TARLE'S ‘THE NEXT TASK’: AN INTRODUCTION AND TRANSLATION

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes B. S. Kaganovich, Evgenii Viktorovich Tarle i peterburgskaia shkola istorikov, 27. In general, warm thanks are due to James D. White and Murray Frame for their careful and helpful reading of Tarle's essay and my Introduction. Kaganovich, Evgenii Viktorovich Tarle, 27. E.V. Tarle, ‘Mezhdunarodnyi istoricheskii congress v Londone’, 130–133. It is possible that Tarle's impressions were reinforced by the empiricist spirit of the host nation and by something like the American historian J. F. Jameson's lack of surprise that ‘British individualism, which had such brilliant results in history, should have its compensation in an organizing power, for such occasions, inferior to that of some other nations’ in particular Germany. See J. F. Jameson, ‘The International Congress of Historical Studies’, 679–680. Quoted by Paul Dukes, Minutes to Midnight, 54. Marc Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State, encourages the parallel between Cameralism and Marxism-Leninism. And see John Keep, ‘Russia 1917: The Tyranny of Paris over Petrograd’. Jacob Burckhardt's seminal The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy was first published in 1860. Hippolyte Taine was anti the ‘great revolution’, while Louis Blanc and Albert Mathiez were pro 1789. Caesar Baronius or Baronio worked on his ecclesiastical annals from 1580 until 1607. Flatsii Illirik or Matvei Vlasich published the pro-Protestant work entitled Magdeburg Centuries in 1562. Charles Dufresne, Sieur Du Cange, published many works including glossaries of medieval Greek and Latin in the late seventeenth century. Jacques Nicolas Augustin Thierry's history of the Norman Conquest in England, 1825, was followed by many other works on aspects of medieval French history. Monumenta Germaniae historica is a multi-volumed collection of documents on German history from 500 to 1500 CE. Best known for his insistence on history ‘as it actually happened’, Leopold von Ranke is also celebrated for his collections of documents. Arnold of Brescia was burned at the stake for heresy in Rome in 1155. Paul Rapin, Sieur de Thoyras, a Protestant refugee from France, fought in Ireland for William of Orange in 1689 and completed eight volumes on English history up to the death of Charles I by 1724. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, wrote an autobiographical history of the seventeenth-century British civil wars. Theodor Mommsen, Ernest Renan and Fustel de Coulanges all wrote on aspects of the history of ancient Rome in the nineteenth century. Bartold Georg Niebuhr also wrote a history of ancient Rome in the nineteenth century. Tarle presumably means Friedrich-Wilhelm Nietszche. Gugliemo Ferrero published a ‘popular-scientific’ history of Rome in 1902. ‘Pais’, to give the literal transliteration, was probably Sir Edward Pears, author of works on Greece and Turkey, as well as the Fourth Crusade. Louis Adolphe Thiers, nineteenth-century statesman and historian of the French Revolution. Somewhat later Albert Sorel wrote a multi-volume study of Europe and the French Revolution. Henry Hallam's constitutional history of England was published in 1827, some years before Thomas Babbington, Lord Macaulay, brought out the first two of five volumes on the history of England in 1848. S. R. Gardiner was to produced many works on British and European seventeenth-century history somewhat later. D. I. Kachenovskii wrote on law and political theory in the nineteenth century before V. I. Sergeevich wrote similarly. James D. White writes that Kachenovskii ‘was Maxim Kovalevsky's teacher at Kharkov University. He was a Positivist and inspired Kovalevsky to study French and British constitutional history. He was a pseudo-historian in Tarle's sense, because it was Russia that he (and Kovalevsky) had in mind.’ Lothar Bücher was an anti-liberal apologist for Bismarck's policies. Werner Sombart and Georg von Below both wrote on aspects of the history of capitalism. Best known for his Democracy in America, Alexis Charles Henri de Tocqueville was also celebrated for his study of the ancien régime and the French Revolution. Joseph François Michaud wrote a history of the crusades in the early nineteenth century. V. K. Nadler published a work on Alexander I and the idea of the Holy Alliance in 1892, N. K. Shil'der's four volumes on Alexander I were completed by 1897 and Nikolai Mikhailovich's two volumes on the same subject by 1912. The claims of Salvatore D'Amarte to be the inventor of spectacles have been shown to be false. Lorenzo Valla was a fifteenth-century humanist scholar highly rated by Luther. M. M. Kovalevskii and M. Ostrogorskii were among the founders of Russian sociology in the early twentieth century. Alphonse Aulard's work on the cult of reason was published in 1892, Albert Mathiez's on the origins of the revolutionary cults in 1904. In the nineteenth century, Johann Gustav Droysen wrote a history of Prussia, George Grote a history of ancient Greece, and Theodor Mommsen a history of ancient Rome. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt wrote visionary works that they considered superior to history. David Friedrich Strauss drew a satirical parallel between Julian the Apostate and the Prussian king Friedrich-Wilhelm IV in 1847, while Ludwig Quidde wrote of Caligula and the Emperor Wilhelm II as megalomaniacs. The Dragoman Ukrainophiles wrote about the ‘felibrige’ movement for the protection of the culture of Provence. Armand Carrel, French republican writer, published a history of the British Revolution of 1688 in 1827. François Guizot, historian and statesman, published widely as well as following an active political career in the nineteenth century. On Thierry, see note 6 above. James D. White notes: ‘Although Tarle mentions Auguste Comte, he doesn't mention his scheme of history, or the fact that it inspired a lot of research in Russia on the evolution of society.’ In 1916, Johann Plenge argued that the years 1789 and 1914 were both symbolical in the history of the human spirit. Edouard Meier wrote widely on ancient history. A nonsensical obituary for Jacques La Palice, a sixteenth-century army officer, was the source of later humorous writing. Koz'ma Prutkov was a facetious fictional author created by A. K. Tolstoi and others in the reign of Nicholas I. Sebastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort, man of letters and cynical wit, who fatally wounded himself in 1794 rather than face the threat of the guillotine. The congregation of St Maur was a Benedictine body of scholars. This is Tarle's sole footonote: ‘In the original this is strikingly clear in its terseness: … quia plus loquitur inquisitio quam inventio’ (because research is more eloquent than imagination), Confessiones XII, p. 1.' The Physiocrats were a group of pre-revolutionary French economists who argued that agriculture was the source of all wealth and believed in free trade. Johann Joachim Becher and Georg Obrecht were both Cameralists. So no doubt was the learned Gornigk, but I have been unable to confirm this.