Late Nineteenth-Century Russia Research Articles

Catching-Up and Falling Behind: Russian Economic Growth, 1690s–1880s

We provide decadal estimates of GDP per capita for the Russian Empire from the 1690s to the 1880s, making it possible for the first time to compare the economic performance of one of the world’s largest economies with other countries. Significant Russian economic growth before the 1760s resulted in catching-up on northwest Europe, but this was followed by a period of negative growth between the 1760s and 1800s and stagnation from the 1800s to the 1880s, leaving late-nineteenth century Russia further behind the West than at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

The Yeshiva and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature by Marina Zilbergerts

Reviewed by: The Yeshiva and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature by Marina Zilbergerts Wendy Zierler Marina Zilbergerts. The Yeshiva and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022. 184 pp. It has long been acknowledged that deep knowledge of biblical and rabbinic literature on the part of early modern Hebrew poets and prose writers played a vital role in the creation of modern Hebrew literature and the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language. As Benjamin Harshav notes, “Secular Hebrew poetry grew in the soil of Hebrew study in the religious society against which all Hebrew poets rebelled in their youth.”1 In light of this, Marina Zilbergerts’s new study of the yeshiva and the rise of modern Hebrew literature might seem, at first, like old news. Far from it, however. Whereas previous studies of this subject emphasized the role of Haskalah, Zionism, or secularism, Zilbergerts examines the rise of the modern yeshiva, with its elite ethos of Torah lishmah (Torah study for its own sake), as a way of explaining the seemingly miraculous rise of Hebrew literary culture. The book sets out to answer several questions from this vantage point: How and why did modern Hebrew literature come to be, and why in the setting of late nineteenth-century Russia? Given the utter impracticality of creating a literature in a language that no one actually spoke, and the ideological push in Russian culture for writing that was materially useful to society, how did these mid- and late nineteenth-century Hebrew writers make the case for their writing? Zilbergerts argues that the text-centeredness of the modern yeshiva led to an orientation where texts became more real than the physical world, where the “play and pleasure” of textual learning took on heightened importance. The result of viewing Torah as an omnisignificant literature to be interpreted and debated through a variety of hermeneutic and literary strategies was a blurring of the conventional boundary between sacred and secular Hebrew texts. All this laid the groundwork for these text-centered values to be transferred to secular Hebrew literary production once these young writers left the yeshiva. In addition to considering the autotelic value of text in yeshiva culture, Zilbergerts considers corresponding patterns of study and ideological dissent among nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox seminarians. Yeshiva and Russian Orthodox students alike experienced both the exhilaration of elite study and deep [End Page 240] despair over their lack of practical skills and economic opportunities, despite their erudition. Seminary-educated Russian nihilist writers such as Nikolay Chernyshevsky (1828–1889) and Nikolay Dobrolyubov (1836–1861) expressed deep dissatisfaction with their church education, along with a strong desire to achieve social usefulness. Nevertheless, these nihilist writers often mimicked the practices of Russian Orthodox hermeneutics in their critical writing, a cultural pattern that was reproduced by disaffected ex-yeshiva students. Indeed, even when yeshiva students abandoned their studies, they carried with them a reverence for textuality for its own sake. Under the pressures and influence of Russian nihilism, Hebrew writers such as Avraham Uri, Shaul, and Yiẓḥak Aizik Kovner attacked the maskilic Hebrew language and literature for ignoring the pressing material issues of society. Still, these same critics often resorted to the Hebrew wordplays and exegetical practices of the very rabbinic/maskilic culture they sought to critique. Even as these writers sought to detach themselves from the constraints of their yeshiva background, they kept returning to the practices and aesthetic models of Torah lishmah, redirecting these practices to the creation of their new secular Hebrew poetry and prose. Moshe Leib Lilienblum thus inveighs against the superstitions and backward practices of traditional Judaism, including kest marriage, and the failure of the yeshiva system to provide young men with a practical vocation, only to defend talmudic literature against maskilic charges of nonsense. Similarly, ex-Volozhin Yeshiva students Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky and Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik produced literary works that decry the dead-in-life nature of text study, but also revel in it with a kind of sublimated sexual energy. “The freedom to engage with Jewish texts and ideas without exterior motive,” Zilbergerts argues, “along with the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, was arguably...

