Making Russian History Up

One of the longest and most mutually enriching relationships in modern European culture is that between history and what we now call literature. All the more striking, then, that the two parties have done so much to obscure or deny their points of connection. In the middle of the 19th century dawned a new age of academic institutionalization and specialization, and the resulting turf wars and boundary policing only intensified in the 20th century. When Hayden White argued in the 1970s that literature and history shared a narrative essence, he triggered the biggest theoretical debate in the humanities of that era—one that is now a classroom staple in historiography courses.¹ Following White and others, most historians have taken a few steps back from bullish assertions of the absolute truth value of their work, but they retain a strong sense that the empirical rigor of history and the license of fiction do not mix.

It was not always thus. The 19th century was an age of academic specialization, but it was also a high point in the interplay between fiction and history. As Alfred Rieber reminds us in the present issue of Kritika, Walter Scott was the dominant historiographical intelligence of his era—and not just in Britain (353). Russia was for once unexceptional, as the most cursory consideration of the works of Aleksandr Pushkin and Lev Tolstoi will convince us. Even if we stick to the belief that history and narrative fiction are different kinds of intellectual enterprise, there is every reason to ask what they can offer each other in the early 21st century.

Carolyn Pouncy notes in her contribution to the same forum that history can be just as gripping, and unexpected, as any literary work (343). Admittedly, the narrative potential and human interest of the stories historians tell will vary according to the subject matter and the sensibility of the historian. Areas of human experience such as everyday life, where the sources soon run out, are more likely to trigger the historian’s imaginative urges. It is telling that among the most fashionable areas of history writing at the end of the 20th century was Alltagsgeschichte, a field that was striving for the same density and authenticity of depiction as literary realism.²

Historians of the 16th century cannot go and conduct a few dozen interviews with their equivalent of steel workers in the Ruhr Valley. Yet they are no less interested in the texture of their subjects’ lives. To write about such things will often take them beyond what their sources can tell them. But highly educated guesswork—about the tea-drinking habits of Tatars, to take Pouncy’s example (349)—is an intellectually productive activity for them to engage in, even if it is not guaranteed to be “history” in an academic understanding. As academic historians we need our imagination, but we keep it on a leash, since our concern is to present an account of some event or phenomenon that is fully defensible on the basis of the information available. Historical novelists, conversely, search for something to fire up their imaginations, even if it lies at the outer margins of the historical record; their only constraint is the need to produce a version of the past that is not wholly indefensible. The three essays here suggest the benefits to historians of taking off the leash and operating on both sides of the demarcation line between literature and history. In an academic monograph their flight-of-fancy embroiderings will stay out of sight; in historical fiction they bedeck the stage.

Practitioners of Alltagsgeschichte are interested in more than tea drinking, of course. Their greatest quest is to reconstruct the worldviews or subjectivity of historical actors. This task is difficult enough for an era such as the 20th century, which left behind any number of ego documents, since they often raise as many questions (about representativeness, about authenticity) as they answer. For the 16th century, such reconstruction is close to impossible. But that has not stopped historians trying. The most famous attempt is Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre, which explored the meaning of...