Canadian Slavonic Papers

Personality and Place in Russian History: Essays in Memory of Lindsey Hughes by SimonDixonReview by: Alexander M. MartinCanadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol. 53, No. 2/4 (June-Sept.-Dec.2011), pp. 594-595Published by: Canadian Association of SlavistsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41708371 .

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594 Book Reviews / Comptes rendus

What is unquestionably demonstrated is that nationality gradually became an essential concern for Russian and Czech writers and critics, it did so at a relatively early date, and the shift toward national identity in literature began to necessitate a rethinking of the national audience, which in turn helped encourage a rethinking of the nation itself. At a minimum, then, this study makes an excellent starting point from which to ask more direct questions about the relative importance of literature in the process of national identity construction.

Creating the Nation should also play a role in relocating Eastern European literature closer to the centre of European and global literary studies. The book's emphasis on the significance of translation and the creation of literary languages has remarkable resonance with post-colonial efforts to develop new literary traditions in languages that have yet to develop large bodies of work. Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o's recent adoption of Kikuyu over English recalls the defiant struggle of certain Czech writers around the turn of the 19th century to transform Czech into a language of literature that had the capacity to outshine German. In showing, moreover, how the move to a national literature, both in Russian and Czech, encouraged a rethinking of the national audience, Cooper raises new questions about issues in education and politics. The implication of literary affairs in other spheres of interest sets the stage for innovative commentary on such historical figures as Sergei Uvarov and Pavel Pestel, whose relationships to literature are rarely discussed. At these points, Cooper's monograph seems to be laying the groundwork for the kind of study that would situate the role of literature within the context of Russian and Czech national identity construction. For its thorough discussion of the development of nationality in literature, as well as its clear demonstration that this process was critically important, Creating the Nation , at once painstakingly comparative and philosophically searching, contributes broadly to the field of Slavic Studies.

Christopher Ely, Florida Atlantic University

Simon Dixon, ed. Personality and Place in Russian History: Essays in Memory of Lindsey Hughes. London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2010. 435 pp. Index. $20.00, paper.

Lindsey Hughes, who died in 2007 in the prime of life and at the peak of her career, was a highly regarded historian of 1 7th- 1 8th century Russia and a leader among a close-knit community of scholars. The volume under review represents those colleagues' tribute to her memory. "Personality and place" may seem a nebulous theme for a sprawling collection of nineteen essays that range from the 16th to the early 20th century, but the contributors, inspired by the centrality of these concepts in Hughes's own work, manage to use "personality" and "place" to give coherence to what are otherwise quite disparate topics.

Simon Dixon opens the volume with an essay on Hughes herself. He locates her in the time and place that formed her, the England of the 1950s-1970s, and explains how her agenda as a researcher developed out of an early interest in architectural history and biography, i.e., "places" and the "personalities" that inhabited them. This focus on people situated in physical spaces provides the framework for the essays in the volume.

The personalities and places that the authors discuss range from the symbolic to the concrete. On the symbolic side, three chapters study cultural representations: Sergei Bogatyrev's "personalities" are images of Ivan the Terrible and his heir Fedor Ivanovich that adorned early modern artillery; Simon Franklin's "place" is the image representing

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Book Reviews / Comptes rendus 595

Moscow, Russia, and all of divine creation on the frontispiece of the 1663 Moscow Bible; and Robin Aizlewood approaches "place" through the notion of disorientation in Russian literature. At the spectrum's opposite end, focusing entirely on concrete places, three chapters are histories of buildings: Anthony Cross writes about the British embassy in St. Petersburg; Roger Bartlett, on the imperial estate at Ropsha; and a previously unpublished chapter by Lindsey Hughes discusses the Cathedral of SS. Peter and Paul in the Peter-Paul Fortress. In these texts, the buildings themselves - their architectural and artistic features, the events that transpired in them, their evolving fate over the century - occupy centre stage.

In other essays, spaces are important for the social dynamics they facilitate. Maria di Salvo revisits the history of Moscow's "German Quarter" to explore, on the basis of rarely used sources, the role that the Italian diaspora played among the larger foreign community. Paul Keenan uses the mid- 18th century development of St. Petersburg's Summer Gardens - who was admitted, under what conditions, for what purposes - as a window onto the history of upper-class sociability. Wendy Rosslyn looks at the travels of Russian noblewomen to understand how their spatial location affected their social interactions and sense of self. Finally, Robert Service analyzes the experience of Marxist émigrés among the Russian diaspora in pre- 1917 London: they kept aloof from local society (including the British Marxists) and treated London purely as a place to bide their time while awaiting the revolution in Russia, thereby missing a chance to gain first-hand knowledge of the capitalist order that loomed so large in their political theories.

"Personality" and "place" are in perfect balance in the contributions by David Moon and Peter Waldron on Russians' encounter with their empire. Moon's theme is the geographic expeditions organized by the Academy of Sciences in the 1 8th century, and how academicians reared in Central or Northern Europe responded to the exotic natural environment of the steppe. Waldron writes about the 19th-century explorer Nikolai Przheval'skii, who escaped the drudgery of a mediocre provincial military career by making himself both a leading Asian explorer and Russia's top spokesman for imperialism in Asia.

Last but not least, a quartet of essays gives centre stage to personality, albeit one grounded in a particular place: Gary Marker's study of the opposing interpretations of Mazepa given by two influential fellow Ukrainians, Feofan Prokopových and the Cossack Hetmán Pylyp Orlyk; Elise Wirtschafter' s essay on the role of Father Platon (Levshin) at the court of Catherine II as a representative of a distinctively Russian religious Enlightenment; Patrick O'Meara's study of General Pavel Kiselev in the early 1820s, when he was stationed in Tul'chin and therefore in perilously close contact with the leaders of the Decembrist Southern Society; and Simon Dixon's essay on the career of the rabble-rousing cleric Father Iliodor in early 20th-century Tsaritsyn.

The personalities represented here are mostly nobles, clerics, and Western expatriates, and the places are ones that such people would have frequented. One could imagine other kinds of "personalities" and "places" that would also deserve study. A tilt toward the elites, while easily explained by the nature of the available sources, provides a lopsided view of history. One hopes that future historians will draw inspiration from the excellent scholarship in this volume and broaden our knowledge to include other personalities and places of which we as yet know little.

Alexander M. Martin, University of Notre Dame

Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. LUI, Nos. 2-3^, June-September-December 201 1 / juin-septembre-décembre 201 1

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