Portraits of Old Russia. Imagined Lives of Ordinary People, 1300–1725. Ed. by Donald Ostrowski / Marshall T. Poe. Armonk, NY, London: Sharpe, 2011. XXVIII, 323 S., Abb. ISBN: 978-0-7656-2728-5

Portraits of Old Russia. Imagined Lives of Ordinary People, 1300–1725. Ed. by Donald Ostrowski / Marshall T. Poe. Armonk, NY, London: Sharpe, 2011. XXVIII, 323 S., Abb. ISBN: 978-0-7656-2728-5.

Inhaltsverzeichnis/Contents:

http://www.gbv.de/dms/bowker/toc/9780765627285.pdf

This handy volume represents an attempt by twenty-three scholars to bring to life four centuries of early Russian history. Some of the lives imagined belong to people who really lived, fleshing out biographies with details based on the authors’ wide research in archives and elsewhere. Other lives are totally imagined, composites or archetypes depicting how someone might well have, and probably did, live. Thus the portrayals are both historical and literary. The contributors include some of the best-known specialists of this era among American and British scholars as well as young historians still establishing their reputations. A few of the lives they imagine are less ordinary than others, ranging from members of ruling houses to peasants, slaves, serfs and holy fools. Government servitors and military personnel are represented, as are provincial landowners, artisans, townspeople, and Siberian explorers and traders. Church prelates and monastics are represented by more than a quarter of the vignettes. The individual portraits average about ten pages in length. Each includes a short bibliography of the most relevant books in English, with a few titles in other languages for some of the entries (Russian, French, German, Greek) when appropriate.

I am currently using the volume as required supplementary reading in my upper-level undergraduate survey course of Russian History. To work best with my chronological approach to the course I effectively had to reorder the chapters, which are arranged in eight sections according to the place in society and economy (“sociopolitical categories”) occupied by the subjects of the chapters. The balance tilts heavily to the seventeenth century. My students responded very well to the volume. The book’s selections breathed life into people often not individuated in textbooks. Students are interested not only in political and military developments but also in how people throughout society lived. In these imagined lives, textbook generalizations come to life. Abstractions for many students take on reality.

My students were required to write short papers detailing what they felt they learned about past Russian society from selected chapters. Responses were particularly warm toward Marshall Poe’s dialogue between two boyars, W. M. Reger’s description of the life of a foreign military officer, and Valerie Kivelson’s portrayal of a poor townswoman accused of witchcraft. The heavy emphasis among the twenty-three essays on some aspect or another of religious life – more than a quarter of them – opened students’ eyes to the importance of the church and churchmen for what was recorded and remembered in early Russian history. The most difficult contribution for students to penetrate was Robert Romanchuk’s reconstruction of the contributions of a teacher, a student and a librarian at the Kirillo-Belozersk Monastery, not least for Romanchuk’s attempt to follow the stylistics of writing used at the time.

Hugh M. Olmsted prepared three useful helps for undergraduate readers in the glossary, a short explanation of the use and history of personal names in Muscovy, and a guide for transcribing and pronouncing Russian names.

Donald Ostrowski’s brief introduction to the volume briefly attempts to place it in the tradition of “imaginative historical recreation” as practiced in the nineteenth century by the British essayist Walter Pater and more recently by such enthusiasts as Robert Graves (“I, Claudius”) and Howard Fast (“Spartacus”) for the classical world, Umberto Eco (“The Name of the Rose”) for the middle ages, Julie Irwin (“The Young Elizabeth”) for the early modern period, and even Walter Cronkite (“You Are There” television series) for American revolutionary history. Ostrowski could have established a further genealogy for this sort of writing in the physiologies so popular in the nineteenth century and also of the photographic ‘types’ common at the end of that century and the beginning of the twentieth. When full biographical information does not exist, why not add to the sketchy details of one life from what is known about others to create a composite? Is that not in its own way ‘historical?’ We are told that “editors of other presses hesitated to take on such an unusual and innovative project” before M. E. Sharpe provided encouragement. Indeed, these portraits play with the boundaries of biography and historical fiction. For today’s generation of American undergraduates, at least, they seem to work in providing a deeper level of understanding and whetting a heightened degree of interest. If for that alone, the volume has merit.

George E. Munro, Richmond, VA, USA