HISTORY TEACHING IN LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY RUSSIA

In 1836 the Russian Minister of Education put up a ten-thousand-rouble prize for the composition of a book about Russian history which would be suitable for use in schools. ‘Suitable’, in this instance, meant a book which presented the empire’s past from a Russocentric point of view, for the Minister, S. S. Uvarov, was acting on a letter which he had received from the Grodno schools inspector, who was having difficulty inculcating in his Polish charges a sense of loyalty to Russia.’ Uvarov’s call marked one of the first occasions on which a Russian government addressed itself to the question of the history books to be used in its schools. The hey-day of the doctrine, ‘He who controls the past controls the future’, arrived a hundred years later, when the celebrated Short Course on the History of the CPSU(b) became the most famous of all history textbooks to be adopted in Russia.’ Since the 1930s, official control of the past has shown few signs of diminishing in the Soviet Union. The Burdzhalov affair of 1956-1957 and the Nekrich affair of the second half of the 1960s illustrated the difficulties of writing history in the post-Stalin p e r i ~ d . ~ To judge by the fact that a conference was held in Voronezh in May 1984 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Stalin’s key decree on history teaching, the textbooks written in the 1930s are still considered worthy of note.4

Yet the attention which scholars have paid to nineteenth- and twentieth- century Russian historiography should not be allowed to obscure the fact that Russian bureaucrats found historical writing a complicated issue at least fifty years before Uvarov called for a textbook of Russian history in the 1830s. The problem of history teaching surfaced in Russia as soon as Catherine the Great established her Commission on Popular Schools in 1782. Although the Commission rapidly succeeded in publishing textbooks for many of the disciplines in which it was arranging instruction, the textbook of Russian history, A Short Russian History, Published for the Benefit of the Popular Schools of the Russian Empire, did not appear until 1799.5 What follows is an attempt to explain why the Schools Commission found Russian history an intractable subject. History teaching in eighteenth-century Russia was dealt with by Vitalii Eingorn in 1909 and J. L. Black in 1976, but Eingorn lacked some pertinent information and Black set his work in a rather narrowly Russian context.6 These considerations make returning to the field worthwhile.

I

Part of the problem with writing or teaching history in the eighteenth century, whether in Russia or elsewhere, lay in the uncertain intellectual standing of the discipline. Dr Johnson held that ‘There is but a shallow stream of thought in history.” Boswell disagreed, and so, it appears, did the English reading public, for in eighteenth-century England history books were in plentiful

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supply. A certain Dr Howell, whose Ancient and Present State of England was in its ninth edition by 1734, included in his preface a justification of history which epitomized a second eighteenth-century approach to the subject:

It is so genuine and familiar to men of all estates, [. . .] so agreeable to the inclination, and suitable to the honour of all: so delightful in the perusing, and profitable in the retention, [.. .I that amongst the many elogies [sic] it hath received from the learned pieces of ancient and modern writers, it may be justly accounted rather the recreation than the application of a studious man.*

Most eighteenth-century readers of history would probably have been satisfied with this, the ‘light entertainment’ view of the subject’s value. Some luminar- ies, however, made far greater claims. Leaving Johnson and Howell far behind, the stars of the European Enlightenment found a third approach to history, treating it as a quarry from which new resources for the analysis of man could be excavated. ‘Philosophic’ historians - Hume in Scotland, Gibbon in England, Voltaire in France - anticipated the way in which, a hundred years after their death, J . R . Seeley was to encourage historians to ‘break the drowsy spell of narrative’. ‘Having read three or four thousand descriptions of battles and the terms of some hundreds of treaties’, Voltaire wrote, ‘I have found that at bottom I was scarcely more enlightened.’ He wanted historians to ask more questions of their material, to ‘seek out what has been the root vice and the dominant virtue of a nation; why it has been powerful or weak upon the seas; how and to what degree it has added to its wealth over a century’, and ‘how arts and manufacturing have established themselves’. Only then would ‘our knowledge [...I be of the history of men rather than a small part of the history of kings and court^'.^ Voltaire’s concern for the general rather than the particular exemplified the view of the past which was most widely diffused amongst eighteenth-century intellectuals, but at least two more approaches found sophisticated representatives. Montesquieu has been held by Hugh Trevor-Roper to differ radically from Voltaire. Whilst Voltaire found in the past only what he was looking for, Montesquieu, according to Trevor- Roper, displayed more empiricism.’” Carl Becker and R. G. Collingwood would have taken issue with Trevor-Roper’s opinion,” but Leonard Krieger has pointed out that the concern for historical sources which was so marked a feature of the seventeenth century survived into the eighteenth and provided at least a modicum of empiricism in that age of abstraction.12 Finally, Giambat- tista Vico expounded a view of the past which differed radically from the views of his contemporaries. At the opposite end of the spectrum from Dr Johnson, Vico argued that history offered the widest scope for the exercise of man’s intellectual powers. The natural world was not a human creation, and could therefore be appreciated only from the point of view of the observer. History, on the other hand, was man-made, and could be understood from the point of view of the insider. Vico was a lone voice at the time he wrote, but his belief that it was possible to get under the skin of the past was to be shared, consciously or unconsciously, by Herder, Barthold Niebuhr, von Ranke, and Michelet. l3

