Peter the Great in the Memoirs of Marquis de Dangeau and Duc de Saint-Simon

2021 ◽  
pp. 105-115
Author(s):  
Valery P. Trykov ◽  

The article for the first time compares the image of Peter the Great in the memoirs of two contemporary French writers Philippe de Courcillon, Marquis de Dangeau (1638‒1720), and Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon (1675–1755). Both Saint- Simon’s continuity in relation to Dangeau’s memoirs and the methods and techniques of their original literary processing are shown. The influence of the writers’ world outlooks and their political views on their interpretations of the figure of Peter the Great is revealed. For Dangeau, Peter the Great was a “curious case”, while for Saint-Simon he was the model of an enlightened monarch, a reigning ascetic striving for knowledge and transformation of his state. In this capacity, Peter the Great is opposed to the depraved and pleasure-seeking French court of the era of the Regency. It has been proved that Saint-Simon stood at the origins of “Peter’s myth” in France. The differences in the poetics of the memoirs of Dangeau and Saint-Simon have been revealed. Dangeau’s laconic and fact-based style emphasizes the mastery of the psychological portrait and the breadth of generalizations of the moralist and thinker Saint-Simon.

2014 ◽  
Vol 178 (3) ◽  
pp. 148-156
Author(s):  
Vyacheslav A. Dubina ◽  
Vladimir V. Plotnikov ◽  
Nina S. Kot

Dynamics of the sea ice cover in Peter the Great Bay is considered, for the first time for its whole area, on the base of satellite images received in 2004-2011 from the spectroradiometers MODIS mounted on the satellites Terra and Aqua. High spatial resolution maps of the ice drift are constructed for various wind conditions. Mean values of the drift velocity and wind coefficient are calculated for four parts of the Bay. In usual conditions of winter monsoon, the ice in the central part of Peter the Great Bay drifts southward with the velocity 0.5-0.6 m/s with deviation from the wind direction about 40° to the right; the ice at the western coast drifts along the island chain with the velocity 0.1-0.4 m/s under wind of any direction in the quadrant from northwest to northeast.


Author(s):  
O.L. Smirnova ◽  
◽  
E.A. Bessonova ◽  
T.A. Emelyanova ◽  
◽  
...  

The results of the biostratigraphic study based on the radiolarian analysis of the rhythmically layered terrigenous deposits from the Islands of the Rimsky-Korsakov Archipelago (Peter the Great Bay, Japan Sea) have been presented. These deposits are most similar to the medium-grained turbidites. For the first time the distribution and stratigraphic division of the boundary sediments of the upper Triassic and lower Jurassic separated by a marking layer were substantiated in the research area. On the basis of comparisons with isochronous zonal units of the Pacific and Tethyan areas in the upper Triassic sediments of the studied sections, layers with Globolaxtorum tozeri (upper Rhaetian) were established, and in the lower Jurassic zone Pantanellium tanuense Zone (Hettangian) was traced and layers with Parahsuum simplum (Sinemurian – Pliensbachian) were established.


2020 ◽  
pp. 247-270
Author(s):  
Brian Holden Reid

This chapter details how the year 1864 allowed William T. Sherman to operate for the first time not as a subordinate commander but as director of a series of armies in the field. His contribution to overall Union strategy would be significant and thus he began to exercise command at the level military analysts currently refer to as the operational level of war. Such a level links tactics and methods of fighting with strategy, in the overall scheme. It defines the manner in which armies organize in discrete campaigns and seek to fulfill the object of strategy by winning victories. Sherman’s performance overall needs to be considered by taking all aspects into account. As he began to work at the higher levels of the military art, he began to change the way in which people think and talk about war, and he propounded an individual philosophy of war. The higher he progressed, the more Sherman could not avoid confronting the harsh realities of political life, for his campaigns increasingly had an impact not just on American political discourse but indeed in 1864 on the outcome of the presidential election. Sherman expressed clear-cut political views and expounded them perhaps too forcefully. This complex mix worked as a catalyst in developing his ideas about war and his ability to put them into practice.


