic, Texts and Travel: Homage to a Scholar, Will Ryan (review)

Abstract

SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 760 Hartley, Janet M. and Shaw, Denis J. B. (eds). Magic, Texts and Travel: Homage to a Scholar, Will Ryan. Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia, London, 2021. x + 388 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Appendix. Notes. Publications of Will Ryan. Index. £25.00 (paperback). According to all its outward signs, this book should make the reviewer wary. The idiosyncratic combination of topics listed in its main title hardly suggests coherence. The subtitle, baldly advertising the book as a Festschrift, gives not even the mildest nod towards modern disguises of the genre (under cover of, for example, a themed issue of a journal). The fact that the volume is published by a study group seems to remind us of publishers’ wariness with regard to collections of essays in general and Festschriften in particular. A glance at the contents list shows contributions ranging from A. V. Chernetsov’s study of early Rus amulets to Paul Dukes’s account of Scottish missionaries and Manchurian railways at the turn of the twentieth century, via detours into diverse side-avenues such as fifteenth-century Slavonic translations of Hebrew philosophical terminology (Moshe Taube), or eighteenth-century masonic rituals (Yuri Stoyanov). Everything seems to indicate the pious obscurity of a semi-private act of — as the title says — scholarly homage. And yet, despite all of that, this turns out to work rather well as a book. As Will Ryan might have said, never underestimate the ostensibly esoteric. The twenty-one chapters are roughly evenly distributed across three sections whose headings are slightly expanded versions of the three words in the main title of the book. To summarize them all is impossible, to select is invidious, but a few highlights will indicate both the diversity and the unexpected coherence. The coherence derives from the predominant focus, across all three sections, on aspects of what might conventionally have been reckoned liminality, on phenomena on or around the cultural, social or geographical margins. But this is not a mere kunstkamera of curiosities. Will Ryan has contributed hugely to the process by which conventionally liminal preoccupations have shifted into the historiographical mainstream. The chapters are also of a consistently high quality. The first section is on ‘Magic and Beliefs’. The line between the two is pleasingly blurred. Valerie Kivelson vividly illustrates the ‘lyrical logic’ of Muscovite spells that involved or invoked animals, while Eve Levin explores the practice of therapeutic blood-letting that seems to have been adopted from Western Europe from the late fifteenth century, despite the fact that Muscovites did not relate disease to ‘humours’ and hence did not share the theory that underpinned the practice. Gary Marker investigates the curiously disproportionate posthumous notoriety of the heretic and dissenter Grigorii Talitskii, who was convicted and immolated in 1701 and on whom a dossier was REVIEWS 761 assembled on the orders of the Empress Elizabeth in the 1740s and published in the 1860s. The second section is headed ‘Texts and Translations’, though in some respects the chapters here also touch on magic and, in particular, belief. Sergei Bogatyrev meticulously deconstructs the sources on the ‘legend of the golden belt’, an apparently scandalous episode at the wedding of Vasilii II. It may have originated as just a drunken row, but it was subsequently interpreted and elaborated into a political polemic. Adelina Angusheva-Tihanov considers how the story of the toll-booths that the soul has to negotiate on its attempted ascent to heaven, derived from a vision in the tenth-century Byzantine Life of Basil the Younger, was adapted in the eighteenth century and later, with particular focus on the treatment of the toll-booth that assessed ‘magic’. Boris Uspenskij makes an intriguing case for the notion that some polite diplomatic rhetoric by the Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1658 was interpreted (and reported) by a Muscovite envoy as an actual pledge of subservience to the tsar. Thethirdsectionismorewordilyheaded‘Travel,TechnologyandExploration’. Here liminality knows almost no limits, as we are reminded of how much of the globe we can traverse while remaining safely within the realm of Russian Studies. Anthony Cross surveys the British in Crimea between 1774 and 1856. Elena Smilianskaia and Julia Leikin investigate a tour...