Historicism, N. A. Polevoi, and rewriting Russian history.

Since the fall of communism in 1991, Boris Mironov's two-volume work, The Social History of Russia (the Eighteenth to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century): The Genesis of Individualism, the Democratic Family, and Civil Society and a State Governed by Law, represents the most ambitious attempt up to now to provide what R. W. Davies referred to in 1997 as a needed "fresh paradigm" for the interpretation of Russian history. Nearly a hundred pages of critical discussion concerning this study in two prestigious scholarly journals, the Slavic Review and Otechestvennaia istoriia, attest to its importance. Yet the title of Mironov's own intelligent but tentative reply to his critics, "There are Many Paths to the Truth" ("K istine vedet mnogo putei"), suggests that his peers have viewed his study favorably but hesitate to endorse it as the "fresh paradigm" needed for the rewriting of Russian history. (1)

Historicism, Thomas Kuhn's paradigm shifts in the sciences and humanities, and F. R. Ankersmit's philosophy of language and history offer useful lenses through which we can view changes in Russian historiography. Ankersmit, a Dutch professor of the theory of history and of intellectual history at the University of Groningen, belongs to a group of historical, language, and philosophical theorists associated, in one way or another, with the American journal History and Theory. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, he and others like Leonard Krieger, Ignacio Olabarri, and Hayden White reaffirmed, on the basis of the "linguistic turn," narrativism, and representation in art, history, and literature, the essential correctness of the claim made by Karl Mannheim and Friedrich Meinecke in the 1920s and 1930s that historicism had been "one of the major revolutions in Western thought." Since the 1980s Ankersmit, more than any other theorist connected with History and Theory, has endeavored to redefine nineteenth- and twentieth century historiography and historicism in conformity with, as he put it in 1995, "the requirements of contemporary philosophy of language." (2)

Slavic and Romano-Germanic historiography began with the story of universal history taken over from Christianized Byzantium and Rome. The Primary Chronicle is the earliest, extant East Slavic version of this history. It was compiled in Kiev at the beginning of the twelfth century, but the political fragmentation of the East Slavs soon led to the compilation of rival regional chronicles that reflected the views and interests of local princes, elites, and clergy. At the end of the fourteenth century and at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the political balance of power in the East-Slavic northeast tilted in the favor of Moscow. In 1945, D. S. Likhachev associated Moscow's unification of northeastern Rus' with the permeation of "all Russian culture" by the "spirit of historicism." (3)

Paradigm Shifts in Russian Historiography

The first true paradigm shift in Russian historiography occurred in the eighteenth century, when the story related by the Muscovite chroniclers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was rewritten under the growing influence of Western natural law philosophy and models of scholarship. Philosophy also played a role in subsequent paradigm shifts in Russian historiography: for example, the shift from Enlightenment to historicism (Schelling, Hegel, and Marx), the aborted shift from historicism to historical sociology proposed by N. I. Kareev and T. M. Bohn in the twentieth century (positivism and neo-Kantianism), and the failed attempts to revise official Marxism in the Soviet period.

The Muscovite chronicles of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries clearly offered raw materials and a Moscow-centric historical framework for the eighteenth-century historians who hoped to revise the traditional, non-secular treatment of the pre-Petrine past. Peter the Great wanted a new Russian history more in keeping with the standards of eighteenth-century European historiography. The new Petrine military and social elite was expected to know something about and to internalize the erudition, values, and philosophy of life--the rationalism, natural law, and belief in the benefits of science and education--that informed the best historical works produced in Europe of the Enlightenment.

In the early eighteenth century, V. N. Tatishchev, a mining engineer and high-ranking official, made first, cautious steps in this direction by writing essays on education, philosophy, science, history and geography and by collating and commenting critically on eleven major chronicles and other pertinent materials for his "History of Russia." After Tatishchev died in 1750, the manuscripts of his essays and partly published collations proved to be extremely useful to the foreign-born academicians and others who wrote about Russian history, organized archives, and taught Quellenkritik to several generations of Russian historical archivists, editors, and librarians. By the final third of the eighteenth century, the infrastructure for historical research in Russia had developed sufficiently to enable M. M. Sheherbatov (whom Catherine II had made Russian historiographer in 1767) to publish, between 1770 and 1790, a well-documented seven-volume History of Russia since the Most Ancient Times. Shcherbatov, a citizen of eighteenth-century Europe, had carefully studied the works of the leading figures of the English and French Enlightenment. His guide as a historian was David Hume, whose interest in didactic instruction, causal connection, and psychological motivation in history he shared. But he never came close to equaling Hume as a master of language and as a popular interpreter of national history. (4)

