From the EditorsPremodern Lessons for Modern Historians
It is no secret that most Western historians of Russia study the period after 1700, indeed after the Great Reforms. Only a brave and resourceful minority focuses on the Muscovite era, and those who venture even farther back are truly few and far between. This is not healthy for our profession. The modernist bias harms efforts to conceptualize the wider sweep of Russian history in both teaching and research by granting unnaturally long life to questionable myths about the medieval and Muscovite legacy—hence, for example, the tendency to overrate the import of the idea of Moscow as the "Third Rome." It also hurts our students by leaving them, and us, at the mercy of antiquated scholarship. Before Chester S. L. Dunning's recent book,1 the standard text on the Time of Troubles was Platonov's, first published in 1923.2 Who today would teach the history of, say, the English Civil War from textbooks more than 80 years old? Some of the contributors to the present issue of Kritika show the modernists among us a further important reason why we would benefit from looking outside our own chronological bailiwick: the problem of what to do with sources.
While source criticism has been with us at least since Ranke's day, several more recent developments have increased its significance: the broader definition of what constitutes a source that accompanied the emergence of social and cultural history; the closer attention to "texts" that followed the rise of "theory"; the Internet; and, in our field, the post-communist "archival revolution." The challenge many of us face in studying the more modern periods is how to sift through, and make sense of, an ever-expanding mass of [End Page 711] evidentiary material. Nor does it make life easier when editors (including this very column a few months ago) ask authors to provide more details about their archival sources even while publishers insist on tighter word limits for manuscripts.3 On the bright side, of course, the embarrassment of riches is such that well-crafted research projects are rarely threatened by a lack of sources; the challenge is instead to design projects that are broad enough to command interest but do not trigger a tsunami of unmanageable documentation. This rapport with the sources shapes our own perception of how we in the present relate to the past, and it is what we communicate to our readers and students as well.
By contrast, as the contributors to this issue remind us, scholars of pre-Petrine Russia face a rather different situation. Edward L. Keenan and Norman Ingham offer conflicting reviews of Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Zimin's book disputing the authenticity of Slovo o Polku Igoreve [the Igor´ Tale], regarded by many as a foundational text of medieval Russian literature. Keenan, of course, has made something of a career out of challenging key pre-Petrine Russian sources with his own books on the Slovo and on the correspondence between Ivan the Terrible and Prince Andrei Kurbskii.4 The deeper Keenan and Ingham (and Zimin) burrow into the complexities and ambiguities of the Slovo's obscure history, the more they leave the non-medievalist reader with an uncomfortable sense of doubt about whether we can know much of anything at all about Kievan Rus´. Nor are things much better as late as the 16th century. In a review essay last year, Carolyn Pouncy noted that historians writing broad, synthetic texts about Ivan the Terrible and his era continue to read key sources as having unambiguous meanings that were first attributed to them in the 19th century, even though more recent studies have raised considerable doubts about the dating, authorship, and other essential aspects of these same texts. From this, she concluded, "As historians, we need to recognize that much of the received wisdom regarding pre-Petrine history is no more than someone's speculation, repeated until it has acquired the aura of truth."5 This phenomenon rarely occurs in the work of modernists, whom the abundance of documentation has accustomed to expecting that disputes about sources—for example, about the authenticity of Peter the Great's alleged testament—can usually be resolved through further research in other sources.6 [End Page 712]
The source problems are most striking in the case of the social and cultural history of early Russia. Carsten Goehrke has recently published a three-volume Alltagsgeschichte of the entire millennium from Iaroslav to Yeltsin that is reviewed in this issue by Gregory Freeze. In his review, Freeze notes two telling peculiarities of Goehrke's method. On the one hand, while Goehrke's work (especially on the more recent periods) is informed by a massive body of published literature, it is unfortunate that he did not in addition use the huge corpus of archival materials. On the other hand, in the chapters on the early periods, Goehrke is reduced to inventing fictional stories because the original sources are so woefully deficient. One important insight to be gained from the pre-Petrine scholarship thus concerns the sheer uncertainty of the sources and the need to keep revisiting what we think we know and acknowledge how much we do not know. The other insight involves appreciating the massive erudition—the broad linguistic skills, the knowledge of art history and material culture, the study of archaeology, numismatics, vexillology, sigillography, heraldry, and so forth—that a creative historian can deploy to squeeze the most out of even limited sources. Charles Halperin reminds us of these possibilities in this issue in his review of books by Nadezhda Soboleva and Valerie Kivelson that explore the use of state symbols and maps as sources for pre-Petrine history. To modernists, who sometimes run the risk of linguistic and methodological narrowness as well as chronological overspecialization, such breadth of knowledge and method can represent an inspirational scholarly alternative.
