Late Imperial Russia Research Articles

«Я пишу эти воспоминания, прежде всего с той целью, чтобы по возможности правдиво и точно изобразить события и людей, с которыми встречался на своём жизненном пути»

The review analyzed the characteristics and content of a unique ego-source, the memoirs of a prominent figure in the revolutionary movement of late Imperial Russia S. A. Nikonova, on the pages which come to life fragments of revolutionary struggle and cultural-public life of Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, and presents a gallery of historical portraits and sketches prominent and often little-known characters of that era. The reviewer pays special attention to the evaluation of the scientific and publishing work on the preparation of this publication, done by Associate Professor V. A. Solomonov.

Isaak Levitan’s enduring appeal and Russian national identity, 1891-present

ABSTRACT Since the late nineteenth century, the landscapist Isaak Levitan (1860–1900) has been praised for his ability to convey the Russian countryside’s beauty and mood. Throughout the czarist and Soviet eras, Levitan remained respected and often admired, and in post-Soviet Russia, Levitan is considered one of Russia’s foremost landscapists. Although Levitan has remained an important figure in Russian cultural history, he is somewhat understudied in the English-speaking world. Moreover, scholars who have discussed Levitan in English- and Russian-language publications have situated him within the context of a specific timeframe, such as late-Imperial Russia or the Soviet era. In order to gain insight into the reasons for the continuous respect and appreciation for Levitan amid Russia’s changing political dynamics, my examination focuses upon the writings of art critics and historians in late-czarist/imperial Russia (1890–1917), communist Russia/Soviet Union (1917–1991), and post-Soviet Russia (1991-Present). Specifically, my inquiry expands upon existing research 1) through an analysis of scholars’ perceptions of the Russian Realists’ (the Itinerants) and Western European artists’ influence upon Levitan, and 2) through an exploration of the varying interpretations of two of his most famous paintings, Tikhaia obitel (Quiet Monastery) (1890) and Nad vechnym pokoem (Above Eternal Peace) (1894). Through a study of these two topics, my article demonstrates that writings from scholars in the late-czarist, Soviet and post-Soviet eras reflect prominent political ideas and ideological beliefs within these three eras, and that these scholars’ interpretations emphasize aspects that have defined and that currently accent Russia’s distinct character.

Women Workers in Late Imperial Russian Industry: Hiring Policy and Employer Attitudes on the Railways to 1914

By defining ‘worker’ to include low-paid white-collar as well as blue-collar staff, and taking a broad definition of industry, this article reveals whereas factory managers increasingly hired blue-collar women during roughly 1895–1914, the situation with women's employment in the railway industry was very different. Railway policy was to restrict numbers tightly and prioritise literate women in certain low-paid mostly white-collar jobs for which men were hard to recruit. Railway policy-makers were influenced by not just enduring patriarchal attitudes, but also military demands together with financial concerns associated with pension rights and retrospective wage increases. At the same time, local labour shortages increasingly forced managers to seek exemptions to the hiring policy or even ignore the restrictions, especially in regions like Central Asia where qualified people of both genders were relatively scarce. The article concludes with some general questions. How typical by that time were the MPS as an employing ministry and state-owned railways as industrial employers? Did hiring policy in state-owned industrial enterprises differ significantly from the private industrial sector? What ishould be understood by the term ‘skilled worker’? And how important are white-collar workers as a category for analysing women's employment in late Tsarist Russia’s industrial economy?

Piano music, fantasy, and Elizaveta Ivanova’s ambivalent feminism

ABSTRACT In this article, I investigate the ambivalent feminism of four otherwise unknown, provincial women in late imperial Russia. Through a close examination of feminist piano music that they played, and the private writings of E.A. Ivanova—the dedicatee of this music—I show that these women expressed an intense ambivalence: while raising the ideal of sisterhood, their feminism was also ironic, in support of patriarchy, and loyal to traditional ideals about women's allegedly light-hearted and private art. Through this music and their writings, these women also grappled with the larger question of how to understand the self. These results are relevant because they allow us to move beyond scholarly analyses of feminist activists which historians have interpreted in relation to the Revolution of 1917.

