Lindsey Hughes's "Landmarks in Russian Culture"

Abstract

SEER, Vol. 88,Nos. 1/2,January/April 2010 Lindsey Hughes's Landmarks in Russian Culture ROBIN MILNER-GULLAND Lindsey Hughes is remembered doubtless by all professional Russian ists, and also by a wider public, as a meticulous traditional historian: chronicler in the first place of Peter the Great, and of other lives too ? of Sofiia, Golitsyn and of the Romanovs (in her last volume). Such a perception, however understandable, reflects only part of her ambitions and achievements: if we look a little further into her copious published work, we get a rather different picture. Conventional inves tigation of biography and historico-political processes retreats from view. In her many shorter articles, we find a tireless enthusiast for generally disregarded corners of history ? all the more significant in shedding an oblique, maybe discomfiting, light on the bigger, more public events. She clearly relished not just historical oddity for its own sake, but themultivalent, disparate strands thatmake up the texture of human culture. She had a special eye for the ephemera of social life ? old guidebooks, prints, cards and the like.We detect her interest not only in ceremony and ritual but in the off-guard moments of the great ? in quirky topics like Peter's decree against beards or the cult of his various 'domiki', the houses he stayed in; and on a broader front in the development and meanings of Court portraiture in an age of massive cultural change. Several clues to Lindsey's interests and theirmotivation can be found in her inaugural lecture at SSEES, published in 2000 as Playing Games: The AlternativeHistory ofPeter theGreat. It opens thus: People often ask me how I became interested enough in Peter theGreat to spend several years writing a 600-page book about his reign.Here is a partial answer: a seed of interestwas sown at Sussex University when, as a student ofRussian Studies in the early 1970s taking a course on 'Russian Ornamentalism and the Grotesque in the 20th Century', I read a novel by Iurii Tynianov called 'TheWax Effigy' [...] Early eighteenth-century Russia sounded like a sort of freak-show of waxworks, which I found intriguing. Unlike, she adds, the textbook version, full of'sensible, concrete things'. She came to her great work on Peter a 'natural sequel' to her 'exami nation of the life and regime' of his half-sister Sophia ? the other way Robin Milner-Gulland isResearch Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Sussex. ROBIN MILNER-GULLAND 23 round to how one might expect. She was always excited by thatwhich was off-centre, distinctive, diverse, involuntarily indicative ? the qual ities thatmade her a cultural (rather than political, social or whatever) historian. It began with her doctoral work (though she had left Sussex for Cambridge, I remember itwell, talked or corresponded about it often, and such was academic life then ? found myself appointed one of her examiners). It was on the 'Moscow Baroque', a strange, idiosyncratic, yet memorable period of architectural and maybe general culture, squeezed between the Old and New Russia, hard to discuss in terms of either. Never thereafter did her intense interest in the processes and achievements of the visual arts leave her. She was also extremely responsive to Russia as a place, having (I believe) been galvanized into academic achievement by the experience of an undergraduate third year there, at a time when this was very unusual. Not only did buildings, pictures and so on as they now exist interest her, but their shifting cultural meanings through the genera tions and for people of varied circumstances. All this naturally gave rise to her great, uncompleted project on Landmarh inRussian Culture. She took it characteristically seriously, producing a document setting out her plans and making it the subject of discussion at a professional study-group in the late 1990s; so she saw it to some degree as a collaborative enterprise. It isworth quoting her aims as set out in this document: Landmarks in Russian Culture will focus on about twentyextantRussian build ings,paintings and statueswhich, inmy view, have a particular resonance for the history ofRussian culture, from the time of their creation to the present day. Individual chapters on each...