Author(s):  
V. V. Dudin

With the dawn of printed press on the shores of the Arabic speaking world, the methods of impacting an individual’s cognition have been changed for the first time in many centuries. The rise of political and socio-political press in the region overall and in Egypt in particular was likely a by-product of Western intervention in the region, more specifically, Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaign resulting in his temporary control of Egypt. It too was Napoleon who created the first publishing houses in Egypt and it was his political views that were being spread through them. Expanding in detail on multiple sources to delve into the relevant periods, we have worked through numerous newspapers and publishers of socio-political articles in the Middle East and have noticed that Egyptian newspapers have managed to be representative of the Arab speaking printed press in the region. Egyptian editori- als have showcased the forefront of suggestive means with the purpose of leaving an imprint on the reader’s cognition, despite the fact that Egypt was not the first nation with a printed press capable of printing in Arabic. In this study we utilise quotes and examples from a range of socio-political press articles, dated as far back as 1967, as we provide examples backing our hypotheses for the changes in suggestive tactics used by the authors and editorials in their relevant periods. However, our goal in this article was not to focus on the suggestive means themselves in depth, but to rather provide evi- dence pointing to the fact that these suggestive methods have in fact undergone a process of evolution in their own right, changing with time and thus becoming more advanced and author-specific in the process. The possibility to spread a specific subjective position of an author in society without a need for speeches and the accompanying crowds became one of the defining factors to impact and shape the Arab speaking society since the XIX century. The efficacy of suggestive means in printed media has remained in present days with further evolution imminent due to the digitalisation of information, thus making suggestibility a more important aspect of printed press to explore than ever before.


2021 ◽  
pp. 223-234
Author(s):  
Maria Di Salvo

In the manuscript Architektura cyvilnaja (written in Venice in 1699), “Gasparo Vecchia” is mentioned by the Russian prince G.F. Dolgorukov as the author of a selection of Palladio’s and other famous architects’ texts, which were the sources Dolgorukov drew upon when writing his work. To my knowledge, Gasparo (Della) Vecchia has neither so far been properly identified nor his role studied in detail; in this paper, I try to shed some light on his relationship with Dolgorukov’s text by analysing a manuscript penned by the Italian artist and entitled Breve trattato d’architettura civile, here investigated for the first time. I shall argue that in Venice Della Vecchia continued to be involved with Russians for some time: a letter dated 1715 and addressed to Peter the Great contains his proposal for a garden with didactic ends, thereby demonstrating that Della Vecchia was fully aware of the tsar’s interests and goals.


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (8) ◽  
pp. 57-78
Author(s):  
Dmitry A. Redin

For the first time in historiographe the article reconstructs the personal history of Kirill Alekseevich Naryshkin. This research is based on the personal and private letters of Naryshkin to the Tsar and Prince Alexander Menshikov. The former are extracted from various documentary collections, first of all, “Letters and Papers of Peter the Great”, the latter are found by the author in the Russian Archive of Ancient Acts and have not been studied before. The reconstruction is focused on the history of the career that was built by K. A. Naryshkin during the first one and a half decades of the 18th century. He successfully and efficiently ruled over the northwestern counties of Russia, solving the difficult tasks of endowing the Russian army, reorganizing garrison regiments, mapping and supervising fortifications on the adjoining lands of Ingria and eastern Estonia as a chief commandant (ober-komendant). However, after being appointed to the post of Moscow governor in 1716, the career of Naryshkin collapsed. Problems at work, tensions with the Senate, harassment by investigative and administrative authorities coincided with a personal drama – the death of his wife and serious property losses. The author both in the context of the general administrative situation of the era, and in line with the then established system of informal ties surrounded by Tsar Peter analyzes the reasons for the collapse of a capable and energetic manager.


Author(s):  
Olga A. Krasheninnikova ◽  

This article analyzes for the first time the full text of objection of Theophan Prokopovich (1681–1736) to the work of Markell Radyshevskiy (†1742) on monasticism ([Objection to The announcement of monasticism], 1730), and explains the circumstances and motives for its creation. In his polemical treatise of 1734, Theophan Prokopovich polemicises with the most important provisions of Markell Radyshevskiy’s work, defending the views of Peter’s companions on monasticism and the Church. In his rebuttal, Theophan Prokopovich stands as a staunch supporter of Peter I and his Church reform, a supporter of unlimited autocratic power and unconditional subordination of the Church to the head of state. He polemicises with important arguments of Markell Radyshevskiy’s work, defending all the main provisions of Peter’s 1724 decree on monasticism. The first full publication of Theophan Prokopovich’s objection will give a clear idea of the nature of the ideological and religious disputes of Peter’s time, the essence and intensity of the controversy between Church reformers and conservatives in the era of formation of the Russian state in the 18th century.


