Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas

Im Auftrag des Instituts für Ost- und Südosteuropastudien Regensburg
herausgegeben von Martin Schulze Wessel und Dietmar Neutatz

Ausgabe: 63 (2015), 3, S. 481-481

Verfasst von: Max J. Okenfuss

 

Kevin M. F. Platt: Terror & Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 2011. xiv, 294 pp. Ill., Bibl. ISBN: 978-0-8014-4813-3.

Written by a literary historian at the University of Pennsylvania, this is a selective and eclectic survey of attitudes toward Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great from Napoleonic times into the Stalin years, with a contemporary epilogue. The book evolved from essays in Platt and David Brandenberger (eds.), Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature in Stalinist Propaganda (2006).

Here the central focus is the manner in which selected imaginings of the two tsars in historical scholarship, literature, and art were transmitted to, and influenced subsequent conceptions. The story begins with the foundational historical texts of Karamzin and Ustrailov, but quickly moves to derivative literary representations, including Pushkins Bronze Horseman. At mid-century focus turned to conflict between fathers and sons, and to the deaths of Ivans son Ivan and Peters son Aleksei, as depicted in print, and later in famous historical paintings by Ge and Repnin. In the Silver Age works by Merezhkovskii and Miliukov evidenced the contemporary usefulness of the accumulated interpretations of Ivan IV and Peter I inherited from the past. Final chapters are devoted to the culmination of these threads in revolutionary and Stalinist revisionism, to Pokrovskii and the Short Course, and especially to Aleksei N. Tolstois novel Peter I and to Eisensteins film Ivan the Terrible. A conclusion surveys some popular representations down to post-Soviet times.

In the end Platt quotes Renan, For the essence of the nation is that all its members hold many things in common, but also that they have all forgotten many things.This cultural history of successive interrelated myths of Ivan and Peter suggest the many ways in which additions to and erasures from historical memory served the present-day needs of Imperial Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet society.

Max J. Okenfuss, St. Louis

Zitierweise: Max J. Okenfuss über: Kevin M. F. Platt: Terror & Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 2011. xiv, 294 pp. Ill., Bibl. ISBN: 978-0-8014-4813-3, http://www.dokumente.ios-regensburg.de/JGO/Rez/Okenfuss_Platt_Terror_and_Greatness.html (Datum des Seitenbesuchs)

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