Which of these views of the past found expression in eighteenth-century

History teaching in late eighteenth-century Russia 141

Russia? Certainly not Dr Johnson’s idea that history was unworthy of much attention, for the past of their own country, if not that of other parts of the world, seemed to exercise the minds of an increasing number of Russians. G. N. Moiseeva pointed out near the beginning of her recent book, Old Russian Literature in the Artistic Consciousness and Historical Thought of Eighteenth- Century Russia, that Peter the Great, for all his determination to bring Russia into line with western Europe, did not turn his back on the history of the country he was trying to transform. On the contrary, he showed considerable interest in it. By ordering a copy of the Radziwill chronicle on his way through Konigsberg in 171 1, he provided eighteenth-century historians of Russia with a source they were to find invaluable. In 1720 and 1722 he ordered the collection of manuscripts belonging to churches and monasteries and their despatch to the library of the Holy Synod. Above all, ‘he set a target - the composition of an all-embracing work on the history of Russia’. l4 Catherine the Great went further and wrote her own Notes on Russian History. Ambiva- lent in her attitude towards Peter, she focused on Russia’s beginnings and gave the medieval period a prominence which was unusual amongst ‘Enlightened’ historians. l5

Perhaps the rulers of Russia took an interest in the past for special reasons - to deepen their understanding of the lands for which they were responsible, or to demonstrate by implication the superiority of the new to the old. But Russian history did not appeal only to the country’s rulers. Furious historical controversy broke out in the Academy of Sciences at the end of the 1740s, when M. V. Lomonosov took violent exception to G. F. Muller’s theses on the ethnic origins of the Russian people. The question of the ‘Norman’ contribution to the foundation of the Russian state troubled intellectuals for the rest of the century (and has never been laid to rest).16 More importantly, a non-specialist readership seemed to be attracted by history. The frequent re-publication of the first printed Russian history book, the Kievan Synopsis of 1674, attested to the fact.” August Ludwig Schlozer, the German historian who spent the years 1761-1767 in Russia, asserted that ‘the half-educated Russian’ was interested in all sorts of reading matter, but especially in works which related to the history of his own country. This was demonstrated, Schlozer claimed, by ‘the custom which had spread amongst both high and low, even amongst the completely uneducated, of collecting chronicles of all sorts’. Schlozer believed that the Russian government ought not to have gone on reprinting the Synopsis but to have published a chronicle instead. The financial risk, in his view, would have been entirely justifiable, for the publi- cation would have been snapped up greedily.I8

In the 1760s and 1770s the public’s appetite for Russian history books began to be satisfied. Lomonosov published his Short Russian Chronicle in 1760 and his History of Russia to 1054 in 1766. Fedor Emin’s three-volume Russian history began appearing in 1767, V. N. Tatishchev’s history in 1768, and Prince M. M. Shcherbatov’s in 1770. A. I. Mankiev’s Kernel of Russian History, written in 1715, was published in 1770, Aleksandr Sumarokov’s Short Muscovite Chronicle in 1774, and Schlozer’s brief Depiction of Russian History at about the same time. Nikolai Novikov began making documents available

142 David Saunders

in his periodical A n Ancient Russian Library (1773-1775), and the Ukrainian Vasyl Ruban published a Short Chronicle of Little Russia in 1777. For the well educated reader, Voltaire’s History of Peter the Great, in French, and Muller’s History of Siberia, in German, became available in the early 1760s. Yet despite this proliferation of books on Russia’s past, Catherine the Great’s Schools Commission took seventeen years to publish a Russian history textbook. Why the delay?

