Personality and Place in Russian Culture—or Not

This collection of articles is a tribute to the memory and rich intellectual legacy of the late Lindsey Hughes (1949-2007), professor of Russian history at London University's School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies (SSEES, now part of University College London [UCL]). Hughes is probably best known for her pioneering biographies Sophia, Regent of Russia, 1657-1704 and the monumental Peter the Great: A Biography, as well as for her interest in material culture as a primary historical source—particularly architecture but also art, clothing, fashion, icons, and ritual.¹ As Robin Miller-Guilland writes, "In her many shorter articles, we find a tireless enthusiast for generally disregarded corners of history ..., the multivalent, disparate strands that make up the texture of human culture" (22). These interests have been cleverly distilled by the editor of the volume under review, Simon Dixon, Hughes's colleague at the SSEES and a leading scholar of Catherinean Russia, as a focus on "personality and place," reflecting Hughes's "interests in the kaleidoscopic variety of individual motivations and the shifting meanings attributable to particular settings" (13). Dixon's characterization of Hughes's scholarship as a "self-denying empiricism" and "not concept-driven" (5) may also be applied to the works in Personality and Place, which do not attempt large-scale statements about Russian culture or forefront theoretical or methodological problems but focus on "the shifting meanings attributable to particular settings" and on the specific materials under consideration.

That said, it is not easy to identify major themes or issues that tie together this collection of articles by 17 authors on a variety of subjects and periods; the volume also includes an article by Hughes on the Cathedral of SS Peter and Paul and a bibliography of her main works. To some extent, Personality and Place may be taken as a cross-section of contemporary scholarship in English on Russia before the Soviet period, with most attention given to the 18th century. The book also appeared as a special issue of The Slavonic and East European Review, and it retains the look and vestigial traces of a journal (e.g., reference to "this journal," 14).² Indeed, the majority of readers will most likely refer to individual contributions in this volume rather than read it in linear fashion. To a greater or lesser extent, all entries deal with "personality and/or place" but with no common understanding of what exactly these mean. That said, we may tentatively break the subject matter down into topics concerning material and print culture, historical sites, expeditions and geography, examinations of discourse in historical context, biographical studies, literary depictions of the self, and tributes to Hughes's life and work. I will say a few words about each contribution, by group.

Dixon's introduction to the collection offers a beautiful evocation of the social and cultural world in which Hughes grew up and describes her intellectual formation in postwar Britain. James Cracraft continues with a "personal memoir" of Hughes, centering on her work on Peter I; Hughes's "exhaustive research" in archives, libraries, museums, and architectural sites, in his words, "yielded an unprecedentedly detailed, complex, and often dark portrayal of the great tsar... . Her book leaves its readers, at Peter's death, with a Russia that is exhausted, confused, and fearful—not unlike the immediately post-Soviet Russia in which she conducted much of her research" (17).

Following Hughes's lead, Sergei Bogatyrev and Simon Franklin take up what we may classify as problems in material and print culture in order to explore images of Russian rulers. Bogatyrev analyzes the "portraits" of Ivan IV and Fedor Ivanovich on two bronze cannons, the "Lion of Revel" (1559) and the Kremlin's famous "Tsar-Cannon" (1586), as reflections of "profound cultural changes in the conception of Russian rulership" (48). Bogatyrev places quotation marks around the word...