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Alexander M. Martin, Richard Stites. Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The Pleasure and the Power. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2005. Pp. xiii, 586. $60.00, The American Historical Review, Volume 111, Issue 4, October 2006, Pages 1283–1284, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.111.4.1283
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Extract
Richard Stites can look back on a long and productive career as perhaps the premier American student of the interaction between culture and society in modern Russia. Much of his past work has focused on the period following the Great Reforms of the 1860s-1870s, whose central problem is the origin and legacy of the 1917 Revolution. In his newest book, he moves backward in time to examine the emergence of a Russian secular high culture in the century before serfdom—along with much of Russia's ancien régime—was dismantled by the Great Reforms.
Western scholarship on imperial Russia traditionally privileges the eighteenth century, when fusing Russia with Europe was still the utopian project of a narrow aristocratic elite, and the post-reform era, when that fusion had already been largely achieved and the aristocracy's hold on the country was eroding. What happened in between—how European influences blended with native traditions to create the late imperial synthesis—has been examined off and on over the last thirty years by Richard Wortman, Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, the late W. Bruce Lincoln, and others, but it remains nonetheless one of the great lacunae in our knowledge of imperial Russian history. In his new book, Stites contributes substantially toward filling in that historiographical gap.