The ordinary reader probably tended to be attracted chiefly by the history of his own country, whereas the Schools Commissioners took a broader view of the subject. Their attitude to the past belonged neither to the school which looked down on it, nor to the school which looked upon it as the ‘recreation of a studious man’, but to the school of Voltaire, the school which saw history as ‘philosophy teaching by examples’. The guiding light of the Schools Commission, the Serbian Jankovich de Mirjevo, would have had little truck with the approach to history teaching advocated by G. R. Elton in his 1984 inaugural lecture at Cambridge. ‘We do not teach well’, Elton said, ‘if we do not compel attention to long stretches of English h is t~ry . ’ ’~ Had Russia’s eighteenth-century pedagogues been ‘Eltonians’ avant la lettre, they would have obliged history teachers to concentrate on the history of Russia. But ‘single-country’ or ‘national’ history did not loom large in their thinking, for they were more interested in the general than the particular. Their pride in the uniformity of the Russian educational system implied a belief in its harmony and balance, which would have been disturbed by the undue allo- cation of teaching time to Russian rather than general history.2” Jankovich made plain his view of the past in a textbook of universal history which he published for schools in 1787:

The value of history is this. It supplies us with various subjects to reflect upon. The examples it adduces incline our hearts to the imitation of beneficent deeds and to the repudiation of vices. Through its agency we understand the reasons why the human race has become better or worse, why states have waxed or waned, how sciences, arts, and other human creations have developed and flowered, and what effect they have had on behaviour and human life. History offers us a representation of all the activities of the human race, from the beginning of the world to the present. We are entertained by reading it, and we used it to extend out other sorts of knowledge.21

These sentiments owed some allegiance to the notion of history as entertain- ment, but more to the subject’s capacity for instruction. Jankovich would no doubt have shared the view of F. 1. Kreideman, one of the Schools Commissioners, that the educational value of history was impaired by too much attention to detail. In arguing the case for compressing the study of history at university level into six months rather than a year, Kreideman asserted, in 1786, that:

history teaching does not depend on multiplicity of circumstance and detailed narration, but on appropriate combination and a proper breakdown of the whole. Although it is well known that in many universities a whole year is spent on history, it is also well known how little the teachers observe the aforementioned rule and how frequently they give way to their inclination to talk, priding themselves on their extensive knowledge and thereby burdening the student or confusing him.22

History teaching in late eighteenth-century Russia 143

For Kreideman, history teaching had to range widely and avoid concentration on any point in time or space. It should point a moral here and draw a conclusion there, but ought not to encourage empiricism, let alone projection into the past. Kreideman would not have been happy with H. A. L. Fisher’s view of the past as ‘the play of the contingent and the unforeseen’. It was hardly surprising, given his opinions, that in the teaching schedules of Catherine the Great’s Main Popular Schools three times as many lessons were allocated to universal history as to the history of Russia.23 Had the allocation been the other way round, an unwanted and even damaging specialization might have been allowed to creep in. If pupils lamented, as one of them did, that at the end of their years in school they knew more about the Punic Wars than about Russia’s battles with the Tartars, Kreideman had no reason to complain.24

I1 Yet Russia’s Commission on Popular Schools eventually produced the 1799 textbook of Russian history, and was only partly to blame for the fact that its publication was so long delayed. The Commissioners’ lack of enthusiasm for the subject was only one of the reasons for the book’s belated appearance. Another sprang from the fact that many of the Commission’s textbooks derived from Austrian or Serbian models, and no model existed for a textbook of Russian history.= Since the history books which had already appeared in Russia tended to be either too short or too long to serve as texts, the Schools Commissioners had to provide a work which was wholly new. Their eventual success might even appear to be praiseworthy in view of what happened in the no less difficult field of Russian grammar. Whereas the Short Russian History was published in 1799, A. A. Barsov’s Russian Grammar first saw the light of day in 1981.26

The problem of bringing a new work of history into being was complicated by the shortage of potential authors. Of the native candidates, Prince Shcher- batov was still active, but he probably seemed too grand for such an apparently straightforward undertaking. Since he was unsympathetic towards the moder- nization process epitomized by the Schools Commission, he would probably have refused the brief anyway.27 Lomonosov, Emin, Tatishchev, Mankiev, and Sumarokov were dead, whilst history was only a relatively minor interest for the journalist Ruban and the publisher Novikov. Russia’s ‘professional’ historians, meanwhile - those attached to the Academy of Sciences and the Moscow Archive of the College of Foreign Affairs- differed, in their approach to the past, both from the Schools Commission and from the potential reader of history books. Almost all Germans, they were collectors of information rather than synthesizers, the Russian equivalent of Western Europe’s Bollan- dists and Maurists. They were right, no doubt, to believe that the spadework for a history of Russia had to be done before the history itself could be written, but their devotion to scholarship created two problems. It conflicted with the fact that the Schools Commission needed a book for children, and it militated against the Commission’s need to hurry.

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The best of the Germans, moreover, were dead or unavailable. Gottlieb Bayer, the true instigator of the Normanist controversy, had died in 1738.2R Schlozer was still under fifty, but had been working in Germany since the end of the 1760s. Gerhard Muller, the leading historian in government service, was in his late seventies. All these were figures sufficiently weighty to have been thought worthy of scholars’ a t ten t i~n , ’~ but the last of the Germans, the man whom the Schools commission chose to write its textbook, was less distinguished than his predecessors. Only by rescuing him from the near- oblivion into which he has fallen can the picture of the Commission’s historio- graphical difficulties be completed.

