While academic histories exist to rupture the condescension of presents about pasts, they are sometimes marred by the presentist pomposities and herd instincts of their academic authors. Paul W. Werth's superb study of a single year, 1837, exemplifies the quest and yet exhibits none of the faults. Beyond its interesting theses, always lightly worn and artfully expounded, this is a work to savor with students, because you can use it to explore how histories are constructed, and what ends they can serve. Werth's skillful research is distilled into a venturesome and ironic narrative.
This book is simply a delight to read: witty, creative, and well-referenced. Werth is deeply informed, but also uninhibited by previous scholarship. He keeps the primary sources front and center. Werth is not persuaded that Hegelian reductionist dualisms of Slavophile and Westernizer really suffice. This is historical scholarship that combines creativity with deep research. While Aleksandr Herzen and Nikoli Gogol΄, Iurii Annenkov, and Aleksandr Pushkin have shaped most of our views of Nikolaevan Russia, most often to cast it aside much as the Renaissance once berated its merely “Middle” Ages, Werth gently widens our frames of reference and (mostly) re-focuses attention on other venturesome activities of the Nikolaevan state not scripted by Sergei Uvarov or Aleksei Arakcheev.
Along with Leonid Brezhnev's doddery era of stagnation (zastoi), Nikolaevan Russia (1825–55) might be one of Russianists’ and Slavists’ least favored eras for historical inquiry. By way of contrast, Werth shows all sorts of fascinating Nikolaevan developments that otherwise might have escaped our notice. Indeed, Werth shows us arrays of links and ties with Russia's futures that Herzen would always have denied: the provincial press (Ch. 5); a tsarevich's public journey (Ch. 4); a palace fire (Ch. 10) as a nascent tsar-and-people sort of civil society; a railway to the Summer Palace (Ch. 9); a joust with Khiva (Ch. 7) that shows a regime as ready as most other post-1812 hegemonic European societies to try to “develop” Russian society, but perhaps not quite as ready to follow through (137–40, 174–75); an activist Interior Ministry eager to enable Orthodox clerics to put Uniates in the shade (Ch. 6); and a Ministry of State Domains ready to re-engineer the agronomy and society of the residual villages it owned in the guise of guardianship (opeka). We certainly glimpse agendas of “The Great Reforms” and way beyond, which is indeed Werth's key point: “a quiet revolution that unified and integrated the country, while also serving to embody a Russian nation in institutions and practices” (201). Werth begins with the familiar ground of the death of Aleksandr Pushkin (Ch. 1), and then takes us through the cultural and intellectual history of Mikhail Glinka (Ch. 2) and Piotr Chaadaev (Ch. 3). But he always adds fresh details and suggestive contrasts, and each episode is narrated with skill.
Werth's central thesis is beguilingly persuasive. Werth finds much more “dynamism, innovation and consequence” (2) in an era most others take pains to avoid. I am ready to believe now in his “Quiet Revolution” even if I still admire Herzen—and Mikhail Bakunin—and even if I still want to offer advice to the Decembrists. Werth's excellent book has shifted the conversation and re-animated the field.
