Filling the Gap between Radishchev and the Decembrists

Slavic Review ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Raeff

In general histories of Russian social and philosophical thought we usually find a gap between 1790 (publication of Radishchev's Journey) and 1815 (the establishment of the first secret societies by the future Decembrists). This quarter of a century could boast neither a prominent personality nor a cause cèlèbre of government persecution. True enough, there was Karamzin and his Zapiska o drevnei i novoi Rossii (Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia); but the tract remained long unknown, and its author is usually dismissed as a lone figure whose impact on the development of the ideologies that were to matter was, at best, peripheral. General histories of literature treat this period primarily in terms of the philological debate between Karamzin and Shishkov and as prologue to Romanticism. Thus, in the one case, the period is described exclusively in terms of Russia's literary history, which is not very satisfactory to the student of social and political ideas; for literature—even as engagé a literature as was Russia's in the nineteenth century—is hardly an adequate source or form of ideology. In the other case, Radishchev must perforce be viewed as an isolated figure, a maverick, without either followers or immediate influence. Furthermore, the obvious implication is that there were no direct links between the Decembrists and eighteenth-century Russian ideas, so that the young rebels of 1825 must have been influenced exclusively by their experiences with the life and thought of Western Europe.On the strength of the testimony of all contemporaries, however, the first decade of the nineteenth century was a period of great intellectual ferment, of exhilarating optimism about Russia's prospects for “modernization” (to use a fashionable term). Compared with the last years of Catherine II and with the reign of Paul, these decades also offered greater freedom, more opportunities for the expression of ideas and hopes. Could indeed the outrage and disillusionment at Alexander's so-called reactionary stance after 1815 be understood if it were not for the fact that his reign had opened on such a strong note of optimism and vitality?

2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (S24) ◽  
pp. 93-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rossana Barragán Romano

AbstractLabour relations in the silver mines of Potosí are almost synonymous with the mita, a system of unfree work that lasted from the end of the sixteenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, behind this continuity there were important changes, but also other forms of work, both free and self-employed. The analysis here is focused on how the “polity” contributed to shape labour relations, especially from the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century. This article scrutinizes the labour policies of the Spanish monarchy on the one hand, which favoured certain economic sectors and regions to ensure revenue, and on the other the initiatives both of mine entrepreneurs and workers – unfree, free, and self-employed – who all contributed to changing the system of labour.


2014 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 115-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Ottner

During the nineteenth century, history developed into an independent discipline with important cultural and intellectual functions in both the academic world, as well as in society at large. Specific circumstances contributed to the rise in importance of this discipline: On the one hand, the emergence of an educated bourgeoisie and rising nationalist movements influenced the study of history; whereas on the other hand, public demands for assurances of continuity, as well as conservative efforts for restoration, also played an important role in history's growth in importance. Historicism, which began to establish itself in late-eighteenth-century Germany, had its forerunners in research approaches that grew out of the late Enlightenment. Concepts of cultural science [Kulturwissenschaft] developed by scholars of the late Enlightenment paved the way for the rise of the historical discipline during the first half of the nineteenth century.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-120
Author(s):  
Dmitry Bulgakovsky ◽  
Nick Mayhew

Abstract Xenia the Servant of God, or Andrey Fyodorovich the Holy Fool is a hagiography written by Russian Orthodox priest and publicist Dmitry Bulgakovsy (1843–ca. 1918). Published in Russia in 1890, it is one of the first full accounts of the life of a saint variably referred to by two names: one feminine, Xenia, and the other masculine, Andrey. The saint ostensibly lived in St. Petersburg in the eighteenth century. Identified female at birth and named Xenia, after the death of their husband Andrey, at the age of twenty-six the saint took on the identity of their deceased husband. The saint is popular in Russia today, and stories about their life are disseminated widely. Although they were canonized in 1988 as St. Xenia and are now venerated as a holy woman, accounts of their life always include the story of their gender transformation. In twenty-first-century narratives, this episode tends to be glossed over briefly as proof of the saint's extraordinary love for their husband, serving to embellish their role as a devoted wife. However, in the original nineteenth-century stories of the saint's life—such as the one translated below—there is greater ambiguity in the depiction of their gender.