The Letters and the Law: Legal and Literary Culture in Late Imperial Russia by Anna Schur (review)

Reviewed by: The Letters and the Law: Legal and Literary Culture in Late Imperial Russiaby Anna Schur Muireann Maguire Schur, Anna. The Letters and the Law: Legal and Literary Culture in Late Imperial Russia. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2022. xii + 224 pp. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. $120.00; $39.95. W hentwo minor characters in Shakespeare's Henry VI(Part II) famously agree to 'kill all the lawyers', the specific source of their ire is lawyers' ability to alter lives by writing down words: namely, the fact that 'parchment, being scribbl'd o'er, should undo a man' (Act IV, Scene II). Anna Schur's meticulously researched and subtly argued monograph does not, thankfully, endorse genocide of the legal profession. Instead, she explores, in the context of nineteenth-century Russia, the resentful perception of lawyers as pseudo-authors, whose powers of invention, imagination and rhetoric, freely exercised in the courtroom, allowed them to rewrite — and sometimes to undo — the lives of ordinary men and women. Schur's title, The Letters and the Law, introduces these two conflicting perspectives: that of writers, whose enduring post-Pushkinian status as their nation's conscience endowed them with quasi-legal, and certainly with moral, authority; and that of the newly formed body of professional lawyers, particularly defence attorneys, practising after court reform supposedly modernized the Russian judiciary in 1864. While we learn about individuals on both sides of the debate, Schur's focus remains on particular celebrity lawyers and the literary reactions they provoked from leading authors, during a time-frame bracketed by the 1864 reform and the 1905 Revolution. Within this timeframe, she revisits some of the remarkable epithets inveighed against the legal profession, all adopted and recycled by its critics, ranging from journalistic invective to literary caricatures. They included 'adulterers of thought' (a phrase Dostoevskii borrowed from another source for use in The Brothers Karamazov), the 'attorney-spider' and ' premier amoureux' (both coined by Saltykov-Shchedrin, referring [End Page 155]respectively to the unscrupulousness and ingenuous eloquence he attributed to different types of lawyer), and lirstvo(or 'lyre-playing' — Dostoevskii, again, inveighing against empty eloquence). All this obloquy contributed to the widespread public perception of all lawyers (but especially defence lawyers) as greedy, hypocritical and ignorant — a calumny often combined with antisemitic vilification. Ironically, as Schur shows, newly qualified advocates often modelled their own reputations on those of acclaimed authors, either by actually publishing literature or simply by attempting to accrue, through psychological insight, ethical excellence, or rhetorical brilliance, the magic dust of Russian writers' moral prestige. Other scholars have recently studied other aspects of legal-literary relations in nineteenth-century Russia — notably Harriet Murav ( Russia's Legal Fictions, Ann Arbor, MI, 1998), Gary Rosenshield ( Western Law, Russian Justice: Dostoevsky, The Jury Trial, and The Law, Madison, WI, 2005), and most recently Claire Whitehead's study of nineteenth-century Russian lawyers who also penned genre fiction, The Poetics of Early Russian Crime Fiction 1860–1917: Deciphering Stories of Detection(Cambridge, 2018). Shur's work is informed by all of the above, in addition to extensive study of Russian legal history. The Letters and the Law's original contribution is to show how the legal profession was conceptualizedin late nineteenth-century Russia. Chapter one surveys lawyers' experimental self-fashioning as moral and literary arbiters, drawing on contemporary speeches, memoirs and publications; some advocates were honoured with election to the Academy of Sciences (like Tolstoi's friend, the judge A. F. Koni, who also takes credit for sharing the anecdote that inspired the former's novel, Resurrection). Chapter two re-examines how the celebrated defence lawyer, and accomplished literary scholar, Vladimir Spasovich, won the lurid 1876 Kronenberg child abuse case in favour of the accused (rather like a negative of Atticus Finch). Schur evaluates successive polemics against both Spasovich's ethics and his eloquence, mounted by Dostoevskii, Saltykov-Shchedrin and Vladimir Rozanov, all pillorying the so-called 'Polish lawyer' (p. 58) for the very skills that won the case, and (in Rozanov's 1897 attack) for his implied claim to reputational parity with writers. Chapter three studies the negative clichés accreting around lawyers...