Johann Gotthilf Stritter was born in 1740 and came to Russia in 1766 through the mediation of Schlozer, who was about to go home. Until 1779 he worked in the gymnasium of the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg, but then, at Muller’s request, he moved to Moscow and became his assistant. When Muller died, he replaced him as director of the Moscow foreign affairs archive, and ran it, in conjunction with Nikolai Bantysh-Kamenskii, until his retirement in 1800. In the classic study of Russian historical writing, N. L. Rubinshtein alluded only to one of Stritter’s publications, a multi-volume production entitled Byzantine Historians’ Information Pertaining to the Remote Period of Russian History and to the Migration of Peoples.30 Stritter, however, worked in many fields. He supplied materials for the continuation of Novikov’s periodical A n Ancient Russian Library, translated part of Patrick Gordon’s seventeenth-century diary into German, published a sixteenth-century chron- icle which dealt with the khanate of Kazan, and composed a number of articles, among them one of the first manifestations of Russian sinology, ‘A Historical and Geographical Description of the Town of Peking’.31 Three volumes of his History of the Russian State, the eventual product of his work for the commission on Popular Schools, found their way into print at the beginning of the nineteenth century, just before and just after the author’s death in 1801.32 The character and long gestation of this magnum opus had much to do with the fact that the Schools Commission’s Short Russian History did not appear until 1799.

When P. V. Zavadovskii, head of the Schools Commission, invited Stritter to take on the writing of a textbook of Russian history in September 1783,33 he sent him a ‘Plan for the Composition of a History of Russia’, drawn up by Jankovich de Mirjevo. Two versions of the plan exist, one in manuscript and one in print.34 The manuscript version is not only fuller, but differs from the printed version in that it envisages dividing Russian history into three periods rather than two, the third (additional) period beginning with the accession of Catherine the Great. The manuscript version of the plan seems to confirm the impression that Jankovich exemplified the Enlightenment, for the principal chronological concerns of ‘Enlightened’ thinkers were best expressed in a tripartite division of the past. Eighteenth-century historians paid particular attention to the age of antiquity and the modern rebirth of reason. The Middle Ages, sarcastically dubbed the ‘Christian centuries’, were supposed to have marked ‘the triumph of barbarism and religion’, and were held to be worth looking at only insofar as they illustrated what happened when the virtues of

History teaching in late eighteenth-century Russia 145

the ancients were abandoned and the blessings of the heavenly city of rational- ism had not yet been conceived. Jankovich may have drawn up a tripartite scheme of Russian history in order to get this message across. He certainly intended the forthcoming textbook to be didactic in tone, for the last of the general remarks with which his plan ended instructed the prospective author to write in such a way that ‘every important event or affair served either to encourage or to warn men of the present and the future’.35

But if Jankovich really hoped to procure a ‘philosophical’ textbook of Russian history, the Schools Commission had chosen the wrong man to write it; for Stritter was the sort of historian who worked on a little bit of ivory rather than on the broad canvas. The German accepted the Commission’s brief enthusiastically. He had long intended, he said, to write a history of Russia, and he had collected materials on the early centuries of Russian history whilst still in St Petersburg. Now that he was in Moscow, he considered himself even better placed than in the past, since he had the foreign affairs archive to work with and the papers and books of Gerhard Muller.36 At the end of October 1783 he sent the first-fruits of his endeavours to Zavadovskii, together with a list of general observations on the matter in hand.

Stritter considered it his first duty to write down only what he knew to be true; the work of Tatischev, he added sternly, had to be used with particular care. He was alive to the need for clarity of expression. He thought it necessary to add notes to his work when he differed from other historians, but he confessed, in a rare moment of praticality, that citing the authors from whom he lifted his material was superfluous in a book for schoolchildren. He voiced sensible views on the provision of genealogical tables and maps, but sounded an ominous note in the last two of his general observations. Since he had been given no instructions on overall length, he proposed to write not only for schoolchildren but for their teachers. ‘However, it is possible’, he added, ‘that it will be useful to make the pupils a short checklist on the basis of my work.’ Fifteen years later, this was more or less what Jankovich had to do. Finally, Stritter announced his intention, given time, to write a ‘full critical history of the Russian empire, which would contain not only what was necessary for the instruction of youth, but also what scholars would require’. Although he claimed that for the time being he would hurry on with his textbook, in practice he was already embarked upon the greater work. Subsequent developments showed that he found it difficult to avoid getting bogged down in detail. With some reservations, the Schools Commission approved his initial effort, but it should probably have taken a firmer line.37 In November 1783 Stritter was already admitting: ‘Hour by hour I see more clearly that my work will not be the sort of compendium that would be called for, for example, in German gymnasia or schools; but I humbly consider that clarity, suitability for the schools here, and the great number of affairs in which the glorious Russian people has been involved do not admit of the composition of such a brief che~k l i s t . ’~~ In March 1784 Stritter regretted that the exigencies of the task did not allow him to make progress with the speed he would have liked, and in September he apologized for the fact that the further he got with his work, the more difficulties confronted him.39