2018 ◽  
pp. 90-111
Author(s):  
Şevket Pamuk

This chapter discusses the Ottoman reforms as well as the efforts to finance them. The Ottoman government, faced with the challenges from provincial notables and independence movements that were gaining momentum in the Balkans, on the one hand, and the growing military and economic power of Western Europe, on the other, began to implement a series of reforms in the early decades of the nineteenth century. These reforms and the opening of the economy began to transform the political and economic institutions very rapidly. The chapter shows the social and economic roots of modern Turkey thus need to be sought, first and foremost, in the changes that took place during the nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
Fiona Price

The historical novel has often been defined in the terms set by Walter Scott’s fiction, as a reflection on a clear break or change between past and present. Returning to the range of historical fiction written before Scott, Reinventing Liberty explores this often neglected and misunderstood genre by reconstructing how conservatives and radicals fought through the medium of the historical past over the future of Britain. Aware of the events of the Civil War and 1688, witness to the American and French Revolutions, Scott’s precursors realized the dangers of absolutism, on the one hand, and political breakage, on the other. Interrogating the impact of commercial modernity, the works considered here do not adopt the familiar nineteenth-century Whig narrative of history as progress but instead imagine and reimagine the possibilities of transition. As such, they lay the groundwork for the British myth of political gradualism, while problematizing the rise of capital.


Author(s):  
Floris Verhaart

The final chapter summarizes the findings of the preceding chapters and offers an epilogue on how the tension between different approaches to classical literature has parallels in the nineteenth century. It is argued that the debates described in the monograph between the ‘Dutch School’ (philologia) focusing on textual problems and the ‘French School’ (philosophia) focusing on moral issues had no clear winners. Rather they led, on the one hand, to a more technical and professional approach to the study of ancient texts and, on the other hand, to the continued popularity of classical ideas and models of moral virtue in the eighteenth century thanks to more accessible works of ‘popular’ scholarship.


Der Islam ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 92 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Reilly

AbstractLate-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources from the Homs and Hama region in Ottoman Syria present contrasting portrayals of Bedouins. Taken together, these sources offer conflicting perspectives with respect to relationships between peoples of the towns and the steppe. On the one hand, literary sources typically portray Bedouins as antitheses of urban life, as savage wanderers who lived outside the norms of propriety and who collectively posed a threat to the wellbeing and property of settled people and of travelers. But on the other hand, legal sources portray Bedouins variously as targets of exploitation or taxation by urban-based governments; or as partners with urban people in contractual undertakings; or as imperial subjects who, like any others, would seek justice in the urban Sharīʿa courts. The article explores these differing characterizations, and seeks to explain the multifarious realities that different sources convey. It concludes by suggesting that relationships between town and steppe were on their way to becoming more institutionalized in the last years of the eighteenth century. This development foreshadowed documented nineteenth-century trends in which urban civil norms and institutions became noticeable in the lives of Bedouins who lived in proximity to towns and urban centers.


1988 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Yeo

The ArgumentFocusing on the celebrations of Newton and his work, this article investigates the use of the concept of genius and its connection with debates on the methodology of science and the morality of great discoverers. During the period studied, two areas of tension developed. Firstly, eighteenth-century ideas about the relationship between genius and method were challenged by the notion of scientific genius as transcending specifiable rules of method. Secondly, assumptions about the nexus between intellectual and moral virtue were threatened by the emerging conception of genius as marked by an extraordinary personality – on the one hand capable of breaking with established methods to achieve great discoveries, on the other, likely to transgress moral and social conventions. The assesments of Newton by nineteenth-century scientists such as Brewster, Whewell, and De Morgan were informed by these tensions.


2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sunil Sharma

AbstractThe eighteenth century witnessed an interest in Persian women poets and attempts were made by writers of tazkeras to create a female canon of poets. The cultural shift in the Iranian-Indian interface at this time had a direct effect on the writing of Persian literary history that, on the one hand, resulted in the desire to maintain a universal vision regarding the Persianate literary past, exemplified by such writers as Vāleh Dāghestāni in Riāz al-sho' arā', and on the other hand, witnessed the increasingly popular move towards a more local and parochial version of the achievements of poets, as seen in Āzar Bēgdeli's Ātashkada and other writers of biographical dictionaries. The tri-furcation of the literary tradition (Iran, Turan [Transoxiana], India) complicated the way the memory of women poets would be accommodated and tazkera writers were often unencumbered by issues of nationalism and linguistic purity on this subject. However, ultimately the project of canonization of classical Persian women poets was a failure by becoming all inclusive.


Authorship ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jodi L. Wyett

This essay argues that Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote or, The Adventures of Arabella (1752) served as a fulcrum in eighteenth-century literary history by providing a figuration of the female quixote for subsequent women novelists who were keen to court absorbed readers on the one hand while countering stereotypes about women's critical failings on the other. The figure of the female quixote proves to be a significant mark of literary professionalism by reifying the spectre of the professional writer’s need for absorbed readers and dramatizing the occasion by which the woman writer demonstrates her own authority, paradoxically allowing both woman novel reader and woman novel writer to lay claim to intellectual authority. Ultimately, the main character Arabella's fictional model potentially echoes more actual eighteenth-century women’s experiences than her adventures at first suggest: the female quixote emerges as less a social outcast or a freak than a figure for women’s commonality, especially their intellectual and ethical ambitions in a world inimical to their interests.


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