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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 April 2008
Looking back on the evolution of my scholarship over five decades, I am struck both by my constant fascination with how systems of thought enthralled and inspired historical figures and by my approach to the changing subjects that became the object of this fascination. The ideas and sentiments propounded by great philosophers and writers established a necessary background for my work, but what engaged my interest and stirred my imagination was the varied ways these ideas were understood and acted upon. It was my reflection on the transformation of ideas into conscious views of the world that prompted my three research projects: the populists of the 1870s and 1880s, the legal reformers of the nineteenth century, and the emperors of Russia.
1 My master's essay was on the subject of the liberal slavophiles and was the basis for my first publication, “Koshelev, Samarin and Cherkasskii and the Fate of Liberal Slavophilism,” Slavic Review (June, 1962), 261–79.
2 Lydia, Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 27–106Google Scholar.
3 Haimson, Leopold H., The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Particularly Gershenzon, M. O., Istoriia molodoi Rossii (Petrograd, 1923)Google Scholar; and idem, Istoricheskie zapiski (Moscow, 1910); Isaiah Berlin, “A Remarkable Generation,” in idem, Russian Thinkers (Hammondsworth, 1978). The essays were originally printed in the journal Encounter in 1955 and 1956.
5 Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1967.
6 Wortman, Richard S., The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Russian translation Vlastiteli i sudii: razvitie pravovogo soznaniia v imperatorskoi Rossii (Moscow: NLO, 2004). An English version of the introduction to the Russian edition, reiterating and developing my views in reference to later works, appears in the journal Kritika: “Russian Monarchy and the Rule of Law: New Considerations of the Court Reform of 1864,” Kritika 6/1 (Winter, 2005), 145–70.
7 Zaionchkovskii, P. A., Otmena krepostnogo prava, 2nd edn (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1968)Google Scholar; idem, The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1978).
8 Dnevnik D. A. Miliutina 1873–1875 (Moscow, 1947); Dnevnik D. A. Miliutina (Moscow 1950); Dnevnik P. A. Valueva, ministra vnutrennix del, 2 vols. (Moscow: Soviet Academy of Sciences Press, 1961).
9 See Whittaker, Cynthia H., “The Reforming Tsar: The Redefinition of Autocratic Duty in Eighteenth-Century Russia,” Slavic Review 51/1 (Spring, 1992), 77–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Raeff, Marc, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth-Century Nobility (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1966), 129, 140–47Google Scholar.
11 Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness, 231, 226.
12 See my articles “Biography and the Russian Intelligentsia,” in Baron, Samuel H. and Pletsch, Carl, eds., Introspection in Biography: The Biographer's Quest for Self (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press), 157–74Google Scholar; and “Tolstoi and the Perception of Poverty,” Rossija 4 (1979), 119–32.
13 See Wortman, Richard, “Power and Responsibility in the Upbringing of the Nineteenth Century Tsars,” Newsletter of the Group for the Use of Psychology in History (Spring, 1976), 2Google Scholar; and idem, “The Russian Empress as Mother,” in Ransel, D., ed., The Family in Imperial Russia (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 60–74Google Scholar.
14 For example, “As has been argued, the revolutionist generally is a person with severe conflicts over masculinity. He is a person on the one hand whose Oedipal hatred of his father has not been dissipated and on the other who feels unusually guilty about asserting his masculinity.” Wolfenstein, E. Victor, The Revolutionary Personality: Lenin, Trotsky, Gandhi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 228Google Scholar. See also Stefan T. Possony's treatment of Lenin's “psychology of destruction” in Lenin: The Compulsive Revolutionary (Chicago, Henry Regnery, 1964), 376–400.
15 Possony, Lenin, 390.
16 Freud, Sigmund and Bullitt, William C., Thomas Woodrow Wilson, Twenty-Eighth President of the United States: A Psychological Study (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1967), x–xiii, 102Google Scholar.
17 Marvick, Elizabeth Firth, Louis XIII: The Making of a King (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), xiv, 2–3, 39Google Scholar.
