The fifth volume of the almanac The Philosophical Age^[1] is a collection of articles, presentations, and paper abstracts complied from an international conference and summer school held in 1998 on the idea of history in the Russian Enlightenment. The content of the book is disposed among thirty articles (thirty-one, including the editors’ introduction). Taken together, these articles analyze the idea of history in Russian thought from the perspectives of philosophy, intellectual history, art, and literature. The concept of history in the Russian intellectual framework is analyzed in nearly every argument, but the book is somewhat lacking in coherence. Featuring a mix of themes and approaches, the collection includes several clusters of related essays, but it has no discernible unifying focus beyond the somewhat loosely observed topic of the idea of history in Russia. The drawbacks imposed by the book’s format tend to produce a terse form of précis with abrupt transitions from topic to topic, and taken at great speed throughout all of Russian history. Those expecting an anthology that probes the connections between the idea of history and the Enlightenment in Russia will be confronted with a wide variety of topics relating to the philosophy of Russian history and the even wider problem of the meaning of history in general. For a majority of the authors, the philosophy of history of the Enlightenment is not main focus, but rather a starting point.
The volume is divided into three parts: “From Historiography to Historiosophy,” “Lessons of the Enlightenment,” and “Socio-Cultural Spaces of Historical Consciousness.” In this way, the book’s conceptual framework is of interdisciplinary character. This attitude is very important indeed, and the editors are right to suggest in the introduction that such collective efforts can incite dialogue between the disciplines, a sentiment intractably inherent in the study of ideas. A majority of the names that crowd the pages of this volume are familiar to students of Russian history. The volume’s focus is not exclusively on the eighteenth century, although the title suggests otherwise. In the introductory article, the editors, Tatiana Artemieva and Mikhail Mikeshin, who direct the St. Petersburg Center for the History of Ideas, announce that the volume is devoted to rethinking one of the most important periods in Russian history – the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century, especially its second half, was a time of the formation, conceptualization, and crystallization of what the editors call the “archetypical” constructions and theoretical foundation of specifically Russian ideas on history and historical research (P. 12). However, the actual temporal boundaries of the volume are far wider than the eighteenth century and stretch from Ancient Rus’ (T. V. Chumakova’s article on Ancient Russian historiosophy, Pp. 77-83) to the beginning of the twentieth century (A. V. Sveshnikov’s article on the image of the recipient of historical discourse in Russian historiography in the beginning of the twentieth century, Pp. 104-106).
In total, roughly ten of the thirty articles are devoted to the eighteenth century and its concepts. The majority of those articles that are focused on the idea of history in the Enlightenment are, paradoxically, placed in the section on the lessons of the Enlightenment. The section “From Historiography to Historiosophy” includes A. V. Bekasova’s article on the role of history in educational curriculum of the second half of the eighteenth century (Pp. 84-91) and two short articles by G. A. Fafurin devoted to foreign books on history in the library of the Noble Corps (Pp. 92-97 and 98-103). The section on “Socio-Cultural Spaces of Historical Consciousness” features I. Z. Serman’s article on history and utopia in thought and literature (Pp. 215-236), V. V. Vasilkova’s essay on the ideas of the Enlightenment and revolution as archetypical foundations for theories of historical cycles (Pp. 243-248), and V. V. Dzibel’s work on I. A. Akimov (Pp. 311-318). If only a third of the articles, in on way or another, refer to the eighteenth century, what are the boundaries of the Russian Enlightenment according to the editors? Even more importantly, how should Enlightenment be defined? Is it the Russian Enlightenment or the Enlightenment in Russia? The emphasis on the nineteenth century throughout the volume correlates the Russian Enlightenment with the nineteenth century, indirectly testifying to the lack of synchronicity between the European and Russian Enlightenments, an issue that is never explicitly addressed.
Undoubtedly, the ambiguity of the theoretical conceptualization of the term “enlightenment” is complicated by the linguistic confusion of the “Enlightenment” as a stage of development or an ideology related to a worldview in a specific historic situation, and the “enlightenment” understood as prosvetitel’stvo, an ideological trend that had various modifications and can be traced through Russian culture well into the modern era. In both senses of the word, not only the idea of history took off during the era of the Enlightenment, but also was instrumental in Russian education since the eighteenth century. For this reason, the collection takes different turns depending on which definition is applied. While the fact that the volume’s contributors do not limit themselves to the period of the eighteenth century testifies to their use of the latter understanding of Enlightenment, the editors emphasize the importance of the eighteenth century for the development of the idea of history in their introduction. Without ever explicitly defining the fundamental questions about the nature of the Enlightenment and its correspondence with the idea of history, the methodology of the history of ideas, or the specificity of the Enlightenment thought in Russia, how can we assess the legacy of the Enlightenment, grasp the importance of the progression from historiography to historiosophy or try and comprehend the “socio-cultural spaces of historical consciousness” in Russia?
