Russia's Path toward Enlightenment: Faith, Politics, and Reason, 1500-1801 by G. M. Hamburg

Abstract

Reviewed by: Russia's Path toward Enlightenment: Faith, Politics, and Reason, 1500-1801 by G. M. Hamburg Paul Bushkovitch G. M. Hamburg. Russia's Path toward Enlightenment: Faith, Politics, and Reason, 1500-1801. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. xi + 900 pp. Very few historians today would possess the courage to recount and analyze the development of political thought for an entire country for three hundred years of fundamental change. Gary Hamburg has done just that, and for a country whose earlier traditions differ sharply from those of Western Europe. As he properly observes, before the end of the seventeenth century, Russia produced much thought about the monarch and more generally about government, but entirely within a religious tradition. In those centuries there was no political thought in the Western sense. The westernization of Russian culture in Peter's time and after signified [End Page 118] the wholesale importation of an entirely different way of understanding the state (as of everything else), but what the Russians chose from the panoply of European thought and how they understood it is a tremendous problem in itself. Hamburg believes that the Russians were able to absorb Enlightenment thought while keeping a central place for Orthodox Christian conceptions of virtue in their ideas of politics. The greatest part of Hamburg's text is a close reading of the authors whom he believes (mostly correctly) to be the most important exponents of the dominant values. For each of these authors he provides a capsule biography and his interpretation of their work. Nearly the first half of the book is devoted to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, covering the authors whom previous historians have seen as central. In some cases this means including authors like Ivan Peresvetov, who were prominent in the scholarly literature some decades ago, but have less currency today. Peresvetov was the one author whom Soviet scholars could find who seemed to advocate something like "autocracy," but the problem was that his works had little circulation and also that he was not Russian. Perhaps he is best understood as a product of the regalist tradition of Poland-Lithuania imported into Russia. Hamburg is more at home with St. Joseph Volotskii, Ivan the Terrible himself, and Prince Andrei Kurbskii. In the case of all three his method of close reading pays off: there are no anachronistic labels or terminology. Hamburg's Kurbskii does not advocate freedom or Aristotelian aristocracy, and Ivan is not an ideologist of "absolutism." Rather they defend greater or lesser power of the monarch and certain modes of behavior in accord with their biblical and other models. Similarly, Hamburg is able to get through the cloud of polemic around Patriarch Nikon, his opponents in the church, and the early writers of the Old Belief tradition with a clear account of their positions on issues that were important to them, not just to modern historians. The section on Russian thought before Peter is mostly a success, but it has two shortcomings. The secondary literature consulted is curiously old-fashioned, with little or no mention of some major works. Hamburg does know the pre-revolutionary literature well, and that remains in many cases foundational, but he is not abreast of many of the debates and newly published texts and approaches since the 1950s, some exceptions aside. The Soviet era historians of Old Russian literature, Ia. S. Lur'e, D. S. Likhachev, and others, do not seem familiar to the author, apart from a few very old and occasional essays, and he does not seem to know the more recent work of A. I. Filiushkin or K. Iu. Erusalimskii. The references to western literature are also spotty and perhaps as a result his approach in this section is entirely text based. Yet one of the main trends in the study of Old Russian culture in the West has been the integration of visual culture and ritual. The texts simply cannot answer all the questions we would like to pose, for Old Russian religious culture was not systematic: all the main texts arose in polemic, even one as apparently encyclopedic as Joseph Volotskii's Prosvetitel'. The best idea of the conception of the tsar comes...