The Perevodchik-Terjiman Newspaper: A Bilingual Phenomenon of the Muslim Press in Late Imperial Russia

This case study examines the bilingualism of the prominent Russian Muslim newspaper of the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, known as the Perevodchik-Terjiman (literally “Translator” or “Interpreter”) by means of discourse analysis. This newspaper was published from 1883 to 1918 in Crimea, until 1914 by Ismail Gasprinskii (1851‒1914), a prominent enlightener of Russian Muslims. Until December 1905, the newspaper was issued in two languages–Russian and so-called common-Turkic. The latter language was unsuccessfully intended to become a common literary language for Russian Muslims. Despite the declarations, the parallel articles in Russian and Turkic barely presented direct translations from one language to another. On the contrary, there were significant differences. The differences in Russian and Turkic narratives were not markers of opposing intentions or obscure meanings. It is argued here that this feature can be qualified as an instance of cultural bilingualism, which reflected the multiculturalism of the newspaper’s heterogeneous audience.

Coates , Ruth Deification in Russian Religious Thought: Between the Revolutions, 1905–1917 (review)

REVIEWS 337 another draft or buy another horse. One is inclined to second Blaisdell’s suspicion that ‘Tolstoy had more vitality while depressed than most of us do when we’re fine’ (p. 190). University of Exeter Muireann Maguire Coates, Ruth. Deification in Russian Religious Thought: Between the Revolutions, 1905–1917. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2019. xi + 232 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £65.00. In the fall of 2011, as I was trying to settle on a topic for my first monograph, I mentioned to two colleagues that I might write a book about the idea of deification in late imperial Russia. My colleagues gently warned me away from the topic, suggesting that deification (obozhenie, sometimes obozhestvlenie) was too pervasive and too deeply ingrained in Russian Orthodox thought and culture to be captured in a single volume. Although I heeded their advice, Ruth Coates’s excellent new study, Deification in Russian Religious Thought: Between the Revolutions, 1905–1917, demonstrates that such a book can be written well, succinctly, and to great effect. But that is not all that Coates accomplishes here. By focusing on ‘the deification narrative’ (passim) of Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov and Pavel Florenskii, Coates establishes a historical fact that had escaped me a decade ago. Far from being pervasive and deeply ingrained, the concept and practice of deification became meaningful to a handful of Russian thinkers only in the last decades of the imperial period — that is, at a moment when Russian literary and intellectual culture was being reconfigured by a ‘diverse range of [modernist] sources’ (p. 4), such as Marxism, Symbolism and the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, by renewed interest in Christian mysticism and philosophical idealism, and by millenarian and eschatological expectations that old Russia was coming to ‘a catastrophic end’ (p. 2), all of which, in the context of war and revolution, informed what Coates calls ‘the deification spectrum’ (p. 14) of Russian religious thought. This emphasis on historicity, contingency and variety is complemented by Coates’s awareness that deification had a fitful, almost accidental, provenance in imperial Russia, despite the fact that it had long resonated in patristic and Byzantine theology (ch. 1). It was some time in the mid nineteenth century, as part of a much larger translation and exegetical project spearheaded by the Metropolitan of Moscow, that the Greek term theosis entered the vernacular, and then only sporadically. The idea of deification initially remained within the confines of ecclesiastical and academic Orthodoxy, where it found some traction in sermons, speeches and studies about Christology, liturgy, SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 338 sacramental theology and Christian anthropology, as well as in monastic practices of hesychasm, eldership (starchestvo) and asceticism (pp. 56–63). It also occasionally informed Russian myths about a sacred ruler (pp. 64–68). This exclusivity began to dissolve in the 1870s, when Fedor Dostoevskii and Vladimir Solov´ev deployed variants of the deification narrative to resolve what they considered to be a host of social, political, epistemological and moral problems generated by philosophical materialism and revolutionary atheism (pp. 68–81). It was from this broad, highly variegated context that Merezhkovskii, in concert with Zinaida Gippius and Dmitrii Filosofov, developed his understanding of deification as the erotic practice of creative celibacy and the political practice of anarchic theocracy (ch. 3); that Berdiaev formulated an extra-ecclesial, mystical reading of deification as the creative task by which humans spiritualize material existence (ch. 4); that Bulgakov interpreted economic activity as the eschatological practice of deifying nature and matter (ch. 5); and that Florenskii grounded his eschatological vision of deified humanity in Orthodox asceticism and mysticism (ch. 6). What bound these divergent currents together were ‘their commitment to Christ as the risen Saviour of humankind’ (p. 14) and their shared desire to overcome biological death. It is difficult to find fault with Coates’s impressive account of how and why deification took the various forms it did in late imperial Russia. Nor can a brief review do justice to the vitality and complexity of the deification narrative developed by Merezhkovskii, Berdiaev, Bulgakov and Florenskii. Instead, I want to draw out some of the implications of Deification in Russian Religious Thought...

