An Interview with Michael Confino

Our eagerness to interview Michael Confino in this ongoing series stemmed from his eminence as one of the greatest historians of Russian history and his cosmopolitan background and experiences. We also suspected, correctly as it turns out, that his historical interest in mentalities and psychological history might lead to an especially interesting autobiographical reflection on his extraordinary personal and scholarly life. As in the past, this was an "e-interview": we sent written questions to Professor Confino and received his responses by e-mail.

Born in Sofia in 1926, Confino emigrated to Israel in 1948, after studying at the University of Sofia in 1945–48. He finished his studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1955–57) and in Paris, where he received his doctorate summa cum laude from the Sorbonne in 1959. Confino was then influential in the development of Russian Studies in Israel, founding and chairing the Department of Russian Studies at Hebrew University from 1964 to 1969 and doing the same for the Russian and East European Research Center at Tel Aviv University from 1971 to 1977. He served as president of the Israeli Association of Slavic and East European Studies in 1979–81, and from 1980 to 1995 he held the Samuel Rubin Chair of Russian and European History and Civilization at Tel Aviv University. He has also been a visiting professor or fellow at leading universities and research centers, first and foremost in the United States—at the University of Chicago, Harvard, Stanford, and Duke, as well as the Kennan Institute and the National Humanities Center.

Of Confino's many books, four are in French: Domaines et seigneurs en Russie vers la fin du XVIIIe siècle: Étude de structures agraires et de mentalités économiques (1963); Systèmes agraires et progrès agricole en Russie aux XVIIIe– XIXe siècles: Étude d' économie et de sociologie rurales (1969); Violence dans la violence: Le débat Bakounine–Nechaev (1973); and Société et mentalités collectives en Russie sous l'Ancien Régime (1991). One is in English (Daughter of a Revolutionary: Natalie Herzen and the Bakunin–Nechayev Circle, 1974) and another in Hebrew (From St. Petersburg to Leningrad: Essays in Russian History, 1993). He has produced some four edited volumes and more than 80 scholarly articles, including many highly influential pieces. In addition, he has served as member (from 1995) and chairman (from 1999) of the International Editorial Scientific Council for the series Dokumenty sovetskoi istorii (Documents in Soviet History). Professor Confino continues this extraordinary effort in research and scholarship today; he has one book forthcoming (Tradition and Dissent in Russian History: Essays in Ideas, Politics, and Society) and one in progress (The Historian's Craft and Historical Consciousness in Contemporary Culture and Society), not to mention several forthcoming articles, including "Political Murder in Russia's Ethos and History: A Comparative View," History and Memory (in 2008), and "The New Russian Historiography, and the Old."

In 1993, Professor Confino became a laureate of the Israel Prize, which is that country's most prestigious civil award. In 2003, he was awarded the EMET (Art-Sciences-Culture) Prize. Since 1994, he has been a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Kritika: You were born in Bulgaria, emigrated to Israel in 1948, and in 1959 finished your doctoral dissertation on Russian agrarian history in the 18th century—presumably the core of your later study Systèmes agraires et progrès agricole. Could you share with us your recollections about your personal and intellectual path into Russian history and the kinds of concerns and interests that motivated you at the time?

Confino: All history-writing is a study in psychological history. It involves, first, the psychology of the people about whom historians write; second, it stems from our own psychology—that is, the mindset and life experiences of those who inquire and write. This is so because psychology lies at the core of mental processes, and in historical research, too, we think in terms of psychological evaluations, and this process takes place regardless of whether the historian is conscious of it or not. Either way, we "speak...