This interesting work uses the history of emotions to provide a new synthesis of the Europeanization of the Russian elite, more specifically the noble estate, from 1762 to 1825. Aiming at the general reader but more likely to reach specialists, it provides a clear narrative of the process of how Russian noblemen (only a few women are discussed) became Europeanized through a process of self-fashioning.
Drawing upon an earlier edited volume and the publications of the two authors, the book is organized as a series of case studies discussing where and how Russian nobles became Europeanized. After a short introduction, with fewer footnotes than useful for specialists, the book then turns to a narrative overview of historical events during this period. It then discusses how Russian nobles were exposed to Europe—through travel, reading, material culture, and sociability. Although these practices did create a Europeanized nobility, they widened the gap between that estate and the rest of the Russian population. Next is an interesting chapter on the Russian court, which draws on new work on the topic showing that the court in Russia was smaller, more unstable, and required a higher level of humiliation among its courtiers than in countries in Europe. This helps to explain the intense desire of many nobles to find interior spaces of reflection, even of refuge, from an unpredictable court.
A chapter on the search for true spirituality provides a complex and insightful analysis of the ways in which nobles sought to move beyond the Russian Orthodox Church, for which many felt contempt, to find new ways of spiritual seeking and belonging, sometimes through western European models. They reconciled with the Orthodox Church through the belief that every church provided a way to the truth rather than embracing it as the one way. The Masons and Rosicrucians mentioned in the spirituality chapter are shown to be the main organizers of new educational institutions in Russia, such as the Cadet Corps, Moscow University, and the lyceum at Tsarskoe Selo. The high moral lessons taught at these educational institutions led to a difficult integration into the actuality of Russian court, civil and military life, which in time would lead to the Decembrist Rebellion.
Literature, as the next chapter argues, moved from being under the complete control of the dynasty and court to a patronage situation under Elizabeth to the assertion of an independent, but noble-only, sphere of activity in the 1750s and 60s. Once again, the tensions between the ideals of literature and the realities of Russian life would lead to the criticisms of Aleksandr Radishchev and the Decembrists. The final chapter, on how the Europeanized elites colonized the provinces, is in many ways the most interesting, as it includes innovative attention to place and how the elites in many ways ignored or rejected its specificities, preferring to create a European archipelago of estates in the provinces, surrounded by unredeemed Russian reality.
It would be useful to bring in more on the earlier development of regional identity, as it would strengthen the argument. As I and others have argued, non-noble regions such as the Russian North and Siberia had the strongest forms of regional identity from at least the seventeenth centuries, and nobles who were posted there tended to work to erase those identities in favor of a homogenized European sense of place. Indeed, the dominance of the nobility was antithetical to the creation of a regional identity throughout the nineteenth century, with Ukraine providing an interesting counterexample outside the scope of the book. The authors’ idea of a “deterritorialized lifestyle” (207) usefully captures the way the elites would act the same wherever they went, as if part of a traveling theater.
The conclusion notes that interiority, not income, is the key to understanding the process of Europeanization in Russia during this time, since the economy was more resistant to change than were the souls of Russian nobles. The authors suggest that the identity of Russian nobles was metropolitan, not regional, and that places were seen as placeless because the elite believed them to be fundamentally malleable. Further, although the elite was Europeanized, no cohesive nation emerged from that process, which only deepened the divide between the nobility and the other estates.
The book provides an important intervention in the literature. There are a few cases where citations are not found in the bibliography and places in the writing that show some infelicities of style, but the focus on emotion and place is an insightful one.