Reader as Accomplice: Narrative Ethics in Dostoevsky and Nabokov by Spektor Alexander (review)

REVIEWS 339 What Deification in Russian Religious Thought ultimately points to, therefore, is not just the deification spectrum and narrative of late imperial Russia. It also gestures toward a decentred, open-ended contest over what is and what is not Russian Orthodox, an interpretative contest which captures historical actors, theologians, and scholars of Russian Orthodoxy, including the book’s author and this reviewer, in a hermeneutic circle to which we all belong and from which we cannot escape. Department of Religious Studies Patrick Lally Michelson Indiana University Spektor, Alexander. Reader as Accomplice: Narrative Ethics in Dostoevsky and Nabokov. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2020. xii + 243 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $120.00: $39.95. Nabokov’s dislike of Dostoevskii is well-known. And yet, Nabokov’s and Dostoevskii’s ethics and metaphysics have much in common. In Reader as Accomplice: Narrative Ethics in Dostoevsky and Nabokov, Alexander Spektor makes a persuasive case that the deepest link that connects Nabokov to Dostoevskii is a shared commitment to personal freedom and moral responsibility, and that this first principle of their philosophy becomes visible when viewed through the lens of narrative ethics. But how to represent personal freedom and nurture moral responsibility in a domain where characters have no freedom (Nabokov called them ‘galley slaves’) and readers have so much of it that authors cannot count on them to respond predictably to moral guidance? If we begin at the point where Spektor’s book ends, we might conclude that freedom is illusory and moral responsibility a mirage. Inspired by the ‘dark’ materialsinBakhtin’swartimenotebooks,Spektorseesnarrativerepresentation as an instrument of power that always tilts towards violence. Though the rest of Spektor’s book is significantly less dispiriting, the compact between narrative and violence remains a theoretical given. The main trajectory of Spektor’s book shows how Dostoevskii’s and Nabokov’s aesthetics (understood as the formal inventiveness of their fictions) enacts an ethics (understood as the distribution of power). Readers’ moral sense is said to become activated when they become aware of the violence that narrative enacts upon the self and others. According to Spektor, Dostoevskii’s and Nabokov’s formal innovations are designed to overcome the tyranny and violence intrinsic to linguistic representation. Spektor’s main claim is that Bakhtin’s influential work on Dostoevskii that preceded his ‘dark’ writings from the 1940s provides us with SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 340 the conceptual scaffolding for staging a non-coercive yet ethically charged encounter among the various stakeholders of fiction, which include characters, narrators, authors and — most significantly since Bakhtin did not concern himself with them — readers. The figure of the reader as ‘accomplice’ in the narrative allocation of power is the most original and important element of the book. To bring it off, Spektor offers a bracing reassessment of Bakhtin’s understanding of polyphony. Bakhtin used the term to describe what he saw as Dostoevskii’s resistance of the absolute power vested in the authorial voice. In Spektor’s reformulation of this Bakhtinian concept, Dostoevskii’s ‘dialogic imagination’ asserts itself most powerfully not in the author’s tolerance for his characters’ competing ideological positions, but in the struggle between speech and silence that he dramatizes in his fictions. Unlike discourse, which is always on the lookout to appropriate more power, silence becomes emblematic of the will’s freedom to perform moral actions. For Spektor, such self-sacrificing and compassionate acts are an integral part of Dostoevskii’s Christian faith and serve as a moral compass for his characters and readers in his post-Siberian work. By becoming aware of the coercive nature of discourse, Dostoevskii’s readers are incited to close off dialogue with the text and become moral actors in ‘real’ life (p. 42). As Spektor frequently reminds us, the analytical apparatus he establishes in his readings of ‘The Meek One’, The Idiot, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Bend Sinister can be fruitfully applied to other works by Dostoevskii and Nabokov. Still, it is surprising that Spektor does not apply it himself to the two texts that make complicity a central moral problematic and dramatize the perils of ‘bad’ reading with such compelling force...