146 David Saunders

In 1787, however, Stritter completed his treatment of the first period in Jankovich’s plan, which covered the years from Riurik to the accession of Ivan I11 in 1462. Catherine the Great declared that no fuller history of the period existed, and recommended the making of a suitable textbook out of Stritter’s extensive account and her own Notes on Russian History, which had started to appear at the time Stritter was hired.40 In July and August 1787 a thirty-page summary of Stritter’s work to date appeared in the journal New Monthly Essays, and the author explained to the Schools Commission that this summary could be continued and used in schools, especially if genealogical tables were added to it.41 It looked as if Stritter was now on the right lines, producing both the ‘full critical history’ of which he had spoken in 1783 and a very much reduced version of it for use in schools. He continued to send instalments of his work to the Schools Commission between 1787 and 1789.

By the second half of the 1780s, however, Stritter’s work had lost favour in the eyes of the Commission. Probably for a mixture of practical, financial, pedagogical, and political reasons, the Commissioners delayed publication of the first part of the full-length History. In March 1787 Zavadovskii explained to Stritter that his work was being held up by the fact that many other books needed by the Commission were in the press. Breitkopf, the printer, could not handle everything at once, and even if he had been able to do so, the Commission would not have been able to bear the cost. Its budget was not large, and it was going through the most intense period of its activity. The teaching of universal history had been or was being catered for, and since Russian history played a much smaller part in the curriculum, teachers were obliged to cope with it as best they could, without the advantage of a textbook. By the end of the 1780s, moreover, the impetus behind educational innovation in Catherine’s Russia was falling away. The French Revolution had begun, ‘enlightenment’ was no longer an enticing prospect, and the government’s need for Stritter’s History had dimini~hed.~’

I11

It was not until the reign of Paul I that history teaching again became a matter of concern to the Schools Commission. In March 1797 an instructor at the teacher training college in St Petersburg, Il’ia Iakovkin, drew to the Commission’s attention the fact that the chronological tables which ought to have been provided for use in the teaching of universal history had never been published. Iakovkin had drawn up such a table, and offered it for the Commission’s consideration. He had also completed a second volume of universal history to add to that written by Jankovich and published in 1787, and he offered the Commission a 30 per cent discount on the remaining copies of the chronological tables which went with it.43 Iakovkin had been on the staff of the teacher training college since 1789 and perhaps carried some weight with his superiors.4 If he was pressing them to do more in the field of universal history, they may have felt the need to do more for Russian history as well. They may also have been influenced by events in the provinces, for in the

History teaching in late eighteenth-century Russia 147

same year, 1797, an anonymous two-hundred-page Children’s History of Russia was published by the Department of Public Welfare (prikaz obshchest- vennogo prizreniia) in Smolensk. This work seemed to do everything that was required of a basic textbook for schools and had been published by one of the very bodies to which the Schools Commission habitually sent its publication^.^^ Early in 1798, Iakovkin offered the Commissioners his own extremely cursory account of Russian history, fifty copies of which they distributed.& Meanwhile, in Nikolaev, a certain Petr Zakhar’in published a work of history entitled A New Synopsis, echoing the title of the Kiev publication of 1674 and indicating that in the south, as well as in Belorussia, there was a potential demand for books about Russia’s past .47 In the light of these developments, Jankovich may have felt obliged to look to his laurels. Other elements may have contributed to his renewed interest in history teaching. In the light of the controversy evoked in Russia by the Russian histories of the Frenchmen LeClerc and Levesque, the tsarist government may have felt increasingly strongly that it was time to publish a history which carried official approval.48 The government certainly believed that new history books were needed in the lands which had become Russian as a result of the partitions of Poland.49 Whatever his reason, in October 1798 Jankovich presented the Schools Com- mission with the Short Russian History which appeared the following year .50

Apparently written on the basis of materials collected by Stritter, the book won Schlozer’s approval and was translated by him into German.”

