Private Affairs: Histories of the Russian Age of Sensibility

The golden age of Russian nobility—the period from 1762, when Peter III’s decree emancipated noblemen from obligatory state service, until 1825, when the crushed Decembrist Uprising disabused them of aspirations toward a liberal alliance with the state—is also a veritable golden age for the history of Russian mentalities, private lives, and, most recently, emotions. In part, this is only to be expected of a period that saw the ascendancy, across Europe, of sentimentalist and romantic cultural paradigms. The sentimentalist “inward turn” and the proliferation of written material to document it—from fiction to various forms of self-writing—validated private lives as bearers of historical meaning. To a greater or lesser degree, the pan-European Age of Sensibility serves as the backdrop for the lives of the Russian elite, variously delimited and defined in the three books under review.

As the editors of The Europeanized Elite in Russia, 1762–1825 argue, this period in Russian history is marked, moreover, by an “interiorization” of Western cultural practices, initially mandated by Peter I and requiring enforcement, but under Catherine II “begin[ning] to affect the mental world of the elite” (5). This narrative echoes the famous assessment by Catherine’s own contemporaries: “Peter gave us being, Catherine soul” (unknown author, “Ko statue Gosudaria Petra Velikogo,” 1769).¹ As a matter for historical analysis, this declaration poses an interesting and diverse scholarly agenda: how can matters of the “soul” be historicized? Where can these processes of interiorization be located, and how traced? How do phenomena detected on the microscale of private sensibility illustrate or amend the macronarratives of Russian history of the period? To what extent is one justified in linking “interiorization”—a process no doubt characteristic of most cultural dynamics—to a specific period? And how can the narrative of modernization, which has for so long been the guiding thread for the history of this period, be recomposed from the stories of individual lives whose modernizing trajectories are often less than obvious?

Andrei Zorin’s much-awaited study of Andrei Turgenev’s (1781–1803) diary and turn-of-the-century Russian emotional culture in Poiavlenie geroia is perhaps most explicit in its pursuit of a methodological framework capable of meaningfully accommodating both the idiosyncratic emotional paths taken by particular individuals and their corresponding collective psychological tendencies, in Zorin’s case imagined primarily along generational lines. The book’s introduction provides a useful survey of the development and key concepts of the history of emotions as a scholarly field. While some parts here retrace the narrative offered in Jan Plamper’s thorough introduction to the field in the Oxford Emotions in History series,² what is particularly valuable about Zorin’s overview is the way it works through the legacies of important Russian thinkers—from Lev Vygotskii, Gustav Shpet, and Grigorii Vinokur to Lydia Ginzburg and Iurii Lotman—and highlights their potential to enrich the field’s conceptual repertoire.

Also noteworthy are Zorin’s reflections on the phenomenological category of Erlebnis (lived experience) as one that can productively unlock (auto) biographical documentary material for historical analysis (18–28). The emphasis on Erlebnis and interiority more generally allows Zorin to propose a productive adjustment to Lotman’s influential theatricality model, which foregrounds role play and the disjuncture between emotional experience...