Hoffmann, Peter Aleksandr Nikolaevic RadiÅ¡cev (1749–1802). Leben und Werk Kölm, Lothar and Schippan, Michael (eds) Peter Hoffmann — Studien zur Kultur- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte sowie zu den deutsch-russischen Beziehungen des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts. Gesammelte Aufsätze, anlässlich des 90. Geburtstages (review)

Abstract

SEER, 95, 3, JULY 2017 562 All the essays are lucidly written, some are theorized, each has a conclusion, partly compensating for the lack of concluding remarks by the volume’s editors. Department of Global, Cultural & Language Studies Henrietta Mondry University of Canterbury, Christchurch Hoffmann, Peter. Aleksandr Nikolaevic Radišcev (1749–1802). Leben und Werk. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, 2015. xv + 332 pp. Notes. Chronology. Bibliography. Index. €64.95: £49.00: $78.95. Kölm, Lothar and Schippan, Michael (eds). Peter Hoffmann — Studien zur Kultur- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte sowie zu den deutsch-russischen Beziehungen des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts. Gesammelte Aufsätze, anlässlich des 90. Geburtstages. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, 2015. xl + 350 pp. Illustration. Notes. List of works. Index. £52.00. In November 2014 the Berlin historian Dr Peter Hoffmann celebrated his ninetieth birthday. Hoffmann’s area of specialization is imperial Russia and Russian-German relations. The occasion was marked by a new biography by Hoffmann of Aleksandr Radishchev and by two collections of Hoffmann’s published and unpublished essays, one on M. V. Lomonosov (not reviewed here), the other on cultural and international history of the imperial Russian period. Hoffmann is one of the last survivors of Eduard Winter’s East German school of historians of Russia. Youthful engagement with the Nazis made him ineligible for high status in the GDR, and he remained ‘in the back row’ of GDR academic life (as he titled his autobiography In der hinteren Reihe, Berlin 2006), a diligent member of the Marxist-Leninist East German historical establishment and the GDR Academy of Sciences, researching, writing, reviewing, annotating, translating: the bibliography of his works 1951–2015 occupies fifty-seven pages (Peter Hoffmann, pp. 257–313). From the beginning he was involved in Winter’s ground-breaking exploration of Russian-German Wechselseitigkeiten — connections and collaborations — beginning with Leonhard Euler. A. N. Radishchev and M. V. Lomonosov, two Russian eighteenth-century figures strongly influenced by their experiences in Germany, also preoccupied him. Hoffmann’s retirement in 1989 coincided with the end of the GDR and the ‘winding down’ (Abwicklung) of the Academy of Sciences and Marxist historical research in East Germany. Some of his work which failed then to find a publication outlet appears in the collected volume here. But Hoffmann, like some other older GDR historians, continued to publish, and his most productive period came in fact after 1991, with studies of St Petersburg, Peter the Great, Eastern Siberia, and serious and well-researched REVIEWS 563 biographical contributions on G. F. Müller, A. F. Büsching, Lomonosov and now Radishchev. Hoffmann’s Radishchev brings together the fruits of a life-time’s study: he first wrote on this topic for his undergraduate thesis in 1953. In the exegesis, however, there are few traces of previous Marxist and Soviet positions. (A few still turn up — thus Hoffmann writes [p. 39] that the 1767 Legislative Commission ‘would quickly exceed the limits set by Catherine’.) Hoffmann seeks to provide a reliable, detailed, factual biographical account, in which he is very successful; he goes into great detail, too, on the writing and publishing history of Radishchev’s Journey. His purpose is also to present his own view of Radishchev, essentially as an intellectual of, and bounded by, his own time. Rejecting the standard Soviet view of Radishchev as the ‘first Russian revolutionary’, he points out that Radishchev accepted the status quo, while seeing clearly the need for reform and also acknowledging the possibility of revolutionary change. Hoffmann’s Radishchev is an eighteenth-century philosophe, eager to improve the world, aware of contemporary revolutionary events but not believing in the necessity or the inevitability of revolution: Hoffmann cites relatively approvingly the views of A. McConnell in this respect (p. 166). Radishchev made freedom the highest ideal, but when the French Revolution evolved from liberty to terror, he turned back to the Enlightened ruler in search of societal good (p. 225). A striking and useful feature of the book is the space given to the opinions and researches of other scholars, which allows Hoffmann to canvas different scholarly views and to define his own against them. His bibliographical coverage is international and thorough, though not perfect...