The Schools Commission’s renewed interest in history did not peter out with the publication of the 1799 textbook. Its change of heart benefited the languishing Stritter, who had been pressing on with his magnum opus. By 1797 he had brought it down to the death of Ivan the Terrible in 1584, but he had not been sending the instalments to St Petersburg because he had become convinced that the History would not be printed in Russia.52 Now, after an eight-year gap, the Schools Commission re-opened its dealings with him. It must have envisaged maintaining contact for a long time to come, for in December 1797 it asked him to treat the reign of Peter the Great particularly fully.53 Since, at his current rate of progress, Stritter was unlikely to reach the eighteenth century for many years, the Schools Commission had clearly revised its estimation of the importance of historical writing. Its most forthright expression of attachment to the subject emerged at the end of its twenty-year existence. In 1800, 1801, and 1802 it published three volumes of Stritter’s History of the Russian State, covering the period from the beginning to 1462. The work was incomplete and had gone far beyond the terms of the original invitation, but the Schools Commissioners made much of it in the extensive report on their activities which they submitted to Alexander I in May 1801.54 Their lack of concern for Russian history had become, as it were, a thing of the past.

Stritter died two months before the report of May 1801, and within about two years Nikolai Karamzin became Official Historiographer of the Russian Empire and recommenced the task of writing a full-length history of When Karamzin’s work began appearing in 1818, it left that of his immediate predecessor in the shade. Yet the earliest historian of Russian historical

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writing rated Stritter’s History more highly than the works of Tatishchev and Shcherbatov which preceded it,s6 and for a brief period it was the standard history book for the educated Russian reader. V. V. Kapnist used it when working on his translation of the medieval Russian epic, The Lay of Zgor’s Campaign, and the playwright V. A. Ozerov availed himself of it when writing Dimitrii Don~ko i .~ ’ Stritter’s three volumes constituted the best single indication that Catherine the Great’s Schools Commission engaged in the advancement of learning as well as the provision of lessons for the young.

Whatever the extent, however, to which Stritter enhanced the lustre of the Schools Commission, neither he, nor Jankovich, nor the Smolensk author of the Children’s History of Russia, nor Iakovkin, nor Zakhar’in’s New Synopsis, solved even temporarily the problem of teaching Russian schoolchildren the history of their own country. S. S. Uvarov, with whom this paper began, wrote a pamphlet on history teaching in 1813 in which he condemned, by omission, the history books produced in Russia in the 1780s and 1790s. They were still in print - Jankovich’s Short Russian History reached its ninth editon in 182758 - but Uvarov passed over them in silence.” The Russian educational system was by this time different from the system which had been created in the 1780s, and textbooks were needed at secondary and tertiary as well as at primary levels. In addition to the enlargement of the system, a more important change was afoot: the past was becoming a more complicated subject of study. When Romanticism overtook Enlightenment, history ceased to be monochrome and became a coat of many colours. The large and varied reception accorded to Karamzin’s History in 1818 (and afterwards) showed the degree of controversy which historical writing could now excite.60 History had ceased to be merely recreational, and could no longer provide the subjects of an autocratic ruler with unequivocal object-lessons. As a result, the work of Russia’s eighteenth-century historians stopped satisfying even the unde- manding general reader, let alone the Russian government. Not even the most wide-ranging universal history of the period of the Enlightenment - and certainly not a heavily antiquarian history of Russia - was going to succeed in impressing upon nineteenth-century Russians the lessons which the govern- ment wanted them to learn. Readers, and perhaps even the authorities, were becoming increasingly sophisticated. In the changed circumstances, the historiographical activity of Catherine the Great’s Commission left few traces.

David Saunders University of Newcastle upon Tyne

1.

2. 3.

David B. Saunders, ‘Historians and Concepts of Nationality in Early Nineteenth-Century Russia’, Slavonic and East European Review, 60 (1982). 58-61. Geoffrey Hosking, A History of the Soviet Union (London, 1985), pp.217-18 Merle Fainsod, ‘Soviet Russian Historians, or: the Lesson of Burdzhalov’, Encounter, 18, 110.3 (March 1962), 82-89; Daniel R. Brower, ‘The Soviet Union and the German Invasion of 1941: A New Soviet View’, Journal of Modern History, 41 (1969), 327-34. V. A. Murav’ev, ‘K 50-letiiu postanovleniia SNK SSSR i TsK VKP(b) “0 prepodavanii 4.

History teaching in late eighteenth-century Russia 149

5.

6 .

