Историческая культура императорской России. Формирование представлений о прошлом: коллективная монография в честь by И. М. Савельевой (review)

The edited volume under discussion is dedicated to the work of Irina M. Savelieva, professor and director of the Poletaev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities (National Research University, Higher School of Economics) and member of the Russian Society of Intellectual History. The aim of the volume is to set out and study the various ways of construction and reconstruction of the past in the Russian Empire from a new perspective and a new interdisciplinary field of research, Historical Culture, which is new internationally as well as within the Russian academic community.

The formulation of this field of research is related to the considerable rise of public interest in history in recent decades, and it links within a wider field various aspects, such as public history, Lieux de Mémoire, heritage, régime d’ historicité, conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), the public use of history (l’ uso pubblico del passato), and public historical representations. Historical culture includes the multiple and multilevel ways with which members of a present or past society relate themselves publicly to the past and incorporate it into the present. Historical culture comprises ideas, ways of thinking, mentalities, practices, and representations through which collective memory is expressed. It is conceived as a dynamic communicative process that refers to production, diffusion, perception of messages, and interpretations of the past that produce views about the present and expectations for the future. In other words, it points to the interactional participation of society in the formulation of frameworks within which the past is perceived as history. Within this new model of historical research, various ways of production of historical meaning are not contrasted to academic history and they are not seen as mere misrepresentations of the past.¹

This collective monograph edited by A.N. Dmitriev studies the historical culture of Imperial Russia with an emphasis on the nineteenth century. However, the contributions also reach the “golden” and “long” Russian eighteenth century as well as the early twentieth century. In his substantial introduction titled, “The Past of Our Past: The Problematic of Historical Culture in the Russian Empire,” Dmitriev makes the point, among others, that the emphasis is on the nineteenth century because by that time, scientific, corporative, (dvorianstvo, statist), and “mass” representations regarding the past had considerably matured in Russian society. The monograph is divided into three parts: historical knowledge, historical consciousness, and historical imagination, which mirror important aspects of historical culture. The common denominator is the past and the ways that the past turns into history, the different agents that take part in this process, the interaction between material and immaterial culture, and the relations between “high” and “popular” historical culture.

Historical Knowledge

Our relationship with the past is forged through knowledge and interpretation. In this sense, academic historiography, as a special kind of historical thinking, is central to the process of production of historical knowledge and consciousness in modern and contemporary societies. The contributions in the first part of the book focus their problematic mainly on academic historiography. It is well known that in the nineteenth century history became a distinct scientific discipline, with its institutionalization and professionalization and its inclusion as a necessary course at various levels of education, from primary school to the university. N. K. Gavriushin examines the birth of church history; A. V. Antoshchenko and A. V. Sveshnikov examine the institution of the historical seminar as a means of knowledge production, and they associate its introduction with the maturing of historical science and the mechanisms of professionalization of historians. Thomas Sanders highlights the relationship between the university and society and the contribution of the university in creating a subculture among intellectuals, with the dissertation-defense process seen as a cultural institution and public event.

The contributions of Α. Β. Kamenskii and L. P. Repina problematize the role of the historian in the construction of historical knowledge and its related questions, such as who is the subject, who historizes, what he/she can “see” or wants to see, how he/she can present historical narratives using theories and explanatory frameworks. The authors focus on the early...