The Ambiguities of the 18th Century

This excursus into 18th-century historiography has proven to be an exceptionally difficult assignment. On the one hand, no other field of Russian history has remained so faithful to the powerful founding narratives of state and ruler as the 18th century. At the dawn of the 21st century we remain nearly as beholden to the fundamental state-centered histories of Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin and Sergei Mikhailovich Solov'ev as did historians of a century ago. Whether in the outpouring of biographies of Peter and Catherine, examinations of governing institutions, or the elaboration of the well-ordered police state, we continue to think along lines articulated by our intellectual forebears. Ten years after the fall, and with the collapse of Soviet-style class analysis, our corner of the profession finds itself, if anything, more preoccupied with rulers and the organization of state power than it has for some time.

On the other hand, 18th-century studies has produced quite a lot of vibrant and thought-provoking scholarship during the past decade (a phenomenon that is perhaps not so visible to the broader field), a good deal of which embraces the interdisciplinarity that traditionally has defined dixhuitièmisme. The work of Viktor Markovich Zhivov, for example, has brought the study of literary language and literature squarely into the mainstream of cultural history, and in so doing has attracted readers from half a dozen disciplines. One sees in his most recent scholarship the early outlines of what might be termed a post-binary, or post-semiotic mode of interpretation.¹

The enduring affinity for the hermeneutics and periodization of state-school historiography is entirely understandable, and, against the backdrop of the essentialist alternatives, not at all a bad thing. At a workshop a number of years ago James Cracraft made the salient observation that dating the dawn of Russian modernity with Peter and the imperial state endures because it makes so much sense, a position that he has elaborated in two books on the Petrine cultural revolution, with a third on the way.² This construction of Russian modernity informs much of the most compelling recent scholarship, including Richard Wortman's study of court spectacles, the biographies of Peter the Great by Lindsey Hughes, Evgenii Viktorovich Anisimov, and Nikolai Ivanovich Pavlenko, and many other studies.³ Not everyone thinks that this revolution was a good thing, and Anisimov's chastisement of Peter's violence and rupture with Muscovite culture constitutes a particularly severe indictment. But they all agree that the rupture took place. Who am I to argue with that? Certainly no new periodizations are looming, and none will be suggested here. Nevertheless, state-and-ruler-centered history, like all commanding narratives, necessarily imposes certain blinders.

In his book Permanence and Change, Kenneth Burke once termed these blind spots "trained incapacities," by which he meant the categorical exclusion of subjects and outlooks that do not fit into our conceptual frames of reference. In the case of 18th-century state-centered history, these exclusions have included some pretty big topics: local and community history, ethnicity, gender, rural life, and popular religion, to name some of the more obviously under-explored topics. As it happens, most of these very topics are undergoing something of a revival of basic research, and we as a community of historians may want to take their collective measure at some time in the near future. But not today.

The paradox of our own trained incapacities is that we have always been vaguely cognizant of them. Solov'ev, for example, periodically stepped away from his seamless narrative to declaim the vastness, complexity, and untamed nature of the realm and most of its people. He knew perfectly well that the orderly categories of the state bore faint resemblance to the real lives and experiences of the empire's subjects. Similarly, Marc Raeff has left no doubt that the "well-ordered police state" was an imaginary and mostly ill-suited way for the state to understand and attempt to domesticate an unruly and unknowable land.⁴ On paper, perhaps, the notion of Regierungsstaat captures the 18th-century state...