The crowning achievement of Enlightenment historiography in Russia was N. M. Karamzin's eloquent and learned twelve-volume History of the Russian State, published between 1818 and 1829. Of all Russian historians, only V. O. Kliuchevskii rivaled Karamzin as a master of historical prose who calls to mind the great historians of antiquity and of the English Enlightenment. Karamzin first attracted the attention of his contemporaries in the 1780s and 1790s as a journalist, translator, and author of sentimental and historical tales and short biographical and literary sketches of famous ancient and modern European writers. Before 1803, when Karamzin was appointed to the post of Russian historiographer, he introduced to the Russian literary language the word "development," but after 1803 this word disappeared from his working vocabulary as he gradually reinvented himself as an Enlightenment historian who followed in the footsteps of Gibbon, Livy, and Tacitus. For these writers, Ankersmit has reminded us, there was no true change or development in Roman history. Similarly, Karamzin found one unchanging theme that ran throughout Russian history, the principle of autocracy from the semi-legendary Riurik of the ninth century to the Romanovs (and by implication to the reign of Alexander I in his own lifetime). For Karamzin, Russian autocracy became an unchanging historical "substance," analogous to what Ankersmit calls the "Ovidian ontology" in his discussion of the problem of historical development in Ovid's Metamorphoses and Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. For Ankersmit, Ovid's metaphor offers us "a universe consisting of substances that eternally remain the same, despite the fact that their outward appearance may be subject to drastic change." Thus Gibbon, according to Ankersmit,

 
   presents us with the metamorphoses that Rome underwent in the 
   course of more than one thousand years of history. That is to say, 
   in contrast to historicist historical writing, the essence, or the 
   substance of the subject of his carmen perpetuum invariably remains 
   the same in spite of all the dramatic changes that transformed 
   Rome from the world's master into a Byzantine empire that was to 
   go through a protracted agony of some thousand years. (5) 

The new currents of romantic history and literature and idealistic philosophical thought that entered Russia after 1815 do not seem to have greatly interested Karamzin. Up to 1830 no fewer than 130 reviews of Karamzin's work appeared in Russian periodicals. Though some reviews were critical, no one questioned the value of Karamzin's efforts to demonstrate the importance of autocracy for Russia. (6)

Karamzin's History, which ended in 1611, had little direct relevance to containing challenges to conservative order in Russia and Europe during the late Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic period, and after 1815. Early German historicism, Karl Mannheim has suggested, offered an effective ideological antidote against these challenges, the idea of the social organism. (7) This and other related ideas gradually filtered into Russia during the 1820s via professors of philosophy and members of aristocratic discussion circles influenced by the philosophical idealism of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. Philosophical idealism and also romantic nationalism were propagated more widely during the second part of the 1820s by M. P. Pogodin and N. A. Polevoi. Pogodin edited the journal Moscow Messenger between 1827 and 1830; and Polevoi, the Moscow Telegraph, between 1825 and 1834. Pogodin was the first occupant of the Chair in Russian History at Moscow University. Closely associated with the official nationalism of Minister of Education S. S. Uvarov, he was not popular among students and faculty in Moscow and in the emerging intelligentsia. Yet there can be little question about his competence as a historian and role in training future professional historians and bringing to the attention of the Russian public the best products of European scholarship. Polevoi, unlike Pogodin, was self-taught as a historian. Born in Irkutsk and the son of a merchant, he had carefully studied the published Kievan, Novgorodian, and Muscovite chronicles, Russia's eighteenth-century historians, and Karamzin's History. He was well informed about Schelling's philosophy and the works of such European historians as Francois Guizot, Augustin Thierry, and Barthold Niebuhr. Especially noteworthy was his application of Schelling's philosophy to the task of interpreting the history of the Russian people as a gradual, organic development of people, state, and society. (8)

Vsevolod Sechkarev, the author of an authoritative study of Sehelling's influence in Russia, has commented favorably on Polevoi's presentation of this philosopher's idea of development, which Sechkarev considered the "greatest merit" of Schelling's Naturphilosophie, while he noted that the ideas of Schelling had been "either not understood or incorrectly applied" in Pogodin's Historical Aphorisms of 1836). (9) Polevoi not only grasped the essence of Schelling's idea of development, but he was also the first, as P. N. Miliukov argued in lectures given at Moscow University in the academic year 1886/87, to apply "a new philosophical-historical view to the explanation of the phenomena of Russian history." In many ways, Miliukov noted, Polevoi anticipated the later views of Konstantin Kavelin and Sergei Sovlov'ev on the gradual organic development of clan-state relations in Russia culminating in the final victory of the state over clan society. (10)

In my monograph of 1999 on the rise of historicism in Russia, I associated the paradigm shift from Enlightenment to historicism in Russia with the names of Iurii Samarin and Sergei Solov'ev, whose first historical works appeared in print at about the time Polevoi died in 1846 at the age of forty-five. In retrospect, it seems clear that I should have given Polevoi more credit for having first proposed a paradigm shift from Enlightenment to historicism. In the review of the History of the Russian State he published in the Moscow Telegraph in 1829, he was the first Russian historian to break decisively with Enlightenment historiography as personified by Karamzin. In this review, Polevoi aimed …