Valerie Kivelson / Karen Petrone / Nancy Shields Kollmann / Michael S. Flier (eds.): The New Muscovite Cultural History. A Collection in Honor of Daniel B. Rowland. Bloomington: Slavica Publishers, 2009. XII, 337 S., 36 Abb. ISBN: 978-0-89357-368-3

Valerie Kivelson / Karen Petrone / Nancy Shields Kollmann / Michael S. Flier (eds.): The New Muscovite Cultural History. A Collection in Honor of Daniel B. Rowland. Bloomington: Slavica Publishers, 2009. XII, 337 S., 36 Abb. ISBN: 978-0-89357-368-3.

This volume originates from the symposium on Muscovite Cultural History in Honor of Daniel B. Rowland that took place at the University of Kentucky on May 15–17, 2008. It consists of three introductions written by the editors and 17 essays divided into five sections. The title of the book deliberately refers to the well-known collection edited by Lynn Hunt (The New Cultural History. Berkeley & Los Angeles 1989). So the appearance of the present volume signals further expansion of this influential trend in American historical writing which is “conquering” a new territory of research.

In the introductory part the editors highlight Daniel Rowland’s contributions to the emerging field of Muscovite cultural history and delineate contours of a new paradigm in Muscovite studies proposed in Rowland’s pioneering works and adopted now by his colleagues and followers. This paradigm presupposes, first of all, the centrality of Orthodox religion in Muscovite politics and culture. Orthodoxy provided “a shared common cultural vocabulary” and “elastic, moral scaffolding of obligation, hierarchy of protection and mutability of responsibility that structured … relations of power and propriety on every level” (p. 14). This view corresponds with a general picture of Muscovy (also shared by most of the contributors) as a well-integrated and homogeneous society, which does not mean a harmony or consensus: conflicts did take place but the fighting parties remained within the same (Orthodox) moral framework and used the same cultural vocabulary (p. 12).

The papers presented in the first section, “Scenarios of Power” (the title reminds of Richard Wortman’s famous Scenarios of Power. Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy. 2 vols. Princeton 1995–2000), seek to reveal political ideas reflected in different works of art, from drama to icon painting. Russell Martin examines representations of power in “The Comedy of Artaxerxes” staged at the court of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich in 1672. Isolde Thyrêt builds her analysis of the image of the Orthodox ruler on the Katapetasma, the liturgical curtain, donated by Ivan IV and his wife Anastasiia to the Hilandar Monastery on Mount Athos in November 1555. Michael S. Flier in order to reassess cultural views of Metropolitan Makarii reconsiders the iconographic program of the Golden Hall murals in Moscow’s Kremlin painted after 1547 on Makarii’s orders, while Sergei Bogatyrev in his study of apocalyptic imagery in 16-th century Muscovy draws on the “Church Militant” icon, as well as on the tsar’s Great Banner of 1559/60 and, for the purpose of comparison, on German woodcuts, Finnish frescoes, and other North European iconographic material.

Exploration of the close link between religion and power in Muscovy is continued in the second section of the book which includes an essay on religious beliefs of Ivan IV’s bureaucrats (d’iaki and pod’iachie) (by Charles J. Halperin), a reconstruction of the ritual of drinking the cup to the health of the tsar (zazdravnaia chasha) (by Nikolaos Chissidis), and a study of theology and rhetoric in Avvakum’s writings (by Priscilla Hunt).

The central section of the book focuses on Muscovite cultural practices as divers as pretenderism, torture, and coerced confessions in law courts. All of them, however, are related to the state and violence. In his essay on the origins of Russian royal pretenderism Chester Dunning rejects all previous explanations of this phenomenon, be it “naïve monarchism” of the low classes, social utopias, or semiotic interpretations. In his own view, “Tsar Dmitrii’s remarkable biography, more than anything else, generated Russian royal pretenderism” (p. 157). However, I find this argument rather weak since it does not account for the fact that pretenderism as a phenomenon did not disappear with the assassination of Tsar Dmitrii: it is the mechanism of turning it into the long-lasting tradition that needs to be explained. Such an explanation requires a social and cultural context, quite appropriate for a volume on Muscovite cultural history, but absolutely missing in Dunning’s essay.

Applying a cultural approach to such a brutal practice as torture, Nancy Shields Kollmann attempts to reconcile it with religious and moral norms accepted in Muscovite society. She maintains that in Muscovy the use of torture was not arbitrary; it was limited by law and many procedural practices (p. 169). In a similar way Valerie Kivelson demonstrates that “treatment of slaves, serfs, and wives was to some extent constrained by a set of ethical, social norms” (p. 183); and in law courts, as she convincingly shows, a Muscovite slave woman at the end of the 17th century might have a chance to get protection and to receive more credence, than her contemporary, an American slave woman, Tituba, who had become a “heroine” of Salem witchcraft trials in 1692.

The articles collected in the fourth section deal with texts that were composed and copied by Muscovite bookmen and then stored in archives and rediscovered by scholars. Here the reader will find a detailed description of the late 18th century Russian manuscript, an illuminated instructional miscellany on apocalyptic themes, now preserved in the Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas (Eve Levin); a prosopographic study of Nil Sorskii’s followers among the Iosifo-Volokolamsk elders who owned or copied the writings of the famous Russian ascetic (David M. Goldfrank); a well-documented biography of Elie Denisoff, an outstanding Russian scholar whose discoveries helped to identify Maksim Grek with young Mikhail Trivolis and thus to reconstruct the pre-Muscovite period of life of that prolific church writer (Hugh Olmstead); and, finally, an interesting, although controversial, deconstruction of the famous legend of the casting off the “Tatar Yoke” in 1480 (Edward Keenan).

The last section of the book also focuses on texts but here they are regarded from a different, regional and ethnographic, standpoint: the elevation of a local Novgorodian miracle worker (Mikhail of Klopsk) to the status of an all-Russian saint and Novgorod’s cultural resistance to Muscovite domination long after the fall of the city have become the subject of Marina Swoboda’s and Donald Ostrowski’s studies respectively, while Janet Martin seeks to reveal various attitudes towards Muslims as reflected in 16th century Muscovite chronicles.

On the whole, the volume under review gives a good idea of a cultural approach to early modern Russian history, of its strengths and weaknesses. To be sure, cultural and visual “turns” have expanded the boundaries of Muscovite studies and essentially enriched the field. However, for the sake of a balance, some reservations, I think, are also in order here. First of all, one may discern a disproportion in selection of topics for the discussion: the reader will learn much more about ideas, texts, images, and symbols inherent in Muscovite culture than about individual experiences of ordinary people. Moreover, judging by the contents of the volume one may think that “The New Muscovite Cultural History” completely ignores such important issues as economy, domestic and foreign policy, social movements, and many others. Besides, some interpretations of written and visual sources proposed by the contributors are probably vulnerable to criticisms of the experts. Nevertheless, it is an important volume which shows a distinctive way of studying Russia’s past. Whether this particular approach can be fruitfully combined with other scholarly traditions (like history of concepts, comparative history, or source criticism so popular among Russian historians and literary specialists) remains to be seen.

Michail M. Krom, Sankt-Petersburg