The New Muscovite Cultural History: A Collection in Honor of Daniel B. Rowland

The Use and Abuse of Dominant Paradigms in Muscovite Cultural Studies

The New Muscovite Cultural History: A Collection in Honor of Daniel B. Rowland. Valerie Kivelson, Karen Petrone, Nancy Shields Kollmann, and Michael S. Flier, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2009, 11–18. The Use and Abuse of Dominant Paradigms in Muscovite Cultural Studies∗ Since its inception, the field of Russian Studies has inclined toward grand explanatory models.1 Orthodoxy, the Mongol Yoke, geographic determinism, or the swaddling thesis have all had their day in the sun. The Marxist-Leninist theory of history offers the most obvious of these meta-explanations for the contours of Russian history, but the tendency to endorse all-encompassing explanatory systems reaches far back in Russian history. Already in early modern times, Western travelers labeled Muscovy a despotism or a tyrannical monarchy, and the label has demonstrated remarkable durability, recycling again and again, working overtime to explain the operation of the Muscovite, Imperial, Soviet, and even post-Soviet state. In the first half of the 19th century , the Slavophiles constructed a counter-narrative to challenge the despotic one. This model, which emphasized the harmonious cohesion of the Russian people, united in humble piety with their Orthodox tsar, also continues to attract adherents to this day. At the dawn of the 21st century, an age of postpost -modernity and post-deconstructionism, most scholars tend to view grand narratives with suspicion and are reluctant to replace old shibboleths with new ones. Yet, much to the surprise of the participants, two days of intensive interchange among the group gathered to celebrate the contributions of Daniel Rowland to Muscovite Studies indicated the glimmerings of a new consensus, but a consensus not of the grand narrative type; rather it pointed to the urgency of addressing a new set of questions. Along with counterparts in other fields of history and cultural studies, many of us in Muscovite Studies have seen our scholarly role as fighting the ∗ This introduction is the product of the collective ruminations of the participants at the Muscovite Cultural History Symposium in Honor of Daniel Rowland, held at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, May 16–17, 2008. Many of the observations and even precise wording are taken from comments made by the participants, whose contributions we gratefully acknowledge here: Rodney Bohac, Nikolaos Chrissidis, Robert O. Crummey, David Goldfrank, Charles Halperin, Priscilla Hunt, John LeDonne, Eve Levin, Russell Martin, Hugh Olmsted, Donald Ostrowski, Daniel Rowland, Jennifer Spock, Marina Swoboda, and Isolde Thyrêt. 1 Marc Raeff, “Toward a New Paradigm?” in Historiography of Imperial Russia, ed. Thomas Sanders (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 481–86; Manfred Hildemeier, “Russian History at a Turning Point: Notes from a Benevolent Distance,” in ibid., 487– 502. 12 VALERIE KIVELSON, KAREN PETRONE, NANCY SHIELDS KOLLMANN, MICHAEL S. FLIER good fight against old-fashioned models of either despotic absolutism or harmonious Orthodox piety. Now, confident in our cognizance of the pitfalls of the extremes, we see a shift of focus toward the as-yet ill-defined areas that lie between those flattened caricatures, and toward the outline of a new, positive model to replace the fallen idols, one more sensitive to contextual variation and based on the evidence of the sources rather than on grand schemas or ideas about national character. Approaching this difficult task from a variety of angles, our individual efforts combined over the course of the workshop to outline the beginnings of a new way to understand Muscovy without falling into the traps of the constraining binaries of earlier models. Our findings leaned perhaps slightly more toward the consensual, harmonious end of the earlier polarities than toward the despotic end, dangerously close to the rosy vision of the Slavophiles in the opinion of some of our contributors. We did indeed find a striking degree of homogeneity in what we might call a Muscovite cultural paradigm, not just at the apex of society but running all the way through. We noted a powerful diffusion of elements of high religious culture down the political and social ladder, and we found that this moral system provided a vocabulary and set of standards that the tsar’s subjects could and did invoke in their interactions with authorities, public or private. To what degree the shared moral framework shaped people’s lives remains less clear, as we will discuss below. This picture of a well-integrated, homogeneous Muscovite culture, as one of our participants noted, allows us to “deconstruct the deconstructionist” approach to Muscovy by restoring a vision of a substantially integrated (rather than fundamentally fragmented and...