The Phoenix of Philosophy: Russian Thought of the Late Soviet Period (1953–1991) by Epstein Mikhail (review)

SEER, 98, 2, APRIL 2020 364 presented in 1990 at a conference at NYU, and are thus explicitly retrospective of a period just closed. Egon Bondy, a generation older than Jirous, writes how an earlier wave of dissident culture (not yet known by that name) in the 1950s drew inspiration from the interwar Czechoslovak avant-garde, as well as from the Beat poets in the United States. Bondy became a hero to the 1970s Underground generation, who rediscovered his earlier work and set his texts to music. Jáchym Topol’s essay is particularly welcome, as it focuses on the younger generation of the Underground who came of age in the 1980s, about whom very little is available in English. The volume is ably edited by one of the leading authorities on post-war Czechoslovak alternative culture, and in particular the bibliographic references are extremely valuable. Regrettable is the absence of a substantial historical introduction: the editor’s ‘epilogue’ assumes that readers are familiar with the general historical events of the period, which means the volume will appeal more to an audience already knowledgeable about Czechoslovakia but seeking more granular detail. But that too is a most welcome contribution. UCL SSEES Peter Zusi Epstein, Mikhail. The Phoenix of Philosophy: Russian Thought of the Late Soviet Period (1953–1991). Bloomsbury Academic, New York and London, 2019. viii + 300 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Appendix. Indexes.£90.00. It has been said that prior to the late nineteenth century Russia had produced more than a few very interesting thinkers but remarkably few philosophers. The author of this extraordinarily valuable monograph avoids the problem of definition and differentiation by using the words ‘philosophy’ in his title and ‘thought’ in his subtitle, and proceeds to present the writings of some three dozen men and two women, nearly all of whom did not know for sure or even perhaps hope that they were living in the last Soviet decades of Russian history. The front cover of this book portrays seven of the most well-known intellectuals/intelligenty who were working in the USSR during part or all of this period: Bakhtin, Losev, Lidiia Ginzburg, Pomerants, Mamardashvili, Averintsev and Lotman, whose names and areas of interest should be familiar to everyone who claims to be knowledgeable about Russian culture at that time and now. However, just in case, Mikhail Epstein provides very useful and accurate summaries of their ideas, concluding that ‘[r]arely in the history of thought has philosophy served as so liberating a force as in Russia from the 1950s through the 1980s’ (p. 233). Already on page 5 the author suggests that in the Soviet Union filosofiia was not the exact equivalent of philosophy elsewhere, REVIEWS 365 so he prefers to use the term ‘philosophical thought’. After all, in the USSR, he claims, perhaps provocatively, ‘the official label “philosophy” was reserved for Marxism only’ (p. 77). In addition, ‘late-Soviet culturology cannot be reduced to what is known in the West as “cultural studies”’. The former is not a type ‘of oppositional politics, because it departs in principle from the political accentuation of culture’. ‘Rather it critiques politics — as a type of discourse, as a relation of power, as a narrow pragmatism — from the standpoint of culture as a whole’ (pp. 232–33). As a result, ‘[o]f all the philosophical trends that attempted to undermine the ideological hegemony of Soviet Marxism, culturology proved the most successful’ (p. 233). The book is divided into four parts: ‘Vicissitudes of Soviet Marxism’, ‘NeoRationalism , Structuralism, and General Methodology’, ‘The Philosophy of Personality and of Freedom’ and ‘Culturology, or, the Philosophy of Culture’. Epstein may expect his readers to tackle them in this order, but it might be better for those not very well grounded in ‘philosophical thought’ to start with the sections on thinkers already well-known in the West, such as Aleksandr Iakovlev, Mikhail Prishvin, Mihajlo Mihajlov, Joseph Brodsky, Aleksandr Esenin-Vol´pin, Arkadii Belinkov, Andrei Amal´rik, Andrei Sakharov, Natan Eidel´man, Aleksandr Ianov, Dmitrii Likhachev and Sergei Averintsev. For this reviewer, the three most stimulating discoveries were Iurii Davydov (Part 1, pp. 54–60), Vasilii Nalimov (Part 2, pp. 99–103) and Iakov Druskin...