“Every Scientifically Educated Lawyer Should be a Cultural Fighter for the Ideals of Law in Life!“ — Nikolay I. Palienko’s Legal and Political Views

. The paper analyzes the legal views of Nikolay I. Palienko, a prominent philosopher of law and a state historian of the beginning of the last century. The authors pay significant attention to the integrative concept of legal understanding that is followed by Prof. Nikolay Palienko. They also substantiate originality and significance of the concept in the light of modernization of the political and legal order in late imperial Russia. It seems that under certain conditions it could serve as a bridge between positivist jurisprudence and the doctrine of “reborn natural law” developed in pre-revolutionary Russia. It was intended to smooth out the contradictions in both doctrines and contribute to the development of a new methodology for law understanding in the context of transformation of the Russian legal system towards establishing institutions of constitutional order.On the basis of published sources, the authors show the evolution of the scholar’s views from the positivist theory of law to idealism that is not properly estimated in the legal literature and is quite typical for the legal scholars of the interrevolutionary period.The authors conclude that Prof. Nikolay I. Palienko scholarship and knowledge allowed him to substantiate his own concept of legal understanding that can be considered integrative on the basis of achievements of the positivist theory of law, philosophy of natural law, psychological and sociological concepts of legal understanding. Prof. Palienko proclaimed the normative nature of law and at the same time expressed ideas of the supremacy of law over the state and the coherence of the state provided by law. An essential element of his legal concept was the legal consciousness of the society, acknowledgement of its role in the course of law education, as well as its establishment as a source of law. Palienko’s idea of legal coherence of the state represents a synthesis of positivism with idealism and leads to a new stage of development of legal methodology and ideology, namely: integrative jurisprudence. Scholar’s political and legal ideas contributed to the development of ideas about the rule of law, which were very popular in Russia during the period of development of representative institutions and constitutionalism.

The Death of the Seagull: Vera Kommissarzhevskaia and the Search for Transcendence in Late Imperial Russia

Vera Fedorovna Kommissarzhevskaia (1864–1910) was one of the most famous stage performers of late imperial Russia, perhaps best known for debuting the part of Nina Zarechnaia in Chekhov's The Seagull (Chaika). Her unexpected death in 1910 became a major public event and media sensation, prompting an enormous outpouring of mourning throughout the Russian Empire and extensive commentary in the press that demonstrated her significant social resonance and place in debates on pressing concerns animating late imperial Russia. This article examines the meanings ascribed to Kommissarzhevskaia by commentators and mourners alike through the symbol most frequently used to describe her: the seagull. Attention to the seagull motif in press coverage and public mourning reveals that mourners, influenced by Kommissarzhevskaia herself, transformed the seagull from a signifier of tragic, suffering womanhood into a symbol of emotionally sincere selfhood that promised the transcendence of the troubles of the present. For many Russians who viewed the present world as fragmented, inauthentic, and temporally disjointed, Kommissarzhevskaia as the seagull both embodied the troubles of modernity and suggested a model of overcoming them through an unwavering sense of self revealed by the performance of sincere feeling. Reactions to Kommissarzhevskaia's death demonstrate the social importance of ideas of sincere emotion and authentic selfhood as part of a larger search for transcendent individuals in the late imperial public sphere.

