Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia's Illiberal Path

Laura Engelstein

Published by Cornell University Press 2011

Slavophile Empire

Imperial Russia's Illiberal Path

Laura Engelstein

https://doi.org/10.7591/9780801459450

Overview
Contents

About this book

Engelstein asks how Russia's identity came to be defined in terms of an consensus opposed to Western-style liberalism, examining debates on religion and secularism, the role of culture and the law, and the status of the empire's ethnic peripheries.

Author / Editor information

Laura Engelstein is Henry S. McNeil Professor of Russian History at Yale University. She is the author of Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian Folktale, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siécle Russia, both from Cornell, and Moscow, 1905: Working-Class Organization and Political Conflict. She is coeditor of Self and Story in Russian History, also from Cornell.

Reviews

Richard Wortman, Columbia University:

These concise and lucid essays by Laura Engelstein reveal the complex and straitened political culture of moderate and conservative Russia in the century before the 1917 revolution. Engelstein provides a compelling analysis of the futile quests of liberals and conservative thinkers and artists to find a basis for a viable Russian national identity either in civic ideals or in Orthodox religion while facing an unyielding autocracy and an increasingly intransigent revolutionary movement.

Andrei Zorin, Professor of Russian, University of Oxford:

The tensions between nationalistic aspirations and imperial status and self perception in many ways defined Russia's search for identity for nearly two centuries and have not lost their relevance until the present day. In her fascinating book Laura Engelstein offers an erudite and sophisticated analysis of the dynamics of these tensions in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian culture from legal consciousness to religious thought and art criticism. I am sure that Slavophile Empire will become required reading for anyone interested in Russian cultural and intellectual history.

David L. Ransel, Robert F. Byrnes Professor of History and Director of the Russian and East European Institute at Indiana UniversityBloomington, author of A Russian Merchant's Tale: The Life and Adventures of Ivan Alekseevich Tolchënov, Based on His Diary:

Laura Engelstein's writing is always thoughtful and instructive. The essays in Slavophile Empire are a pleasure to read. They illuminate the battle that Russian thinkers and artists waged with one another and with the government to define the terms of Russia's encounter with modernity and indeed to define what it meant to be Russian in a modern world whose categories of thought derived primarily from Europe.

Gregory FreezeV, ictor and Gwendolyn Beinfield Professor of HistoryBrandeis University, author of The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia:

Slavophile Empire has a clear logic and coherence: the divisions of law, religion, and art all revolve around the central question of identity and relationship to the 'West.' I found the chapters on Slavophiles and art especially stimulating and original.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Preface Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xi
Introduction: The Discordant Choir Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Combined Underdevelopment Discipline and the Law in Imperial and Soviet Russia Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	13
2. Revolution and the Theater of Public Life The Triumph of Extremes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	33
3. The Dream of Civil Society The Law, the State, and Religious Toleration Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	78
4. Holy Russia in Modern Times The Slavophile Quest for the Lost Faith Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	99
5. Orthodox Self-Reflection in a Modernizing Age The Case of Ivan and Natal'ia Kireevskii Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	125
6. Between Art and Icon Aleksandr Ivanov’s Russian Christ Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	151
7. The Old Slavophile Steed Failed Nationalism and the Philosophers’ Jewish Problem Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	192
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	233

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 256
Illustrations
- Other: 2 color illustrations, 4 halftones
Keywords: Soviet & East European History; History

eBook

Published: January 15, 2011
ISBN: 9780801459450