Smoking Under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia by Tricia Starks

Reviewed by: Smoking Under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia by Tricia Starks Mark Lawrence Schrad Tricia Starks. Smoking Under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2018. xvi + 324 pp. Ill. $42.95 (978-1-5017-2205-9). The old adage suggests you should never judge a book by its cover; though an exception should be made for Smoking under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia, by Tricia Starks, associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas. The cover incorporates actual nineteenth-century cigarette advertisements, drawn from the forty-seven stunningly vivid, full-color pictures that help immerse the reader into both the image and reality of smoking during the late tsarist period. Fortunately, Starks has an equally vivid narrative to accompany such engrossing images. As anyone who has visited the Soviet Union of old—and presumably the tsarist empire that preceded it—will tell you, tobacco smoking in Russia was fundamentally different from most any other country, at least before openness to international markets permitted the influx of mass-produced Western filtered cigarettes. Before then, smoking in Russia was synonymous not with cigarettes, cigars, or pipes, but with the ubiquitous papirosa (plural: papirosy): a filterless, hollow paperboard tube capped with a cartridge of rolled Turkish- or Russian-Ukrainian-grown tobacco at the end. The rise of papirosy in late-nineteenth century Russia accompanied the transformations of urbanization and industrialization. "The easy availability of cheap papirosy from street sellers and their portability made for a more mobile, modern, and convenient habit," Starks writes, "in keeping with the pace of the modern city" (p. 2). The unfiltered, fast-acting nicotine proved highly addictive, leading to an explosion of papirosy sales, consumption, and government revenues, though much of the retail trade was off the books. Smoking under the Tsars casts a wide historical net: exploring not only the political-economic impacts of smoking, but the physiological, hygienic, psychological, social, and cultural experiences as well. While similar scholarly histories exist of smoking in other national contexts, this is the first to [End Page 154] wed such diverse approaches together into a unified consideration of smoking within the Russian context and makes a convincing argument for understanding the uniqueness of Russian papirosa-smoking in its own right. Starks argues in the "Cultivated" chapter that papirosy were not only symbols of Russian difference, but instruments of imperial statecraft used extensively by the armed forces that pushed the empire's boundaries ever outward, planting tobacco in newly conquered territories from Crimea to Central Asia. Manufacturers incorporated these themes of masculinity, patriotism, and orientalism through vibrant images of smoking Cossacks, which adorned many early advertisements. In order to mass produce such cheap papirosy, manufacturers did not mechanize production as in the West, but rather simply added more women and children as laborers, who were paid at a lower level than men. In her chapter "Produced," Starks convincingly explains how such particularly exploitative labor practices—combined with the addictive nature of the product—made tobacco manufacturers in pre-revolutionary Russia high-profile targets of workers'-rights activists, feminists, and radical Marxists, especially from within the factory walls themselves. Gendered differences were evident not only on the production side, but on the consumption side as well. The chapter "Tasted" underscores how Russian women were welcome in the realm of "respectable smoking" connoisseurs, drawing greater parallels with smoking practices in China rather than in Western Europe in that significant regard. The chapter "Condemned" looks at the rise of anti-tobacco temperance, as the increasing prevalence of smoking prompted concerns from the medical and public-health communities, and hand-wringing over national moral decline from both the Orthodox Church and the imperial state connected to it. As with anti-vodka temperance, Russian imperial officials could not be too energetic in their condemnations against tobacco, as the powerful trade generated substantial excise revenues to the tsarist state itself. Consequently, as explained in the chapter "Contested," even among public health and medical professionals, anti-tobacco activism focused more on moderation rather than total abstinence from consumption; the more strident the anti-smoking agitation, the more it was...