But perhaps the most important thing to be learned from a dialogue between scholars of different periods—and what we need to share with our students and the wider public alike—is that not all "history" is the same. We are trained by modern life to ask certain questions about the world, including the world of the past. As we delve more deeply into that past, however, the relevance of those questions diminishes. To insist that the scanty vestiges of a remote past answer our modern queries is sometimes to demand the impossible; and in our resulting frustration, we may be tempted to fill in so much missing source material that, like Sir Arthur Evans with his creative reconstruction of the ruins at Knossos, we end up substituting the products of our own imaginations for the past that we are trying to recover.7 Neither, however, will it do to resign ourselves to the notion that we can study only individual fragments that survive from the past without trying to fit them into a conceptual framework of our own. Instead, for the modernists among us, the best in pre-Petrine scholarship holds a valuable lesson: approach the distant past with humility, respect the specificity of its evidentiary legacy, [End Page 713] understand that much is lost forever, and be willing to admit that there are things that we simply do not know based on existing sources, but try all the same to integrate what we do know into our broader understanding of history. That way, our readers and students will better understand the uniqueness of each epoch as well as the possibilities and limitations of history as such.
* * *
It is with deep sadness and regret that we note the passing, on 27 February 2007, of Daniel R. Brower, a good friend of Kritika as well as a member of our editorial board. It speaks volumes about his intellect, his generosity, and his courage in the face of adversity that just a year ago, when his health was already failing rapidly, he wrote the afterword for the latest book in the Kritika Historical Studies series.8 His last contribution to Kritika appears posthumously in this issue, together with an obituary by Ronald G. Suny that speaks for all of us at Kritika. Dan will be greatly missed.
Footnotes
1. Chester S. L. Dunning, Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001). In a forthcoming issue of Kritika, Russell Martin will review the abridged version intended for classroom use: Chester S. L. Dunning, A Short History of Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).
2. Sergei Fedorovich Platonov, Smutnoe vremia: Ocherk istorii vnutrennego krizisa i obshchestvennoi bor´by v Moskovskom gosudarstve XVI–XVII vekov (Petrograd: Vremia, 1923). For the English edition, see S. F. Platonov, The Time of Troubles: A Historical Study of the Internal Crisis and Social Struggle in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Muscovy, trans. John T. Alexander (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1970).
3. “Citing the Archival Revolution,” Kritika 8, 2 (2007): 227–30.
4. Edward L. Keenan, The Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha: The Seventeenth-Century Genesis of the “Correspondence” Attributed to Prince A. M. Kurbskii and Tsar Ivan IV (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); Keenan, Josef Dobrovský and the Origins of the Igor´ Tale (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
5. Carolyn J. Pouncy, “Missed Opportunities and the Search for Ivan the Terrible,” Kritika 7, 2 (2006): 309–28, here 327.
6. Martin Malia, Russia under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999), 24.
7. On Evans at Knossos, see John K. Papadopoulos, “Inventing the Minoans: Archaeology, Modernity, and the Quest for European Identity,” Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 18, 1 (2005): 87–149.
8. Daniel Brower, “Along the Borderlands of the Empire (A Conclusion),” in Orientalism and Empire in Russia, ed. Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander Martin (Kritika Historical Studies 3) (Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2006), 349–60. Dan also contributed the following articles to Kritika: “Whose Cultures?” Kritika 3, 1 (2002): 81–88; “Liberation through Captivity: Nikolai Shipov’s Adventures in the Imperial Borderlands” (co-authored with Susan Layton), Kritika 6, 2 (2005): 259–79, repr. in Orientalism and Empire in Russia, 270–90; and “Law and Empire”—available at web.mac.com/kritika (click on “Law”)—an e-Kritika response to Richard Wortman’s “Russian Monarchy and the Rule of Law,” Kritika 6, 1 (2005): 245–70.