Hear My Desire: Rachmaninov’s Orphic Voice and Musicology’s Trouble with Eurydice

Stigmatized as kitsch, the music of Rachmaninov has largely been neglected by scholars. A reassessment has been made possible by recent historiography on late imperial Russia documenting the intelligentsia’s search for a messianic musician-bard, a role that several of Rachmaninov’s pre-revolutionary works take up, but not in the terms expected of them. Heard in relation to the Orpheus myth often invoked at the time, to the contemporaneous prevalence of psychoanalysis, and to the formal affinities between early modernist orchestral music and the unconscious, the music both assumes unforeseen significance and offers the possibility of a counterstatement to current musicological concerns with embodiment and presence. Amid these debates, Rachmaninov’s symphonic poem, Isle of the Dead (1909), emerges as an unexpectedly subversive work that sounds the futility of fin-de-siècle Russian utopianism while giving voice to an alternative, anti-metaphysical ethics. Meanwhile, the music points to a clandestine violence governing much of musicology’s ongoing fascination with the “drastic.” The resulting critique leads to the proposal of a reparative musicology capable of giving a sympathetic account of the cultural work of public mourning that Rachmaninov’s music performs in the concert hall today.

The repair and maintenance of locomotives as sources of innovation and technology transfer. New insights from the Ryazan–Uralsk private railway (Russia, 1890–1914)

This paper provides an overview of the practices of the repair, maintenance, and appropriation of locomotives on Russian railways at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, exemplified by a case study of the Ryazan–Uralsk railway. Particular attention has been paid to the function of repair and maintenance in the railway context. Repair and maintenance have therefore been considered complex phenomena bringing together infrastructure, things to be repaired or maintained, and people involved in these actions on the one hand, and field research, innovation and business on the other. Based on a broad range of sources regarding the legal prescriptions, statistics, reports of railway employees to their superiors, financial documentation, and drafts of repaired locomotives, the diversity of the repair and maintenance of locomotives in late imperial Russia is analysed.

Rhetorical Practices of the State Duma of the Russian Empire: Features of the Transfer of European Parliamentary Traditions into the Russian Political Context (1906—1916)

The article analyzes the influence of the European parliamentary experience on the process of formation of Russian parliamentarism and development of parliamentary rhetorical practices in late imperial Russia. Particular attention is paid to parliamentary rhetoric. In addition to the political context and the acuteness of certain public problems, it was greatly influenced by the nature of the meeting room in the Tauride Palace, the order of the sessions, and the professional skills of the speaker and the members of the presidium. Russian liberals, who were considered students of their “Western teachers”, acted as translators of European political experience in the first place. The channels for the spread of Western influence can be seen in the experience of Russians in Europe during their student years, during short private visits, or on official business. Books and the mass publication of translated literature on oratory were also of great importance in the transfer of rhetorical experience. In addition to considering the main channels for the transfer of Western parliamentary traditions, it is also important to analyze how the influence of European parliamentary practices was evaluated and interpreted by different political forces both inside and outside the Tauride Palace, especially during political debates.

Discussion on the Issue of National Outskirts in Late Imperial Russia

The monograph “National outskirts in the policy of the Russian Empire and Russian social thought” is a comprehensive study of the strategy and tactics of imperial integration of foreign ethnic peripheries, the causes of political decisions of the authorities and public debate of the 19th — early 20th centuries on the problems of borderlands. The geographical coverage is large: Poland and Finland; the Western and Southwestern regions; the Baltics; the Caucasus; and Central Asia. Each of the considered outskirts had a unique juridical status and its own legislation, economy, social classes, diverse national structure, and a complex history of mutual relations with St. Petersburg. In the last twenty years the methodological approaches to the study of imperial history have been significantly supplemented. The combination of new archival sources with extensive historiographical heritage allows the authors of the reviewed monograph to form a new substantiated view on the relations between imperial center and national periphery. They involved mutual influence of the peripheries and the capital: the public and the tsarist bureaucracy. The modernization potential of the Empire by the beginning of the 20th century had been exhausted, and the inability to reorganize the system of regional government led to a protracted crisis. The clash of conservative and liberal concepts of Empire building is evident in the detailed source analysis of periodicals and journalism of the era. Diverse natural and geographical zones of Russia, ethnic and religious population, rich natural resources determine the exceptional civilizational significance of Russian border policy in 19th — early 20th centuries, and the attention to it of contemporary researchers.

