The Unfinished Puzzle of Identity in Imperial Russia

Abstract

Marcus C. Levitt, The Visual Dominant in Eighteenth-Century Russia. 362 pp. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011. ISBN 0875804422. $49.00. Olga Maiorova, From Shadow of Empire: Defining Russian Nation through Cultural Mythology, 1855-1870. 277 pp. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010. ISBN 0299235949. $29.95. Elena Vishlenkova, Vizual'noe narodovedenie imperii, ili uvidet' russkogo dano ne kazhdomu (Visual Ethnography of Empire, or Not Everyone Can See Russian). 384 pp. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2011. ISBN 5867938628. It seems surprising today that not so long ago question of identity--ethno-cultural, national, imperial, regional, and so on--played a small and secondary role in historiography of imperial Russia. Deeply committed to grand problematic of empire's gradual demise and replacement by Soviet Union, Cold War scholarship (in Russia and abroad) did not ignore of identity so much as allow them to be subsumed under then appeared to be more pressing concerns. The rapidity with which topic of identity took center stage in late 1980s and early 1990s can be attributed to coincidental confluence of two distinct factors. First, under influence of was then called the new cultural complexity and contingency of identity itself was coming to fore throughout discipline of history. National identity in particular underwent a quick shift from something tacitly agreed on as relatively stable to a flexible and contested set of values and ideas based on invention of tradition and imagination of community. (1) Second, scholarship of this sort grew widespread around same time that power in Soviet Union was being decentered, flowing out from Moscow into regions and allowing for rise of national states that would soon recenter power on themselves. In short, of difference, affiliation, and identity in former Soviet and imperial Russian space were in obvious need of exploration just at time when intellectual equipment for that exploration was being delivered. (2) By now it would not be going too far to say that problems of identity have become an essential concern for historians of imperial Russia. The cursed questions remain, but now those overtly political bol'nye voprosy, like who is to blame? and what is to be done? have been supplemented by a new focus on equally thorny, and even more irresolvable, who are we? and where are we going? (3) These questions, too, resonated loudly in Russian Empire. How ultimately to distinguish Russian from Ukrainian, Western from Slav, regional or national from imperial, and so on were fraught and difficult problems, rendered even more intractable by an autocratic state that imposed its own structures of meaning and organization on society it governed. As difficult as of identity in imperial Russia may have been, however, they could not be ignored. As with other external developments that continued to threaten Russia with need for change, like industrialization or political liberalization, outside world kept making demands, and clear forms of identity and allegiance were yet another inescapable presupposition of European modernity. To be sure, identity must be understood as a myth or a useful fiction, but it is one of essential myths on which modern history is made. No doubt culturally constructed nature of collective identity helped delay its appearance as a key historiographical problem, partly because topic does not lie within provenance of any single discipline. As scholarship on identity formation has become more sophisticated, it has been carried out in disciplines as disparate as art history, literature, political science, and psychology. Historians interested in identity issues have often been compelled to move outside their disciplinary comfort zones. …