SUMMARY:

In her review essay Alla Zeide critically comments on the quality of the first Russian-language publication of lectures by the Harvard historian Michael Karpovich. She begins by listing the implications of the edition’s having neither a scholarly nor a general editor. Zeide shows that both the academic and political (ideological) contexts of Karpovich’s work are either ignored or misrepresented by the authors of introductory articles, which does not allow an appreciation of the lecture course in all its complexity. She also poses a question (omitted by those involved in preparing the book) concerning why Karpovich’s grand narrative of the Russian past was structured as the history of ideas and ideological currents. Zeide gives her answer to this important question. Finally, she establishes many inaccuracies and unexplainable omissions and distortions of the original meaning in the Russian translation of the lectures and in the commentaries. She concludes that the book, or rather its critical reading, highlights problems with traditional historiography as a genre that should be replaced with a model of intellectual biography.