Slavo-phile Thought and the Politics of Cultural Conservatism by Susanna Rabow-Edling (review)

458 Рецензии/Reviews Mikhail SUSLOV Susanna Rabow-Edling, Slavophile Thought and the Politics of Cultural Conservatism (Albany, NY: State University of New York Pres, 2006). vii+183 pp. (=SUNY Series in National Identities). Notes, Bibliography, Index. ISBN: 0-79146693 -0 (hardcover edition). It is welcome news that Slavophilism can still intrigue “Western” scholars satiated with Cold War studies on Russian intellectual hisductory comments. However, for researchers on Russian Empire in Asia, the collection should be useful for those looking to access information on particular events, personalities , or topics, given that the level of scholarship is high in most of the articles. Yet if one is looking to find a coherent and collective argument in this volume, they will be hardpressed to locate it. tory – catering for all tastes, from the bellicose writing of Stephen Lukashevich on Ivan Aksakov,1 to the conceptually brilliant monograph of Andrzej Walicki,2 the “intellectual biography” by Abbot Gleason,3 and the German-style meticulousness of Peter Christoff’s “Introduction” (the latter seemingly exhausted the topic in the early 1990s by the impressive volume on Iurii Samarin).4 A comparably thorough study by Susanna Rabow-Edling appeared fifteen years later, well equipped with the latest fashionable methodology , and whose fruitfulness and appropriateness in this case is beyond doubt. Rabow-Edling endorses the “Cambridge school” of intellectual historians, spearheaded by Quentin Skinner, John Dunn, and John Greville Agard Pocock. This approach allows the author to move over past debates on the intellectual origins and philosophical achievements of Slavo-philes, plunging directly into the historical context in order to understand what was being said and why. Rabow-Edling sets out to discuss the intellectual background of Slavophile ideology, coining a vivid 1 S. Lukashevich. Ivan Aksakov, 1823-1886: A Study in Russian Thought and Politics. Cambridge, MA, 1965. 2 Andrzej Walicki. The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought. Oxford, 1975. 3 Abbott Gleason. European and Muscovite: Ivan Kireevsky and the origins of Slavophilism . Camridge, MA, 1972. 4 Peter K. Christoff. An Introduction to Nineteenth Century Slavophilism: A Study in Ideas. Vols. I-IV. The Hague, 1961, 1970; Princeton, 1982; San Francisco, 1991. 459 Ab Imperio, 2/2007 5 J. Hutchinson. Cultural Nationalism, Elite Mobility and Nation-Building: Communitarian Politics in Modern Ireland // The British Journal of Sociology. 1987. Vol. 38. No. 4. P. 483. label “dual crisis of identity” as a title for the first chapter. Making short but persuasive references to Eric Hobsbawm and Liah Greenfeld, the author explains that Westernized and cultivated Russian intellectuals stood in stunning contrast to the economic, social and political foundations of the backward Empire. The confession of Fonvizin’s Ivanushka mirrors his blurring identity: “My body was born in Russia, that is true, but my spirit belonged to the French Crown.”The other side of the coin are the pervasive influences of Romanticism, refracted visions, and the self-perception of the “educated classes”: purely imitative Europeanness was no longer understood as “cultivated civilization,” but to the contrary, it came to be seen as barbarism – the Russians, having copied the West, stopped being human and turned into monkeys. That was the way the educated Russian aristocracy became trapped in the “dual crisis of identity.” In this context, as Rabow-Edling convincingly shows, Slavophilism might be interpreted as a way out of the predicament of how to combine being Russian and civilized. The author interprets this Slavophile urge for overcoming Russian intellectuals’ identity crisis, drawing on the methodology of nationalism studies. For this purpose Rabow-Edling spends all of chapter three on the conceptions of the nation by discussing two types of nationalism: a political nationalism, striving for political reformation and seizure of power by means of popular movement; and a cultural nationalism that is based on the “moral regeneration of the national community” (P. 70). The author follows John Hutchinson , whom she abundantly cites in order to furnish evidence that cultural nationalism can also serve as a mighty weapon for social change, and even “in many contexts… this ‘grass roots’ movement has played a central part in nation-building.”5 Frederick Beiser’s writings on German Romanticism were also an inspiration for this monograph, as Rabow...