This is a big book, and not only because it is a doorstopper. It is also “big” in its ambition: to make sense of hundreds of years of Russian intellectual history. The subtitle actually understates the book's chronological scope, for the volume begins with Kievan Rus΄ and ends with the death of Nikolai Karamzin in 1826.
Russian thought, according to Gary Hamburg, was inflected by religion in the pre-Petrine period, and contrary to what many have argued, it remained so afterward. Already in Muscovite times, Russians were receptive to foreign ideas and understood “enlightenment” to entail the search for both religious and intellectual truth. The Petrine opening to the west required them only to modify these traditions, not to jettison them altogether. Hamburg therefore, similar to Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter and some other recent scholars, rejects the thesis of a secularization of Russian thought after Peter the Great.
The first part of the book deals with pre-Petrine Rus΄. As early as the eleventh century, Hamburg finds themes that continue throughout the book, including debates about the definition of a good Christian prince and whether there exists a right to resist an unrighteous ruler. The book then discusses a series of authors and texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Iosif Volotskii, the “Third Rome” doctrine, the Domostroi, Ivan Peresvetov, Ivan Kotoshikhin, Archpriest Avvakum, and various others. Russians' long-standing belief in a polity centered on a pious Christian ruler was shaken by the excesses of Ivan the Terrible, the Time of Troubles, and the Schism, but ultimately these crises did not undermine support for autocracy and the belief in the link between politics and Orthodoxy. Likewise, while the theological works of Simeon Polotskii and Sil΄vestr Medvedev “shifted the ultimate source of Church authority from revelation and from the ecumenical councils to rationality grounded in erudition” (234), this new understanding of “enlightenment” did not displace the concept's older association with faith and morality.
The second part of the book carries these topics forward into the period from 1689 to 1762. More than in the section on Muscovy, the book now focuses on individual thinkers: Feofan Prokopovich, Stevan Iavor΄skyi, Ivan Pososhkov, Petr Shafirov, Dmitrii Golitsyn, Vasilii Tatishchev, and Mikhail Lomonosov. The larger thesis that emerges is that all of these thinkers “drew simultaneously on contemporary and traditional intellectual sources” (372): although increasingly immersed in European ideas, they saw no contradiction between traditional religious understandings of “enlightenment” and the more secular conception advocated by Europeans.
The third and longest part of the book is on the age of Catherine II and Paul I. The thinkers discussed here are Catherine, Nikita Panin, Grigorii Teplov, Denis Fonvizin, Gavriil Derzhavin, Aresenii (Matseevich), Platon (Levshin), Semen Desnitskii, Nikolai Novikov, Aleksandr Radishchev, Mikhail Shcherbatov, and Karamzin. In this period, cracks began to appear in the older consensus as a number of thinkers put forward ideas for turning Russia into a constitutional monarchy and problematized the relationship between Orthodoxy and the empire's non-Orthodox inhabitants. Nonetheless, continuity still prevailed: “Even under Catherine, most thinkers visualized the enlightened Russian state of the future as an Orthodox polity” (742).
A brief review cannot begin to do justice to a book of such sweep and erudition. To read this book is to receive a broad education in Russian intellectual history. Because it is constructed mainly as a series of studies of individual writers, we never lose sight of the diversity of the Russian tradition. This approach does, though, come at a cost. The close reading of works by so many authors gives the book an overall length that may discourage some readers. Even though Hamburg periodically steps back to give a larger assessment, one sometimes loses sight of the forest for all the trees. Because the focus is on individual writers, long-term continuities—such as how certain themes first articulated in Muscovite times later recur in nineteenth century literature—are often suggested but then left hanging. Lastly, it is not really clear what changed after the age of Karamzin. Did “faith, politics, and reason” at last drift apart, and if so, why?
Such quibbles aside, this book is a very impressive accomplishment. Its chronological scope and breadth of learning are enormous, and the argument it makes is compelling and persuasive. For a reader interested in understanding the Russian intellectual tradition before the nineteenth century, there is no better place to start.