7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

grazhdanskoi istorii v shkolakh SSSR”’, Istoriia SSSR, 6 (1984), 212-13. For an attempt to distinguish patterns in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian historical writing, see David Saunders, ‘The Political Ideas of Russian Historians’, Historical Journal, 27 (1984), 757-71. Anon., Kratkaia rossiiskaia istoriia, izdannaia v pol’zu narodnykh uchilishch rossiiskoi imperii (St Petersburg, 1799). On the authorship of this work, see section 111, below. Vitalii Eingorn, ‘Prepodavanie istorii v Moskovskom glavnom narodnom uchilishche (1786- 1802)’, in Sbornik statei, posviashchennykh Vasiliiu Osipovichu Kliuchevskomu (Moscow, 1909), pp.765-90; J. L. Black, ‘The Search for a “Correct” Textbook of National History in 18th-Century Russia’, New Review of East-European History, 16 (1976), 3-19. Eingorn lacked the manuscript evidence pertaining to J. G. Stritter, utilized below. Boswell, Life of Johnson (London, Oxford, New York, 1970), p.495. Dr Howell. The Ancient and Present State of England, 9th ed. (London, 1734), author’s preface. Jack Lively, The Enlightenment (London, 1966), pp.75-76. Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The Historical Philosophy of the Enlightenment’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 27 (1963), 1667-87. Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Cenrury Philosophers (New Haven, Conn. and London, 1932), pp.112-16; R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (London,

Leonard Krieger, Kings and Philosophers 1689-1789 (London, 1971), p.167. Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London, 1976), pp.1- 142. G. N. Moiseeva, Drevnerusskaia literatura v khudozhestvennom soznanii i istoricheskoi mysli Rossii XVlIl veka (Leningrad, 1980), p.20. Karen Rasmussen, ‘Catherine I1 and the Image of Peter I’, Slavic Review, 37 (1978), 58, 60. Dimitri Obolensky, ‘The Varangian-Russian Controversy: the First Round’, in History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper, ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl, and Blair Worden (London, 1981), pp.232-42; Alexander V. Riasanovsky, ‘Ideological and Political Extensions of the ‘Norman’ Controversy’, in Nation and Ideology: Essays in Honor of Wayne S. Vucinich, ed. Ivo Banac, John G. Ackerman, and Roman Szporluk (Boulder, Colorado, 1981), pp.335-50. S. Maslov, ‘K istorii izdanii kievskogo “Sinopsisa”’, in Sbornik statei v chest’ akademika Alekseia Ivanovicha Sobolevskogo, ed. V. N. Perets (Leningrad, 1928 [Sbornik otdeleniia russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti Akademii nauk SSSR, 91, no 3]), pp.341-48. ‘Obshchestvennaia i chastnaia zhizn’ Avgusta Liudviga Shletsera, im samim opisannaia‘, Sbornik otdeleniia russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti Imperatorskoi Akademii nauk, 13 (1875),

G. R. Elton, The History of England: Inaugural Lecture (Cambridge, 1984), p.27. On the Schools Commissioners’ pride in the uniformity of the educational system they had established, see their report to Alexander I of May 1801: ‘0 dostavlenii Kommissiei v Nepremennyi Sovet polnogo svedeniia o shkolakh, sostoiashchikh pod ee rasporiazheniem’, in Sbornik materialov dlia istorii proveshcheniia v Rossii, izvlechennykh iz Arkhiva Mini- sterstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia (St Petersburg, 1893-1902), I , 331,335. (This documen- tary collection is cited hereafter as Sbornik materialov.) F. I. Iankovich (Jankovich), Vsemirnaia istoriia izdannaia dfia narodnykh uchilishch rossiis- koi imperii, I (St Petersburg, 1787), 1-2. Materialy dlia istorii uchebnykh reform v Rossii v XVIII-XIX vekakh, ed. S. V. Rozhdestven- skii (St Petersburg, 1910), p.364. Pupils studied universal history for four hours a week in class three and for four hours a week in each of the two years of class four, whereas they studied Russian history only for two hours a week in each of the two years of class four: F. I. Iankovich, Ustav narodnym

1961), pp.78-79.

50-5 1.

