Rossiia koldunov by Sergei Erlikh (review)

Abstract

764 SEER, 84, 4, 2006 Erlikh, Sergei. Rossiiakoldunov. Nestor-Istoriia, St Petersburg, 2003. 497 Pp. Notes. Bibliography.Price unknown. THISis a highly eccentricbook, both conceptuallyand structurally.It is a little hard to discernthe author'sstatedpurpose in writingit, though it appearsto run roughly as follows: after contrasting 'militant' Russian civilization with its 'magical'Western counterpart,the work explores the 'mutualrejection'of three successive generations of Russian 'sorcerers':soothsayers, Orthodox priests and the intelligentsia.It then develops a hypothesis about the descent of 'Slav magician-priests'from 'a medieval people of sorcerers',and investigates the combination of the 'incompatible mythological structures' of Alexander Herzen's 'Decembrist legend', which conditioned the reverential reception of the Decembristsby the Russian intelligentsiafor I50 years. The book consists of three sections:'The Russia of sorcerers'(fromwhich the book takes its unhelpful title), 'The worship of soothsayers' and 'The history of a myth (Herzen's "Decembristlegend")'which accounts for over half the book. Sergei Erlikhclaims that articulatinghis 'new view' of Russian historyis a lonely businessto which the antidote is a superabundanceof citation from the work of others (p. i8). This policy, however, leads to such structural oddities as a four-page chapter buttressed by twenty pages of notes. These, moreover, are densely textured with numerous referencesexclusively to Russianliterature,pointing to an almostincontinenteruditionand containing lengthy digressionsof breathtakingself-indulgence. Erlikh'scentral idea is that the third generation of Russia's 'sorcerers',the intelligentsia,was born on the day of the Decembrist uprisingin Petersburg, 14 December I825. Its forerunnerwas Radishchev (John the Baptist')and its chief 'evangelist'was Herzen. The religiousmetaphoris extended to a parallel between the Decembrists' status as 'martyrs'and Christ'spassion. In a particularlybizarrechapter (six)Erlikhinsiststhat Russia,followingthe 'death'of the intelligentsia,is now awaiting its fourth generation of 'sorcerers'.A typically self-referentialand unconventional aside (pp.47-53) sees the author defend his hatredof Putin's'man-hating'Russianstateand proclaim,however implausibly,Moldova (where he lives and where this book was published)as the present and future repositoryof Russian civilization. If this book has a point at all, it is definitelyto be found in the Decembrist section which it would have been far better to have published separately. Here, Erlikharguesthat in Russia scholarlyinterestin the Decembristsis out of all proportion to their historical significance and attributes this to their mythicalstatusas developed by Herzen and continued by Soviet historians.It is only now that post-Soviet commentatorsare questioningthe Herzen-Soviet idealization of the Decembrists as 'knights in shining armour'. He traces Herzen's mythologizing of the Decembrists from the 'baptismal'moment of his precocious teenage oath to dedicate his life to avenging them. A lengthy section analysesHerzen's manipulationof his sourcesas he stroveto construct an unblemishedportraitof the 'heroic' Decembrists. Erlikharguesthat Herzen was concerned above all with this mythologizing process and that thereforeto call him (as many have) the Decembrists' 'first historian'is to misunderstandboth his work and its purpose. Herzen's use of sourceswas highly selectiveand he massagedthem to show the Decembristsin REVIEWS 765 an exclusively positive light. For example, he rarely mentioned Kakhovskii, the assassinof Governor-GeneralMiloradovich, even omitting him from the list of the five hanged 'martyrs',since he disapprovedof an outragewhich was wholly inconsistentwith the 'chivalry'central to his Decembrist myth. Pavel Pestel', Herzen's favouriteDecembrist, he famouslydubbed a 'socialistbefore socialism' and promoted his myth by recasting references to him in official accounts, for example playing down the alleged hostility towards him in the Northern Society. The uncriticalacceptance of Herzen's carefullyconstructed myth, Erlikh claims, in turn informed the Soviet stereotyping of the Decembristsas the 'firstgeneration'of the 'foundingfathers'of the Bolshevik state (p.39I). Unfortunately, instead of ending at this point, Erlikh appends a quirky epigraphwhich lurchesinto wider philosophicalquestionsabout the meaning and making of history, and the role of the intelligentsiain its narrationand interpretation,leading him to conclude that the only lesson that history has taught us is that we continue to learn nothing from it. In a final manifesto,he sets an agenda for future interdisciplinarycollaboration with both Russian and Westernscholarsto enrich understandingof the past and, in particular,of what he calls the 'technologiesof power'. Potentialreaders,and only those interestedin Herzen and the Decembrists, are advised to restrict themselves to pages I91 to 437...