History, Real and Invented

Like many people who eventually become professional historians, I read historical fiction long before I understood that real, academic history involved much more than identifying and listing the four causes of the Civil War.¹ I vividly remember learning, at the age of ten in my UK fifth-form classroom, that King George III had graciously granted the American colonists their independence after a bit of a brouhaha led by that traitor George Washington. After my parents moved us to Chicago the next year, I realized that historical fiction probably contained at least as much truth as that piece of nationalist propaganda. But it took me almost another decade to grasp that historians do not simply memorize facts. Instead, they begin with sources of which they ask questions and from which they develop hypotheses about this or that element of the past—hypotheses with which other historians are free to disagree.

In short, I finally realized that history as a discipline could be as dynamic, as exciting, as controversial, and as appealing as any historical detective novel, family saga, or romance. That perception enlivened my graduate work, then my Ph.D. dissertation, which began as the search for an answer to a simple question: if books on domestic management were, as previously argued, associated with the rise of a middle class, then who was writing and reading Domostroi in 16th-century Russia, which supposedly had no middle class?² Finding an answer to that question led me down numerous highways and byways, eventually yielding a textual history that I could not have written when I started the project. In the process, I learned a great deal, not just about Russian language, history, and culture and the study of manuscripts but also about what it means to be a historian.

Textual history, I think it is fair to say, probably does not qualify as most people’s idea of scintillating reading. Yet I can still remember the day when I opened the Solovetskii Monastery account book from the 1570s, there in the Reading Room of the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts, and found myself staring at the name of Sil′vestr, “former priest of the Annunciation Cathedral.” I felt as thrilled as Hercule Poirot unearthing a crucial clue—or as Alan Grant, the bedridden detective in Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, tracking down another detail about the life of England’s Richard III.³

Yet it was far from inevitable that I would eventually supplement my studies of Domostroi and Sil′vestr and Ivan IV the Terrible (1530–84) with the series of novels that I am publishing under the name C. P. Lesley.⁴ On the contrary, had you asked me 20 years ago whether I would ever write anything besides nonfiction books and articles on Russian history, I would have looked at you askance. I still read and enjoyed historical fiction, but writing it was not on my list of skills to master. Nonetheless, here I am, with two novels in print and a rough draft of the third, ready to answer the question asked of contributors to this forum: how does historical fiction contribute to an understanding of history, and what can specialized knowledge add to novels about Russia?

What changed me from an avid consumer of historical fiction to a producer was my decision to work in academic publishing rather than as a professor, meaning that I had no summers off, limited access to outside funding, and minimal opportunity for archival research.⁵ One summer, more or less on a lark, I wrote down a single scene of what would become an excruciatingly bad novel. In hindsight, persisting with this dreadful book through multiple drafts and rewrites before I accepted that it was beyond salvation might seem like a waste of time. But it gave me the idea that I could, if I worked on it, learn to write good fiction—and, moreover, that I would have fun doing it.

At that point, it dawned on me that, if I were to write novels, my chosen area of concentration, Muscovite...