Chaikovsky and the Economics of Art Music in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia

As Russia’s first professional, conservatory-trained composer, Petr Il'ich Chaikovsky operated in the rapidly evolving social and economic context of post-emancipation Russia, identifying ways to interact with Russia’s musical institutions—its opera houses and theaters, its concert organizations and publishers—to fashion a career that was as successful financially as it was critically. Yet the myth of Chaikovsky’s financial incompetence persists, and the image, whether popular or scholarly, is still one of Chaikovsky as a spendthrift, unable to manage his income or regulate his outgoings. This article challenges such views by drawing on the recently published complete correspondence between Chaikovsky and his publisher, Petr Iurgenson, as well as on financial records preserved in the composer’s archives. In particular, this article analyzes the relationship among Chaikovsky, Iurgenson, and the operation of Russia’s musical “marketplace” at the level of genre, examining the interaction between financial considerations on the one hand and Chaikovsky’s decision to work in particular musical forms on the other. By examining the connections among Russia’s nascent musical institutions, Chaikovsky’s particular collaboration with his publisher, and the relative status of different musical genres, it becomes possible to establish the nature of Russia’s musical “art world” in the second half of the nineteenth century. In proposing a more nuanced and systematic account of Chaikovsky’s economic agency than has been attempted previously, this article thus contributes to a growing body of work on the institutional structures that shaped the Russian arts in the nineteenth century.

Jewish acculturation in late nineteenth-century Russia: the case of Yonah Berkhin

ABSTRACTYoung Jewish students in the Pale of Settlement have not received comprehensive scholarly attention, despite their impact on Jewish politics and the public sphere in the late nineteenth century. Typically, representations of Jewish pupils and students are limited to the study of small and non-representative radical groups. This paper fills this gap through a contextualized examination of the practices and meanings of acculturation among educated Jewish youth. It focuses on a previously unknown diary by Yonah Berkhin, a Jewish teenager who strove to obtain a secondary education between 1879 and 1882. The discussion of this document adds a critical contextual perspective to the existing scholarship on acculturation among Jewish learning youth in late nineteenth-century Russia. I suggest that acculturation was a complex, multidirectional process. I show how, rather than merely creating alienation from Jewish society – which is often described as a “departure” leading either to a complete assimilation or to “repentance” and “return” – acculturation created new as well as modified existing modes of attachment to Jewish society.

Linguistics, feminism, and Three Sisters

Discourse analysis theories, along with feminist studies theories, can be applied to the four main female characters in the Russian drama Three Sisters, written in 1900 by Anton Chekhov. In this presentation, I show how these characters, living in late nineteenth-century Russia, a patriarchy that restricts women both legally and socially, demonstrate agency, autonomy, and power despite their discriminatory society. Using methodology from various theories of discourse analysis and feminist studies, such as framing, positioning, facework, speech acts, and agency, I present evidence that these women find ways to establish a positive identity. This study contributes to the field of discourse analysis and expands the textual sources of such analysis to nineteenth-century Russian drama. It also contributes to the subfield of Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis by demonstrating how linguistic strategies can be a positive force against a restrictive environment.

NOT Finding Women in the Archives: The Case of Evegeniia Serebrennikova, Pioneering Woman Physician in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia

This article examines the life of one early woman doctor, Evgeniia Serebrennikova (1854–1897), a graduate of the St. Petersburg women’s medical courses and an eye doctor in Perm. Serebrennikova established an eye clinic in Perm, wrote numerous articles, gave talks at medical conferences at home and abroad, and was a fixture in Perm’s philanthropic life. Despite these achievements, there are few traces of her in the archives. The article also discusses the author’s research trajectory and the difficulties involved in finding evidence about women such as Serebrennikova.