18 Bryant, Lawrence M., Journal of Modern History 1/3 (1989), 610Google Scholar.
19 For similar efforts to use the notion of political culture to understand particular Russian institutions, in this case the contemporary legal system, see Mary McAuley, “Bringing Culture back into Political Analysis: The Reform of the Russian Judiciary,” in Whitefield, Stephen, ed., Political Culture and Post-Communism (Houndmills, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Solomon, Peter H. Jr., “Informal Practices in Russian Justice: Probing the Limits of Post-Soviet Reform,” in Feldbrugge, Ferdinand, ed., Russia, Europe, and the Rule of Law (Leiden and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2006)Google Scholar.
20 In Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz (New York: Basic Books, 1973)Google Scholar; idem, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 1980; idem, “Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power,” in Wilentz, Sean, ed., Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics since the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 13–40Google Scholar.
21 Kasinec, Edward and Wortman, Richard, “The Mythology of Empire: Imperial Russian Coronation Albums,” Biblion: The Bulletin of the New York Public Library 1/1 (Fall, 1992), 77–100Google Scholar. The Romanov books are described in Davis, Robert H., A Dark Mirror: Romanov and Imperial Palace Library Materials in the Holdings of the New York Public Library. A Checklist and Agenda for Research (New York: Norman Ross, 1999)Google Scholar.
22 For a critique of this tenor see Biersack, Aletta, “Local Knowledge, Local History: Geertz and Beyond,” in Hunt, Lynn, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), 72–96Google Scholar.
23 Sahlins, Marshall, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), xi, 41, 78Google Scholar.
24 This emerges from Sahlins's revision of Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between langue and parole, language and speech, in which speech represents changing expressions of the underlying structure of language. Sahlins casts this distinction on a historical grid, the myth containing the structure—langue, historical actions or events representing the parole, guided by but representing transformations of the myth. Sahlins, Marshall, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1981), 3–8, 17–22, 43–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
25 When Peter the Great reformed the Russian state on a European model, he endeavored to create state institutions that operated according to law, a state that had a perpetual existence regardless of the monarch on the throne. But the Western states Peter sought to emulate observed to a lesser or greater degree a sophisticated legal distinction between on the one hand the king as ruler of the state, an abstract and perpetual embodiment of state authority, and on the other the mortal person—between the body politic and the human body of the king, described in Ernst Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957). In Russia, Michael Cherniavsky, Kantorowicz's student, showed that Peter's attempt to impose such a distinction never took hold. The state never assumed the integrity of an institution with its own rules and traditions that could not be breached by the imperial will. In this situation, I observed, the monarch himself took on the role of literal incarnation of the immortal state. See Cherniavsky, Michael, Tsar and People: Studies in Russian Myths (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 82–90Google Scholar.
26 For a discussion of the rise and decline of the Moscow–Tartu school and its contribution see my review of Sergei Nekliudov, ed., “Moskovsko-tartuskaia semioticheskaia shkola. Istoria, vospominania, razmyshleniia,” Kritika 1/4 (Fall, 2000), 821–9.
27 Cited in ibid., 824–5.
28 Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. 1, From Peter the Great to the Death of Nicholas I; vol. 2, From Alexander II to the Abdication of Nicholas II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995–2000). Russian translation, Tsenarii vlasti, 2 vols. (Moscow: OGI, 2004). Princeton University Press published a revised and abridged one-volume paperback version in 2006: Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy: From Peter the Great to the Abdication of Nicholas II. A translation is in progress to be published by Novoe Izdate'lstvo in Moscow.
29 Other ceremonies such as parades, and court fêtes, and religious ceremonies also changed to fit the scenario of each reign.
30 See Verner, Andrew M., The Crisis of Russian Autocracy: Nicholas II and the 1905 Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 109–10, 239–41Google Scholar; Hosking, Geoffrey, The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma, 1907–1914 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 201–5Google Scholar.
31 Recent scholarship has made clear Nicholas II's role in insisting on the most aggressive and brutal responses and imposing his views on his ministers, whom he often hid behind. For example, he was clearly behind Peter Stolypin's introduction of the notorious field courts-martial in 1906 and the “Stolypin coup d’état”, the change in the election law in June 1907. See Ascher, Abraham, The Revolution of 1905, vol. 2, Authority Restored (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 244–59Google Scholar.