One of the volume’s unifying ideas is that Russian thought had been extremely anthropocentric, with strong religious and moralistic overtones. By distinguishing between history (what has happened), historiography (narrating what has happened), and historiosophy (giving meaning to what happened), throughout the volume there is an unpronounced tendency to understand historiosophy as the writing of history and associate it with the Russian philosophy of history in general. Even though historiosophy can be identified as an interpretation of the meaning of history and the place of humans in history, there is a risk in applying a nineteenth-century construct to the eighteenth-century. Instead, it seems that the notion of “historical-mindedness” (istoricheskaia napravlennost’ myshleniia) could be more fruitful for analyzing the particulars of the approach to history during the Enlightenment. The development of historical-mindedness in Europe in the long period between Giambattista Vico and Leopold von Ranke, which Friedrich Meinecke called a permanent “revolution” in Western thought, was one of the definitive mutations in intellectual history. Many enlightenment philosophers considered themselves historians (David Hume, for instance); and it seems that in the eighteenth century every educated person, from Voltaire to Karamzin, was writing (a) history. The direction many eighteenth-century works took reflects the general fascination with foundations and developments, a trend that in Russian thought was embodied in the idea of Russian history having a starting point (whether it was the creation of the world, the christening of Rus’, the rule of Rurik, or the reforms of Peter I). If the history of Russia had a beginning, the goal of the historian was to trace its development in changing institutions. By the end of the century, culminating in the idea of progress that brought moral history and natural history closer together, enlightenment historical-mindedness relied on an empirical approach to historic reality that considered every phenomenon not only at a specific time and place but in an organic connection with other phenomena of the past and present. If history was a legitimate part of scientific enquiry, and the development of the state and society had its own laws, then to understand the inner complexity of progress, history required not only a scientific method but also classification and conceptualization.
Another common theme is that Russian treatment of history concentrated on how to make moral appraisals of historical events and whether, or to which extent, such appraisals could involve an individual opinion. As the authors of the collection establish, methodologically, Russian thought on history can be characterized by tendencies emphasizing synthesis, wholeness, organic togetherness (either religious or rational), and the possibility of historical interpretation. But it is also possible to argue that considering human nature, the methods and goals of education, the formation of habits and customs, moral foundations, and behavioral norms and motivations, enlightenment intellectuals all over Europe were writing their interpretations of history. Russian intellectuals, just like other European enlighteners who called themselves historians, derived paradigms, connected ideas and events of the past to understand (and often reinforce) the present, and even more important, projected developments onto the future.
Since history, its interpretation, and Russia’s place in it were paramount in the evolution of Russian thought, one of the main problems for Russian intellectuals was Russia’s relationship to (and with) the history of the West. How they posed and resolved this problem often determined the direction of their intellectual activities, including their philosophy of history. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the concepts of history and historical development formulated by the European Enlightenment were finding almost immediate reaction and reflection in Russia. Russian thinkers who wrestled with the meaning of history in the eighteenth century, in many ways, relied on the rich tenets of the European Enlightenment and translated them into new cultural vocabularies. By the end of the eighteenth century, a growing feeling that Russia’s difference from Europe had to be preserved along with the conscious efforts at imitating Europe impacted the views of historians and had practical implications for their research. Nevertheless, the intellectual implications of the problem of Russia and the West is not treated in the Almanac, except episodically in relation to the opposition between the Westernizers and Slavophiles in I. I. Evlampiev’s article “The Metaphysical Dimension of the ‘Russian idea’” (Pp. 21-52); E. D. Alekseeva’s “The Notion of Enlightenment and the ‘Education of Society’: Theory in the Historico-Philosophical concepts of Slavophiles” (Pp. 196-202); and D. Lakicevic’s short and inconclusive attempt to outline the impact of the Russian Enlightenment on Serbian culture (Pp. 210-211). If the development of Russian thought on history were considered from the standpoint of the constant borrowing, adapting, and blending together of different ideas and traditions, it would become clearer that Russian philosophy of history grew from the Enlightenment and the native Russian tradition and prepared the ground for Romanticism, Slavophilism, and the upsurge of interest in history in the 19th century.
While the grandiosity of the task and the nature of the collective editorial publication always runs the risk of being unsatisfactory, this is not to say, however, that the essays themselves disappoint. Most of the articles are scholarly and interesting, though they vary considerably in scope and length.^[2] No doubt, inquisitive and patient readers will enrich their knowledge about the broad issues at hand. But many articles pose more questions than they answer, especially concerning the definitions and temporal boundaries of the Russian Enlightenment, and the specificity of the Russian contributions to the development of the concept of history and their relations to the Western concepts. Even though this publication might have been driven by the desire to publish as the aim in itself rather than the desire to enlighten the audience – as is the case with many current Russian conference collections – a guidepost facilitating orientation and marking a common direction might have helped the readers to navigate the volume.