The Births, Lives, and Deaths of Corporations in Late Imperial Russia

Enterprise creation, destruction, and evolution support the transition to modern economic growth, yet these processes are poorly understood in industrializing contexts. We investigate Imperial Russia’s industrial development at the firm-level by examining entry, exit, and persistence of corporations. Relying on newly developed balance sheet panel data from every active Russian corporation (N > 2500) between 1899 and 1914, we examine the characteristics of entering and exiting corporations, how new entrants evolved, and the impact of founder identity on subsequent outcomes. Russian corporations operated flexibly and competitively, conditional on overcoming distortionary institutional barriers to entry that slowed the emergence of these leading firms in the Imperial economy.

Homosexuality in the Late Imperial Russian Navy: A Microhistory

Homosexuality in the Late Imperial Russian NavyA Microhistory Irina Roldugina (bio) During the winter of 1916, at the height of World War I, Second-Rank Captain Vladimir Grigor´evich Petrov, aged 35, found himself in a trouble-some situation. The Naval Procuracy in Kronstadt had opened a preliminary investigation: he was suspected of homosexual activity with his subordinates.1 Petrov refused to assist the investigation and said nothing about the sensitive topic. His reluctance to cooperate did not prevent officials from conducting the inquiry, but it meant that they had to rely on the testimonies of witnesses. More than 20 people were thoroughly questioned about Petrov's same-sex liaisons during his service at the Kronstadt Naval Base. Some of them had to answer the official investigator's questions two and even three times. As a result, the surviving paperwork provides a unique perspective on how homo-sexuality was discussed and perceived by people not professionally engaged with the subject. Since Michel Foucault first raised the question about the birth of the modern homosexual, historians have been quite prolific in researching and contextualizing the issue in various regions and countries. Alongside the important role of medical science, they argue, homosexual selfhood was forged by such factors as capitalism, the rise of free wage labor, secularization, the [End Page 451] spread of literacy, and urban growth.2 The present article seeks to contribute to this historiography by examining how the figure of the homosexual emerged and was understood outside the expert community in prerevolutionary Russia. The military context, I further suggest, shaped the perception of homosexuality in this case. Scholarship in this area is still relatively modest. In her groundbreaking book The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia, Laura Engelstein suggests that homosexuality had never been a subject of broad public discussion or political attention in Russia, as it was in England and Germany.3 By the turn of the century, however, she shows that a significant proportion of Russian legal scholars were advocating for a modernizing approach to homosexuality and the decriminalization of consensual male intercourse, although this agenda subsequently failed.4 "The reformers refused, however, to endorse a notion of privacy and individual self-determination that would have allowed adult males to deviate freely from public norms and reproductive sexuality and gender definition."5 According to Engelstein, Russian medical experts did not provide significant help to these legal reformers. Frustrated by the lack of autonomy within tsarist society, they were not as influential as their European colleagues: "The medical interpretations of homosexuality, which Foucault sees as crucial to the development of modern sexual identity in the West, had little effect on Russian legal thinking."6 One of the most important implications of Engelstein's analysis for the present article is her argument about the failure of the "political and sexual modernity" that Russian professionals had sought to achieve in late imperial Russia.7 Having worked mainly with printed sources and focusing her attention exclusively on medical and legal discourses among "educated Russians," Engelstein [End Page 452] ignores the question of how expert medical and legal debates might have influenced laypeople. What exactly could they have absorbed through the era's flourishing print culture on the question of homosexuality? Indeed, she admits the sexual question preoccupied not only professionals in the years following the revolution of 1905 but also began to attract attention "in settings open to a more general audience."8 A decade later, Dan Healey offered a different approach.9 Using previously unknown archival material, he demonstrates how a "masculine tradition indulgent of mutual eros," and the increasing visibility of male prostitution in St. Petersburg and Moscow by the end of the 19th century combined to shape the emergence of a homosexual subculture in the capital cities.10 He also discusses the intersection of masculinity and social status, arguing that class played a central role in same-sex urban sexuality: "Men who experienced same-sex desire expressed it according to the social roles they played."11 At the end of the 19th century, according to Healey, "traditional mutual male sexuality in the provinces highlights the apparent patriarchal confidence...