Law and Interethnic Relations in the Russian Empire: The Tatar Riots of 1878 and their Judicial Aftermath

В статье Штефана Кирмзе рассматриваются проблемы административно-правовой системы в России конца XIX в., в том числе изучается имперское управление многоконфессиональным населением. Обращаясь к татарским крестьянским бунтам в Казанской губернии (1878−1879 гг.) и их юридическим последствиям, автор показывает не только важность правовых норм и практик пореформенного периода, но и их влияние на изменение статуса нерусского населения. Новые правовые механизмы оказались востребованы этноконфессиональными меньшинствами, включая казанских татар-мусульман, которые смогли привлечь губернатора к суду за применение к ним насилия. В то же время в статье отмечаются внутренние противоречия и сложности пореформенной эпохи: успехи модернизации отдельных сфер управления в сочетании с хронической нехваткой квалифицированных кадров местного чиновничества, безалаберность администрации, восприятие реальности и поведение людей на местах в контексте внешних факторов, например международного положения. Исследование основано на мемуарах, докладе и переписке казанского губернатора, архивных материалах из Казани и Санкт-Петербурга, а также широком освещении этой истории в местных и центральных газетах.

Peasant communes and factor markets in late nineteenth-century Russia

The peasant land commune was the emblematic institutional feature of agrarian Russian society before the Revolution of 1917. Economic historians have long blamed the commune for restricting household behavior in ways that contributed to Russia's economic “backwardness” by the late 19th century. Drawing on new household-level data collected from archival sources in Moscow province, this article provides the first microeconomic analysis of local factor markets and household behavior within the institutional context of the Russian peasant commune. The empirical evidence indicates that peasant households did have substantial flexibility when it came to allocating their land and labor holdings. In response to mortality shocks or lags in the communal adjustment of land, households engaged in land rentals and off-farm labor market transactions to improve upon suboptimal factor endowments. Although these findings do not imply that the resulting allocation of resources was fully efficient, they do illustrate how peasants made rational factor market transactions in a seemingly inhospitable institutional environment.

Mind and labor on the farm in black-earth Russia, 1861-1914

Did Tsarist Russia's political and industrial backwardness result from its rigid and archaic agrarian structure? Did the Russian revolution stem in large part from a parasitical elite's exploitation of an enormous peasant class? Was the Russian peasantry itself backward and 'dark' as a result? The attention contemporaries and historians have lavished on these questions has enshrined them as fundamental issues in Russian history. This text endeavours to recast our understanding of the agrarian problem by uncovering the history of both the physical and mental dimensions of agriculture. Employing literary, agronomic and statistical information on peasant labour and culture, this book also offers new perspectives on the limitations of traditional agriculture to adapt to a rapidly changing economic geography, such as that of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Russia. By taking a ground level view of the evolution of Russian agricultural technique, the author arrives at a very different understanding of the agrarian problem. The book identifies both the achievements and limitations of peasant farmers in adapting farming practices to the economic and technological challenges of the half century preceding the revolution. Most importantly, the book delves deeply into peasant life and culture to demonstrate how and why farming imrovements did not pass determinable levels.

Urbanization and the construction industry in late-nineteenth century Russia: a case study of St Petersburg

Urbanization and the construction industry in late-nineteenth century Russia: a case study of St Petersburg

Witchcraft Denunciations in Late Imperial Russia: Peasant Reactions to the Koldun

