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277 Notes Introduction 1. Quoted in Viazemskii, Fon-Vizin, 95. “One can say, my dear sir, that the history of our century will be interesting to posterity. How many great changes! How many strange adventures!” 2. Griboedov, Gore ot uma, 34. “To compare and to consider / The present age and the past age . . .” 3. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobraniie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, 21:42. “What good is Voltaire these days? Now [we need] a cudgel, not Voltaire!” 4. Khodasevich, Sobranie sochinenii v 8 tomakh, 1:63. “And the dead ancestors will not grasp / Their descendants’ vain speech.” 5. Irina Reyfman has explored the role of what she calls the “mythogenic spirit” of the eighteenth century in Russian literary historiography that sees the period as launching a “new” literature (Vasilii Trediakovsky: The Fool of the “New” Russian Literature, 13). As I shall argue, this powerful myth of origin is countered by a later one reserving innovation as the province of Pushkin, and casting the eighteenth century as an epoch to be overcome. 6. For a recent collection that theorizes precisely the meaning the eighteenth century holds for postmodernism, see Clingham, Questioning History: The Postmodern Turn to the Eighteenth Century. 7. Lopukhin, Zapiski nekotorykh obstoiatel’stv zhizni i sluzhby deistvitel’nogo tainogo sovetnika, senatora I. V. Lopukhina, sochinennyia im samim, 169. 8. These were no doubt pan-European developments. Harold Mah aptly formulates the alternative and multiple temporalities available to European intellectuals before and after the French Revolution: “The Revolution did not introduce new notions of temporality, but it did unsettle them, intensifying, separating, and reifying each against the other. To many Europeans, the Revolution signaled a quickening of historical change, conveying a sense that historical events had suddenly accelerated, so that Europe now seemed in the throes of a breakthrough into an entirely new stage of history.” Mah, Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in France and Germany, 1750–1914, 159. Reinhart Koselleck argues that modernity in general is characterized by an acceleration of historical time, a process originating in the gradual “temporalization” of experience underway in Europe in the long period between roughly 1500 and 1800. Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, 5. 9. There exist several influential accounts of this development broadly conceived . In the scholarship on Russia, the greatest attention has been paid to the rise specifically of the intelligentsia. Marc Raeff locates the widespread emergence of this class (defined largely through its dissenting attitudes) in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, while tracing its origins to a still earlier period, emphasizing in particular Peter III’s 1762 manifesto exempting the Russian nobility from obligatory state service. Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: Eighteenth-Century Nobility. Nicholas Riasanovsky offers an alternative account, which dates Russian educated society’s divergence from the government to the reign of Nicholas I (1825–55), in contrast with the strengthening ties between these entities Riasanovsky describes in the early years of Alexander I’s rule (1801–25). Riasanovsky, A Parting of Ways: Government and the Educated Public in Russia, 1801–1855. It has been pointed out by Riasanovsky’s reviewers (e.g., Richard Wortman) that the state-society trajectory he draws from full allegiance to complete break may be too stark. While I find both Raeff’s and Riasanovsky’s accounts illuminating (as much for the alternative arrangements of Russian intellectual history they offer as for the testimony their divergence provides to the inconclusiveness of periodizing intellectual history), here I am primarily interested not in the emergence of an opposition to the state, but in the very possibility of locating and thinking history elsewhere, outside the government or its centralized structures—a mentality in and of itself not connected with dissent. What is important for me is the decenteredness, rather than oppositionality, of Russian intellectual life at the beginning of the nineteenth century. 10. Needless to say, care should be taken not to overstate this expansion, particularly if considered retrospectively rather than from within the period itself. The demographic that was not only literate, but also interested in relatively highbrow magazines such as The Herald of Europe (Vestnik Evropy), was limited, though still sizable compared to the eighteenth century. The circulation of The Herald of Europe in the years 1802–30 ranged from 580 to 1200 copies. 11. Among several historians who address the broadening of the experiential range available to historical thinking in this period, Mark Phillips contextualizes a panoply of new and revised historiographical and parahistoriographical genres emerging in turn...