Writing History in Late Imperial Russia: Scholarship and the Literary Canon. By Frances Nethercott. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. X, 280 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $115.00, hard bound.

Writing History in Late Imperial Russia: Scholarship and the Literary Canon. By Frances Nethercott. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. X, 280 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $115.00, hard bound.

FIN DE SIÈCLE, MODERNISM, MULTIPLE MODERNITIES AND DISCUSSIONS ABOUT THEM IN THE RUSSIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY

The paper covers the discussions about the Modern Style and Modernity in the Russian historiography. The terms Modern Style, Modern Style Culture, Fin de siecle determine the turn of XIX-XX centuries, while the concept of Fin de siècle is quite popular in the Western historiography. As for the term "Belle Époque" is concerned it is less common in the Western historiography. The theory of multiple modernities raises the question of autonomy of the social institutions' evolution and the development of the cultural and symbolic area, including in the late-Imperial Russia. The combination of westernization and Empire modernization triggered different sociocultural trends: Empire construction was the primary imperative for some, while others voted for the reforms bringing together Russia and European modernity models, and the revolutionary westernization served to be the third force. It is seen to be quite reasonable to distinguish the rationalization and traditionalism in a modernized society, including in the art. Modernism which re-interprets all previous basics of the arts and has its purpose "to be" rather than "to mean" comes from philosophical, scientific, social, and political prerequisites.

НОВЫЕ БЕЛОРУССКИЕ И ПОЛЬСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ ОБ АКТУАЛЬНЫХ ВОПРОСАХ ИСТОРИИ ПОЗДНЕИМПЕРСКОЙ РОССИИ И СОВЕТСКОГО ГОСУДАРСТВА

The review presents new publications on the Belarusian and the Polish historiographies of the history of the late Imperial Russia and the Soviet State. Such problems as the number and conditions of detention of foreign prisoners of war in the Belarusian territories of the Russian Empire during the First World War, the influence of the military conflicts of 1914-1921 on the identity of the inhabitants of the Belarusian lands, the initial stage of the formation of academic science in the BSSR, the question of the «invasion» of Poland by the Red Army in September 1939 are highlighted.

Brumfield , William Craft Journeys through the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (review)

