Writing History in Late Imperial Russia: Scholarship and the Literary Canon by Frances Nethercott (review)

It is usually assumed that somewhere in the middle of the nineteenth century (or a little later) literature, language, and history parted ways and became independent scholarly disciplines. Previously, history was very much regarded as part of literature, in terms of topics as well as ideals of good style. However, this understanding gradually yielded to visions of specialized, "scientific" disciplines with distinct methodologies and terminologies – first in linguistics and history, and then in comparative literature/history of literature (the latter field is also discussed in the book under review here). This happened as history entered the university system and was no longer the preoccupation of "writers" whose works depended on their "narrative flair" (P. 1).

The central claim in Frances Nethercott's Writing History in Late Imperial Russia: Scholarship and the Literary Canon is that, in Russia, history as an independent discipline with its own field of research never really lost sight of literature; rather, literature remained a significant frame of reference, despite historians' positivist-scientific ambitions. Whereas the structures imposed from above encouraged specialization and differentiation, and scholars themselves sought to become proper producers of pure knowledge, other tendencies worked in different directions. The author's starting point is the historian Vasilii Kliuchevskii's praise of "creative imagination" as exemplified by Alexander Pushkin, put forward in the "climate of positivism and rigorous science-based approaches to the past that otherwise characterized the discipline of history across Continental Europe during the closing decades of the nineteenth century" (P. 1). The aim of the book is to explain this appeal of literature for historians and to explore the "literary interface" (P. 2) of Russian historiography.

The ambition to make history more "scientific" did indeed reach Russia, too, and the introduction to Kliuchevskii's Course in Russian History is a case in point. It is often read as a program for a sociological turn in history. The question is still to what extent such programmatic statements, as we encounter them in introductions, are the final word. As I have argued elsewhere, the introduction to Kliuchevskii's narrative – described in passing by Nethercott as "tortuous" (P. 14) – may not be the best way to get acquainted with Kliuchevskii's writing of history and understand it. My own interpretation is that Kliuchevskii's history is just as much informed by other models (historicist narratives), as may be revealed in a Hayden White–inspired analysis of narrative configurations in his writings.¹

If the first, "sociological" approach has been pursued by Thomas Bohn,² and the second, "narrativist" path by the author of this review, Frances Nethercott offers a third, and to my knowledge quite original, way into this field of historical inquiry and writing in late imperial Russia. Although Nethercott's book is called Writing History, it is not primarily a study of historiography in a literal sense, although she does devote several parts to ways of writing – for instance, Kliuchevskii's well-known ironic, aphoristic style. Meanwhile, Nethercott does rely extensively on Hayden White, but differently from the way scholars usually do. It is not his "poetics of history" that informs Nethercott's analysis, but his broader descriptions of nineteenth-century historical culture.³ And it is precisely "historical culture" and its connection to literature that is the focus of her work. Historical culture refers to a society's broad obsession with the past in a variety of forms and venues (scholarly writing and fiction; seminars and circles), which in turn is seen as a tool for the moral enlightenment of the people and in serving the "common good." Kliuchevskii's course, for one, ended with a call for liberation and the strengthening of civil society. History, then, could not do this, or at least not as efficiently, without some of the models offered by literature.

It needs to be added here that in the nineteenth century, "literature...