Seeing Muscovy Anew: Politics—Institutions—Culture: Essays in Honor of Nancy Shields Kollmann ed. by Michael S. Flier et al. (review)

Seeing Muscovy Anew is a strong new collection of essays in Muscovite and imperial Russian history celebrating the career of Nancy S. Kollmann, one of the most prolific and influential scholars of the Russian Empire today. The volume itself ranges widely, roughly following Kollmann's own scholarly interests from Muscovite political culture and early conceptions of honor to the visual culture of the early empire and the social history of the imperial periphery from Siberia to Ukraine.

Festschrift volumes are usually somewhat scattered, unified more by the shape of a single person's scholarly community (their mentors and students, their longtime colleagues) than by a given theme or method. In this case, the individual contributions to the volume Seeing Muscovy Anew demonstrate a surprising degree of coherence. Clearly these contributors have been brought together first and foremost by their collective scholarly debt to Nancy Kollmann and for the most part build directly on her research while invoking her publications. However, there may be an even deeper affinity here in terms of method. If this volume is any indication, then the community that has assembled in the name of "Kollmania" is one that remains in direct, critical dialogue with the source material on which Muscovite and imperial Russian history has long been based. Most striking throughout is the creativity with which the essays in this volume return to many of the most familiar collections of source materials in the field, from the early chronicles and land registers to the lives of the saints and travel narratives.

The opening essay by Sergei Bogatyrev initiates this pattern of engagement with the sources by offering a close re-reading of several royal genealogies found in three fifteenth-century chronicles (letopisi). In Bogatyrev's analysis, they point toward the surprisingly late development in Novgorod of "dynastic discourse" in the articulation of East Slavic political power. It is a subtle argument that relies on a nuanced reading of three versions of the Novgorodian First Chronicle, long familiar to the field, which are then presented to the reader with bibliographic precision in a concluding table. In a similar move, Janet Martin contributes an essay that uses the sixteenth-century Novgorodian land registers (pistsovye knigi), to resurrect the otherwise hidden history of landownership among women within the pomest'e system. In terms of ordering the Muscovite state, both cases show how that order was articulated officially (and somewhat fantastically) through royal genealogies and regnal lists, as well as more informally (and rather dynamically) in the allocation of land and its income to the female and minor dependents of military elites.

While establishing order is almost always the focus of an emerging state, disorder is often more interesting. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in Eve Levin's essay, which puts forth a fundamentally new approach to the history of "insanity" in Muscovy by focusing on the "disordered behavior" of "besnye" individuals incarcerated in monasteries for mental affliction. Not unlike Bogatyrev and Martin, Levin derives this interpretation from sources long essential to Muscovite studies including several Zhitie (Lives of Saints) and miracle cycles. Not only is Levin's essay a highly original take on these fundamental texts, it engages in a return to the sources that is resolutely a step forward by incorporating digitized resources, which occur occasionally throughout the volume but are best used here.

The culmination of this approach of looking at old sources with new eyes can be found in Erika Monahan's essay on the Filatev family. Generating an almost anthropological description of a globally connected, boyar-like, merchant family at the start of the eighteenth century, Monahan conducts a close reading of published documentary sources in combination with classics of the travel narrative genre, including works by Paul of Aleppo, Nicholaas Witsen, Adam Brand, Adam Olearius and Giles Fletcher. Meanwhile...