REVIEWS 183 Brumfield, William Craft. Journeys through the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky. Duke University Press, Durham, NC and London, 2020. xi + 518 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $49.95: £43.00. The photographs taken by Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii in the decade before the 1917 Revolution, held since the 1940s in the Library of Congress, provide one of the richest sources of material evidence available to scholars of late imperial Russia. During the years after 1905, Prokudin-Gorskii undertook a series of expeditions across large swathes of the Russian Empire, typically with the active support of the tsarist authorities, photographing both the traditional architecture of provincial cities and the industrial paraphernalia of factories and railways that were rapidly transforming the country. The striking colour images, made possible by Prokudin-Gorskii’s long experiments with photography, were part of an ambitious project to create a visual portrait that would acknowledge the diversity of the Russian provinces while celebrating the way they formed part of a single empire. The semi-official character of his work, and its underlying commitment to using photography to create patterns of knowledge that fostered a sense of the unity of the empire, naturally lends itself to a set of discourses about such topics as ‘the imperial gaze’ and the ‘orientalist imagination’. And yet, while the interpretation of all historical photographs requires a lively sense of the context in which they were produced, the importance of Prokudin-Gorskii’s work extends far beyond its contribution to an imperial discourse that celebrated the unknown while subtly embedding it within a framework of the familiar. William Craft Brumfield has produced a work that combines text and illustrations in a way that illuminates the contemporary interest of Prokudin-Gorskii’s work both for scholars and a wider public. Brumfield, one of the foremost Western experts on the history of Russian architecture, has over the past fifty years himself photographed many of the sites visited by Prokudin-Gorskii, ranging from the ‘Ancient Heartland’ through to more far-flung areas such as the Urals and Central Asia. Much of Journeys through the Russian Empire is devoted to comparing Brumfield’s own photographs with those of his illustrious predecessor. This is a modus operandi that could easily become tiresome, but such a prospect is avoided in the book, both because Brumfield’s own photographs are of exceptional quality, and because there is something enthralling for the reader about comparing pictures of a building or set of buildings taken many years apart. Since Brumfield was not able, by definition, to photograph buildings destroyed in the Soviet period, a careless reading of the book might run the risk of giving the impression that the architectural fabric of Russia — and especially its churches and monasteries SEER, 99, 1, JANUARY 2021 184 — has changed surprisingly little despite decades of chaos and destruction. The author’s beautifully crafted text is, however, adept at informing the reader about what has been lost — through war, revolution and the depredations of time — as well as what has been preserved. Brumfield is well-aware that Prokudin-Gorskii’s vivid illustrations can easily fuel an ill-informed nostalgia for a lost Russia. His discussion of the history of the churches and cathedrals that form the subject of most photographs is erudite and informative without providing unnecessary detail. The same is true of the chapter dealing with the Islamic architecture of Central Asia (in particular Bukhara and Samarkand). Brumfield’s introductory and concluding essays provide a thoughtful insight into the history of the Prokudin-Gorskii collection, artfully showing how it can cast light both on the history of Russian architecture and the preoccupations of pre-revolutionary Russia, while representing something more than a simple representation of the appearance of the provinces on the eve of revolution. Any criticisms of this excellent book cannot begin to dent its achievements. The photographs focus on ecclesiastical architecture, as is to be expected given Brumfield’s own interests and personal photographic odyssey, with the result that the anthropological value of the Prokudin-Gorskii collection is only touched on quite briefly in the photographs and written text. And, while Brumfield talks a good deal in his...

СОЦИАЛЬНЫЕ ЭЛИТЫ ПОЗДНЕИМПЕРСКОГО ЕКАТЕРИНБУРГА: ПРОГРАММА ИСТОРИКО-ДЕМОГРАФИЧЕСКОГО ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ

This article develops a theoretical basis for studying the socio-demographic evolution of elites in local/urban historical communities. The authors analyzed the methodological and terminological apparatus used in modern elite studies and formulated the concept of “social elite” based on synthesizing the civilizational aspects of elite theory and modernization theory. The social elite is understood as a minority that is a reference group for the rest of society in the sphere of sociodemographic practices. A fruitful study of such an object is realistic only by employing mass nominative sources that recorded demographic events in individual lives. The most important nominative source which contains demographic and, in addition, social information about the demographically representative communities of imperial Russia, are metricheskie knigi — parish vital events records. The potential of this type of source is most effectively realized by transcribing the information into databases for subsequent quantitative analysis. The research was carried out based on the URAPP — “Ural Population Project” — a comprehensive electronic resource containing information from the Orthodox parishes records in Ekaterinburg for 1880–1919, now extended to about 57000 entries. The initial adaptation of the proposed model to the historical context of late imperial Ekaterinburg enabled us to identify a community of townspeople — the parish of the Orthodox Epiphany Cathedral — that was more modernized than the rest of the city. Concentrating the research focus on socio-demographic processes among the parishioners of this community at the individual level, will in the future make it possible to represent more fully the evolutionary mechanisms of the social elite in the late Imperial Russian city. The proposed scheme can be used to study the problems of Russian social history in the late 19th — early 20th centuries, primarily to identify the agents driving the socio-demographic modernization.