Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power, 1671-1725 by Paul Bushkovitch (review)

Abstract

MLRy 99.1, 2004 269 time comparing them to Janovic is like comparing such feeble and venal war writers as Ivan Stadniuk and Leonid Brezhnev with Vasil Bykau' (pp. 424-25). This is a totally unjustified attack on three very important Russian writers, especially Astaf'ev, who in the 1990s emerged as Russia's greatest living writer, one who was equally adept at writing on the fate of the village or the Great Fatherland War. Astaf'ev's cycle of war stories written in the 1990s, Tak khochetsya zhit' (I Really Want to Live, x995)> Oberton (Overtone, 1996), Veselyi soldat (The Cheerful Soldier, 1998) and the outstanding Proklyaty i ubity (The Damned and theDead, 1992-94), are emphatically not the work of a feeble and venal pen. Whatever the current political positions of these writers?Astaf'ev died in 2001? they do, as can be seen from their own writing, share a great deal with Janovic. Astaf'ev, like Janovic, was a countryman, who bemoaned the destruction of rural life, and the same is true of Belov and Rasputin, as McMillin concedes. Janovic's love of nature and man's relationship to the natural world?characteristics of Janovic's most successful miniatures, according to McMillin?arestaple themes in the work of Astaf'ev and other village writers. Again, the dichotomy of town and country,another important theme in Janovic, is, arguably the theme of the village prose writers and a major one in Russian literature as well. In other words, comparing Astaf'ev, Belov, and Rasputin with Janovic is thematically justified and illuminates shared experiences and literary responses to common problems across the boundaries of language and culture. Those that somehow survived the purges, the German occupation, and the return of the Red Army were driven by an exceptionally powerful need to preserve the collective memory, to save Belarusian literature from extinction. In Western exile many writers and poets feel a desperate longing for Belarus. Now this poses an interesting question: the extent to which censorship, repression, exile, the pain of separation, and the longing for homeland, everything that is that one associates with a Diaspora, actually helped to strengthen Belarusian literature and Belarusian national identity rather than weakening them. Russian literature would be the main focus of any investigation here, but the general conclusions would pertain to Belarusian letters as well and some exploration of this question on the part of McMillin would have been welcome. More of a small encyclopaedia than a monograph, Belarusian Literature of theDia? spora is a well-researched and clearly written reference work in which many authors and genres are analysed. The intemperance regarding Astaf'ev et al. is, fortunately,an exception. The book has all the hallmarks of becoming one of the standard reference works on the subject, and remaining so foryears to come. For in its present layout it will readily lend itself to being updated in the future. University of Leeds Frank Ellis Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power, 1671-1725. By Paul Bushkovitch. Cam? bridge: Cambridge University Press. 2001. xii + 485 pp. ?13.95. ISBN o84769 -639-1 (pbk). The justification that Paul Bushkovitch claims for writing this voluminous study of court politics in the reign ofPeter the Great is that we cannot properly evaluate Peter's actions because not enough is known about what they were. Bushkovitch does not dispute that Peter's reign is 'one of the great turning points in Russian history, and indeed of European history as well' (p. 12), but he feels that the 'political narrative' of the reign needs to be rewritten, 'using sources which have been largely bypassed or underutilized in the study ofthe period', such as the unpublished dispatches of foreign 270 Reviews diplomats (pp. 1,6,8). He hopes his 'new narrative' will have several outcomes. It will 'elucidate the informal structures of power in the Russian state' (p. 1), by providing insights into the 'ruling elite, essentially the old boyar aristocracy with the addition of the new favourites and officialsof Peter's reign', whom historians ofthe 'state' school, Bushkovitch alleges, have largely overlooked (pp. 2-3). It will show the degree to which 'the great clans really ran Russia...