- History, Memory, and the Modernization of 19th-Century Urban Russia
At some point during the middle third of the 19th century, Russia was suddenly full of modern, middle-class Europeans: readers, shoppers, civic activists, urban flâneurs. We know their faces from paintings and photographs and their voices from memoirs and fiction. So deeply did these sons and daughters of merchants, clerics, and other "commoners" absorb the culture of modernity that in the following century, even the overthrow of two modernizing regimes, tsarist and communist, could not reverse the triumph of Western modernity itself—men kept shaving, girls still went to school, kaftans did not make a comeback, science and art and consumerism carried on as before. Yet we know little about this cultural process, both because many of those same modern Russians embraced the preposterous notion that Western middle-class attitudes were somehow alien to their national character, and because the politics of the 20th century focused attention on what made Russia different.
Two important weaknesses in our knowledge of Russian history are therefore how common Russians in the 19th century became modern middle-class Europeans, and why this has been so widely ignored. To plagiarize the titles of two canonical texts on modernity and nationalism, we might call this process "Provincials into (Modern) Russians" and "the invention of (Slavophile) tradition."
These themes—modernization and memory—are the focus of the books under discussion in this review. Aleksandr Kamenskii and Aleksandr Kupriianov describe pre-reform provincial towns as the crucibles of Russia's cultural modernization. Susanne Schattenberg examines a specific subgroup of pre-reform society, the provincial bureaucracy, as it confronted the dilemmas of modernity. Vladimir Lapin explores the modernization of the urban environment and how it affected Russians' sensory perception of the world around them. Alison K. Smith and the team of authors assembled by Georges Nivat take on the construction of identity and memory. Taken together, these books promise to shed new light on how Russians became modern middle-class Europeans and why this development has received so little attention.
Before discussing the books in greater detail, however, we should consider the historiographical problem that they address.
Danger and Opportunity
Russian elite culture long ignored Russia's urban realities. Russians knew Hogarth's gritty images of London, yet their own first real cityscape artist, Fedor Alekseev, preferred to paint St. Petersburg around 1800 to look like the idealized Venice that Canaletto had painted for British tourists, complete [End Page 838] with radiant Mediterranean sunshine.1 Literature was similar. Abroad, the thousand-plus vignettes that composed Louis-Sébastien Mercier's Le tableau de Paris (1781-88) made Mercier, as Jeremy D. Popkin points out, "the spiritual ancestor of nineteenth-century campaigners for urban improvement," "the inventor of a new kind of urban journalism, known in France as the feuilleton," a forerunner of Balzac, and the original flâneur who roamed the city in search of new impressions.2 Nikolai Karamzin...