Reevaluating Russian Historical Culture

The impact of the “cultural turn” on Russian historical scholarship is fairly well documented. Originating some 40 years ago in the field of semiotics and literary criticism, where it signaled a courageous alternative to official Marxist dogma, the study of culture, of whatever hue—intellectual, popular, visual, everyday life, local—has now virtually become the default setting in analyses of the Soviet and more distant tsarist past.¹ Far less attention, however, has been given to the repercussions of the cultural turn on the very nature of historical inquiry itself. In various ways, the four books reviewed here all address this issue. By discussing the production of historical knowledge, exploring the shaping of traditions and distinctive methodologies, and placing particular emphasis on the historian’s career path in view of his intellectual ancestry and the sociopolitical climate of his age, each attempts to dislodge the still prevalent, yet largely simplified, historiographical narrative privileging a succession of “isms” and distinctive methodological paradigms.² Moreover, these new case studies of imperial, prerevolutionary, Soviet, and émigré scholarship attest (whether by design or tangentially) to a preoccupation among Russian historians with culture that appreciably predates its current popularity. Placed in this long view, then, the innovative research agenda and methodology spearheaded by Iurii Lotman and the Moscow–Tartu school during the 1960s and 1970s, which has provided the building blocks for present-day historical scholarship, should be perceived not so much as a “turn” but rather as the most recent variant in a line of inquiry foregrounding the concept of culture as an object and/or tool of historical research.

In his study of the formation of scholarly communities, Anton Sveshnikov charts the career of Ivan Grevs (1860–1941) and his circle of medievalists at St. Petersburg University during the first two decades of the 20th century. It is an intriguing topic, not least because Grevs’s reputation in the Soviet era as one of the founders of kraevedenie has overshadowed his early career and the rewarding parallels it offers with the more famous Annales school of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.³ Specializing in the history of medieval France and Italy, Grevs and his closest pupils—Lev Karsavin (1882– 1952), Georgii Fedotov (1886–1951), Ol′ga Dobiash-Rozhdestvenskaia (1874–1939), and Nikolai Antsiferov (1889–1958)—analyzed the verbal tissue of sources, key categories, and ideas, which they combined with a visual perception of the past (excursion history) to produce an imaginative reconstruction of the daily experiences and worldview of medieval man. In particular, it was their treatment of architecture, artifacts, painting, and urban topography as cultural products and refractors of daily life in the community and its belief system that has prompted a number of Western and Russian scholars, including Sveshnikov, to regard the work of Grevs and his pupils as an incidental precursor of the mentalities paradigm championed by the French Annales in the 1920s and 1930s.⁴ If, in the Russian version, emphasis on religious mentality and sentiment was perhaps more pronounced, the coincidences between the career trajectories and research agendas of Grevs and the French Annalistes are, nevertheless, quite striking and would undoubtedly present an interesting case study for research into patterns of development in national historiographies from a comparative (or global) perspective. Similar to Marc Bloch, Grevs had been trained in socioeconomic history, and, like the founders of the...