The majority of peasants in late nineteenth century Russia believed in the power of magic and its ability to affect their lives in both beneficial and harmful ways. An important aspect of this outlook was witchcraft, which can be defined as “the attribution of misfortune to occult human agency” (Thomas 1971: 436). Nearly any personal misfortune, including impotence, illness, death, crop failure, and the death of livestock, could be construed as an act of witchcraft, or “spoiling” (porcha). Peasants, however, could attempt to defend themselves against witchcraft by turning to magical practitioners who lived in and around their villages. Interestingly, these same individuals whom peasants sought out for magical aid could also be suspected of witchcraft and were sometimes attacked for this supposed crime. Suspicions stemmed from the fact that peasants tended to regard some magical practitioners, such as the male sorcerer, or koldun, who will be discussed below, quite ambivalently. In fact, they were often believed to have the ability to spoil. Moreover, there is evidence that magical practitioners sometimes sought to intimidate their potential clientele through threats and ambiguous speech in order to underscore the importance of seeking out their help. This study employs a variety of sources, including folklore, ethnographic studies, and reports of attacks against kolduny (plural of koldun) found in a variety of nineteenth century sources, in order to examine their vulnerable position within rural communities. The koldun’s marginal social status, coupled with peasants’ ambivalent attitude toward magical practitioners, made him an easy target for witchcraft denunciations and violence. The time frame of this study ranges from the 1860s to the 1890s ‐ a period marked by a growth in elite interest in studying the peasantry, and increased instances of denunciations and violence against perceived witches (Worobec 1995: 167‐168). The chronological end point for the study ‐ the 1890s, is apt because attacks against suspected

Vladimir Solov'ev on Spiritual Nationhood, Russia and the Jews

D espite the very Christian, indeed trinitarian nature of his religious philosophy, Vladimir Solov'ev (1853-1900) was known call himself a Jew.' Because he believed that to despise Judaism is folly, quarrel with Jews is useless, it would be better understand Judaism, although that may be more difficult, the great Christian theologian and philosopher of late nineteenth-century Russia learned read Hebrew Scriptures, studied Talmud with a partner in the traditional yeshiva manner, and became an expert on Jewish mysticism.2 By no means a blind Judeophile, he was nonetheless fascinated by the Jews throughout his adult life.3 According his friend, Sergei Trubetskoi, Solov'ev invoked the Jews even on his deathbed: At one point, he said my wife: 'Do not let me fall asleep, force me pray for the Jewish people. I must pray for them,' and began recite a Hebrew psalm in a loud voice.4 One historian understands Solov'ev's constant support of the Jews as a product

Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia. Cathy A. Frierson

<i>Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia</i>. Cathy A. Frierson

Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia. Cathy A. Frierson

<i>Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia</i>. Cathy A. Frierson

Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia

Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia

Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia.

Frierson's study examines the revealing images of the peasant created by Russian writers, scholars, journalists, and government officials in the twenty years following emancipation. She illustrates how the question, Who is the Russian peasant? became deeply embedded in the larger questions of What is Russia? and What will Russia be? in the programs of liberal reformers and conservatives alike. Along the way she introduces readers to the stereotypes created by intellectuals (including such writers as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky) in order to comprehend peasant life, from the likeable narod, the simple man of the simple folk, to the exploitative kulak, the village strongman.

Lesbian Vignettes: A Russian Triptych from the 1890s

Little is known about the development of the idea of homosexuality in nineteenth-century Russian medical works, or about popular Russian conceptions of same-sex love, or about the social practices that might have corresponded to or inspired such representation. Did differences of culture, religion, and social organization mean the Russian construction of gender diverged from the European construction in legal, ideological, or anthropological terms? What can the Russian example tell us about the power and limits of the modern Western construction of sexual categories and norms? The texts translated here purport to describe the social reality of lesbian love in the diverse cultural terrain of late nineteenthcentury Russia. They offer a Russian example of a clinical genre pioneered by physicians in the West and show how contemporary paradigms of sexual deviation were modified to fit a different set of cultural presuppositions. The three vignettes that follow form the centerpiece of what seems to be the only clinical study of homosexuality among women in the Russian medical literature of the period. Published in 1895, this study was written by obstetriciangynecologist Ippolit Mikhailovich Tarnovskii (1833-99), then assistant director of a St. Petersburg maternity hospital.' Available