Nethercott , Frances Writing History in Late Imperial Russia: Scholarship and the Literary Canon (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 771 Nethercott, Frances. Writing History in Late Imperial Russia: Scholarship and the Literary Canon. Library of Modern Russia. Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York, 2020. x + 280 pp. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. £90.00; £28.99: £26.09 (e-book). No-one doubts that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian novelists and poets cast light on Russian history, but Frances Nethercott argues that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian historians reflect or embody trends in Russian literature. This is hardly surprising, for many of the historians who figure in the book received their training in what were once called ‘Historico-Philological Faculties’ (i.e. parts of universities in which both history and literature were studied), and until quite late in the nineteenth century historical writing in most European countries, not just in Russia, was thought to be a subdivision of belles-lettres rather than the less entertaining discipline it often is today. It was a rare historian in nineteenth-century Europe who did not derive a degree of inspiration from the historical novels of Walter Scott. Nethercott knows these things, and by way of contextualizing her Russian historians speaks of the literary dimension of the work of Jules Michelet, Augustin Thierry and Hippolyte Taine. She might have added Lord Macaulay, who was certainly style-driven and no less famous for his Lays of Ancient Rome than for his History of England. Nevertheless, the thesis of the book reminds readers of a truth they may have forgotten, and may also do something to broaden the modern understanding of what should be included in the classical Russian literary canon. Today, pre-1917 Russian historians are usually assigned to political, ideological, chronological, typological, or geographical (rather than literary) categories; they tend to be divided into statists and populists, idealists and postivists,modernistsandmedievalists,synthesizersanddocument-collectors, Russianists and Europeanists, or historians of the ‘Moscow School’ or the ‘St Petersburg School’ (rather than, say, writers of epics or lyrics). Nethercott cuts across such polarities by thinking of her historians as writers first and truthseekers second. Her chapters are thematic rather than chronological (let alone biographical). After discussing, in chapter one, the part that the state thought it should play in the management of historical instruction and publication in Russia (was it to be a hands-off patron or an interventionist overseer?), in chapter two she sketches the literary sensibilities of some of the historians whose work best enables her to make her case (especially Timofei Granovskii, Vasilii Kliuchevskii and Ivan Grevs, who are perhaps the scholars who appear most frequently in the book as a whole). The later chapters deal with Russian historians’ style; their interest in providing portraits of historical figures; the extent to which and the reasons why they made use of literary evidence; their SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 772 depiction of place; and their work on poets and novelists (Grevs, for example, on Turgenev). In the final chapter the author returns to her over-arching question: whether we should be thinking of tsarist historiography not as art or science but, at the very least, as a literary-investigative hybrid. The book makes no attempt to embrace the work of all the historians at work in nineteenth- or early twentieth-century Russia. Indeed, Nethercott’s approach limits the number of historians on whom she can focus, for not all the historians at work in her period are grist to her mill. Different readers will have different views about who should have been included and who omitted. The present reviewer particularly welcomed the appearances in the book of Nikolai Kostomarov and did not regret the near-total absence of Nikolai Ustrialov and Sergei Solov´ev, but he was disappointed that Nikolai Polevoi did not attract much attention and that neither Ivan Beliaev nor Vasilii Semevskii rated a mention. But the book is not trying to supplant George Vernadsky’s Russian Historiography: A History (Belmont, MA, 1978), let alone the monstrous volumes of the collective Soviet Ocherki istorii istoricheskoi nauki v SSSR (5 volumes + 2 volumes of bibliography, Moscow, 1955–85). Dr Nethercott is putting forward a thesis. At times, she protests too much, for the endnotes take up more than a quarter of...