From the Editors: Homo Imperii Revisits the “Biographic Turn”

17 Ab Imperio, 1/2009 From the EDITORS Twenty years ago Lawrence Stone described the most promising developments in world historiography: One of the most striking recent changes in the content of history has been a quite sudden growth of interest in feelings, emotions, behaviour patterns, values, and states of mind. ...The first cause of the revival of narrative among some of the “new historians” has therefore been the replacement of sociology and economics by anthropology as the most influential of the social sciences.Although psychohistory is so far largely disaster area – a desert strewn with the wreckage of elaborate, chromium-plated vehicles which broke down soon after departure – psychology itself has also had its effect on a generation now turning its attention to sexual desire, family relations and emotional bonding as they affect the individual, and to ideas, beliefs and customs as they affect the group.1 With a usual lag of 15 – 20 years these new tendencies came to play a role in Russia, or, to be more precise, in the historiography of Russia. Significant in this respect is a thematic forum “Emotional Turn? Feelings in Russian History and Culture,” which takes up most of the summer 2009 issue of the leading professional periodical, Slavic Review. No less notable 1 Lawrence Stone. The Past and the Present Revisited. London and New York, 1987. P. 86. HOMO IMPERII REVISITS THE “BIOGRAPHIC TURN” 18 From the Editors is the focus of the upcoming convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies: “Reading and Writing Lives.” In St. Petersburg, a conference on biographic research in memory of V. V. Ioffe is held regularly and positioned as “the only interdisciplinary seminar in Russia dedicated to biographic studies of the twentieth century.”2 It seems that we find ourselves in the situation described above by Stone: there is a growing interest in the inner world of people of the past that is paralleled by common mistrust of both traditional psychohistory and structuralist approaches. As Ronald Suny perceptively notes in the “Theory and Methodology” section of this issue (which carries his review of research literature on Stalin), regardless of our attitude to psychohistory, historians critique it as often as they use its methods. Indeed, the most worn-out clichés of historians (who write that their subjects “thought about” something, “decided not to allow” something to happen…, “felt” something) presuppose a reconstruction of the inner world and motivations of the protagonist, and these speculations are of a psychohistorical nature. Therefore historians would be in a much better position to recognize this fact than to use these tropes thoughtlessly and therefore unprofessionally. In this respect, the figure of Stalin, under discussion by Suny, is an archetypical example. Nonetheless, it seems to us that the Russian and Eurasian case is not just about a belated reaction to the anthropological and biographical turns in world historiography. New imperial history, developing within the field of reframed Russian and Eurasian studies, takes empire as a “context-setting category”3 and creates a special space for biographical and psychological reconstructions. This new research perspective suggests replacing the question “what is empire?” with the question of how the imperial space is populated, lived, experienced, and conceived of. The frame of empire’s “languages of self-description” necessarily presupposes the reconstruction of both collective and individual experience and perception and raises the question of how for a specific individual or a group life in an empire is different from life in nonimperial societies. Since imperial history describes a diverse geographic, social, cultural, and political space that cannot be reduced to taxonomy and a hierarchy of noncontradictory categories, each taxonomic category in empire becomes a context. Therefore, it is natural for historians to try to find an agent that allows them to bring together the rapidly disintegrating fabrics of imperial 2 On the 2009 conference see www.memorial-nic.org/iofe_chteniya.html. 3 Аlexander Semyonov. Empire as a Context Setting Category // Ab Imperio. 2008. No. 1. Pp. 193-204. 19 Ab Imperio, 1/2009 society. Biography becomes a convenient framework for the mutual overlap of different contexts because a given individual brings in previous experiences to new imperial loci. On...