Author(s):  
Andrzej Walicki

‘The Russian Idea’ is a term used by Russian thinkers to define specific features of Russian culture, the spiritual make-up of the Russian nation, the meaning of Russian history and, as a rule (although not always), Russia’s unique mission in the universal history of humanity. The term was introduced for the first time in 1861 by Dostoevskii, for whom the essence of the Russian Idea was the ‘universal humanity’ (or ‘all-humanity’) of the Russian spirit. At the same time however, Dostoevskii linked the Russian Idea with Russian imperial messianism. Thus, the notion of the Russian Idea included from its beginning a characteristic tension between striving for universalism and nationalist self-assertion.. The first philosopher to devote a special separate work to the Russian Idea (l’Idée russe, Paris, 1888) was Vladimir Solov’ëv, for whom the national idea was ‘not what a given nation thinks about itself in time, but what God thinks about it in eternity’. He was influenced by Dostoevskii but, challenging Russian nationalists, put much greater emphasis on universalism, stressing that the peculiar greatness of the Russians consisted in their capacity for ‘self-renunciation’. The first case of this self-renunciation was the so-called ‘calling of the Varangians’, that is, the voluntary acceptance of foreign rule; the second was the reforms of Peter the Great: rejection of native traditions for the sake of universal progress. Now the Russian nation should commit itself to the third, most important act of self-renunciation: to submit itself to the authority of the pope, restoring thereby the unity of the Universal Church and bringing about the reconciliation between East and West. But this act of humility was seen by Solov’ëv as a precondition from the fulfilment of Russia’s great mission of creating the universal, freely theocratic Christian Empire. Solov’ëv invoked in this connection the monk Philotheus’ idea of ‘Moscow as the Third Rome’ but reversed its meaning by putting emphasis on symbolic Rome, that is, not on national isolationism and keeping intact the purity of the Orthodox faith, but on ecumenical universalism and the messianic task of the Christian transformation of the world. Owing to Solov’ëv, the term ‘Russian Idea’ came to be applied retrospectively, as a designation of a set of problems characteristic for Russian philosophical discussions about the essence of ‘Russianness’. Most historians agree that these problems were formulated under the reign of Nicholas I and that the first thinker who posed them forcefully was Pëtr Chaadaev.


2018 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 190-220
Author(s):  
Brynn Shiovitz

It is 7 November 1904, 7:55 p.m. New York City theatregoers anxiously await the opening of George M. Cohan's newest production, Little Johnny Jones. The house is just about filled, but the well-dressed ushers hustle a few stragglers to their seats. Some of the theatre's usual patrons have been held up late at work, while others are too consumed by Clifford Berryman's political cartoons in the Washington Star to attend the performance. This particular Monday evening marks an important moment for America: polls for the thirtieth presidential election will be opening in fewer than twelve hours. Theodore Roosevelt represents the Republican Party, and Alton B. Parker heads the Democratic ticket. Although results will not be known for sure until the close of the 8 November election, Roosevelt's recent success in office upon the assassination of William McKinley gives him a political boost. New York City's predominantly Republican values leave little doubt about which name a majority of tonight's audience will be checking off on the ballot come morning; Roosevelt has carried every region but the South in his campaigning efforts thus far. Nonetheless, Broadway occasionally attracts a few guests from the slightly less liberal states of Maryland and Pennsylvania, and this evening's house is no different; the Liberty Theatre is filled with men of opposing political views. A nervous excitement fills the room; a combination of political gossip, predictions about how Cohan's first Broadway musical will compare to his earlier comedic works and vaudeville skits, and occasional gasps and awestruck sighs from spectators who are seeing the inside of the Liberty Theatre for the first time since its very recent grand opening at 234 West 42nd Street. The twenty-thousand-square-foot theatre, with its dramatic stage, extensive balconies, and striking cathedrallike ceilings is the perfect home for the unfolding of Broadway, a theatrical form and style that America will come to call its own. As the house lights dim and the violins hum a piercing A note, other members of the orchestra slowly begin tuning their individual instruments. As the oboists finish adjusting their pitch, the conductor taps his music stand: musicians tilt their gaze to the front of the pit, audience members sink into the velvet of their plush seats and begin to quiet their chatter. Blackout.


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