150 David Saunders

24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

37. 38 39 40 41

42

uchilishcham v rossiiskoi imperii (St Petersburg, 1786), 2nd appendix, ‘Raspolozhenie uchebnykh predmetov i chasov Glavnogo narodnogo uchilishcha’. F. P. Lubianovskii, Vospominaniia 1777-1834 (Moscow, 1872), pp.38-39 For a list of the Russian textbooks derived from Austrian or Serbian models, see I. Matl’, ‘F. Ia. [sic] Iankovich i avstro-serbsko-russkie sviazi v istorii narodnogo obrazovaniia v Rossii’. Vosemnadtsatyi vek, 10 (1975). 79-80. Lawrence W. Newman, ‘The Unpublished Grammar (1783-88) of A. A. Barsov’, Russian Linguistics, 2 (1975), 286-88; A. A. Barsov, Rossiiskaia grammatika, ed. B. A. Uspenskii and M. P. Tobolova (Moscow, 1981). Shcherbatov’s political views were not wholly reactionary, but in the mid-1780s he was to write his conservative tract, On fhe Corruption of Morals in Russia, which Alexander Herzen, its first publisher, contrasted with Radishchev’s contemporaneous (and radical) Journey f rom St Petersburg to Moscow: see 0 povrezhdenii nravov v Rossii kniazia M . Shcherbatova i Puteshestvie A . Radishcheva s predisloviem Iskandera (Moscow, 1983, facsimile of London edition of 1858), p.V (‘Prince Shcherbatov and A. Radishchev represent two extreme attitudes towards Catherine’s Russia’). Ocher-ki isforii istoricheskoi nauki v SSSR, ed. M. N. Tikhomirov et al. (Moscow, 1955-), I, 191. On Bayer, see n.28; on Schlozer and Muller see, for example, S. L. Peshtich, Russkaia istoriograjiia X V I I I veka (Leningrad, 1961-1971), 11, 210-42. N. L. Rubinshtein, Russkaia istoriograjiia (Moscow, 1941), pp.128, 157-58. For brief details of Stritter’s activities and a bibliography of the earlier works from which these facts are taken, see Slavianovedenie v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii: biobibliograficheskii slovar’ (Moscow. 1979), p.375; for Stritter’s publications, see also Svodnyi katalog russkoi knigigrazhdanskoipechati XVlll veka: 1725-1800, ed. I . P. Kondakov et al. (Moscow, 1962-

Ivan Stritter, Istoriia rossiiskogo gosudarstva (St Petersburg: Commission on the Establish- ment of Schools, 1800-1802). Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (hereafter TsGIA), fond 730, opis’ 1, delo 37 (‘Perepiska s sovetnikom Stritterom o sostavlenii Rossiiskoi istorii i dostavlenii ee v Komissiiu’), list 3. TsGIA 73011l3714-7; A. Starchevskii, Ocherk literatury russkoi istorii do Karamzina (St Petersburg, 1845), pp.236-41. TsGIA 7301113716. TsGIA 7301113718. Miiller had been collecting materials for a history of Russia since arriving in the country in the 1720s: see Uchenaia korrespondentsiia Akademiia nauk 1766-1782, ed. I. I. Liubimenko (Moscow and Leningrad, 1937: Trudy Arkhiva A N SSSR, 11), pp.165, 171. TsGIA 73011137110- 13. TsGIA 73011137117. TsGIA 73Qlll37123, 31. A. N. Pypin, ‘Istoricheskie trudy imp. Ekateriny 11’, Vestnik Evropy, 9 (1901), p.172. I. Stritter, ‘Obozrenie rossiiskoi imperii ot osnovaniia rossiiskogo gosudarstva do po- bedonosnykh vremen Rosii. Ot 862 goda PO 1462 god’, Novye ezhemesiachnye sochineniia, 13 (July 1787), 3-16; 14 (August 1787), 3-21. These articles appeared anonymously, but for Stritter’s authorship see TsGIA 73011137166-7. TsGIA 73011137165 (Zavadovskii to Stritter, March 1787). On the financing of Catherine the Great’s educational reforms, see Isabel de Madariaga, ‘The Foundation of the Russian Educational System by Catherine II’, Slavonic and East European Review, 57 (1979), 391. On textbooks of universal history (apart from that of Jankovich, cited in 11.21, above), see TsGIA 73011125, which deals with the translation into Russian, between 1783 and 1785, of the work of Johann Matthias Schrockh. On the fact that teachers had to cope with Russian history without the advantage of a textbook, see Eingorn, ‘Prepodavanie’ (n.6, above),

1975), I, 410-11; 111, 175; IV, 174, 219-20, 226.

History teaching in late eighteenth-century Russia 151

43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

58.

59.

60.

pp.778-79. On Catherine’s mistrust of ‘enlightenment’ after 1789, see Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (London, 1981). pp.540-41. TsGIA 730/1/183/1. TsGIA 730/1/191/22 (brief details of Iakovkin’s career from a 1794 list of promotions). Detskaia rossiiskaia istoriia, izdannaia v pol’zu obuchaiushchegosia iunoshestva (Smolensk, 1797). On this work see Eingorn, ‘Prepodavanie’, p.781, and on the close links between the Schools Commission and Departments of Public Welfare see Sbornik materialov (11.20, above), pp.332-34, I. Iakovkin, Letoschislitel’noe izobrazhenie rossiiskoi istorii (St Petersburg, 1798); TsGIA 730/1/183/9. P. M. Zakhar’in, Novyi Sinopsis ili kratkoe opisanie o proiskhozhdenii slavenorossiiskogo naroda (Nikolaev, 1798). On LeClerc and Levesque see Hans Rogger, National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), pp.227-28, 245-46. Sbornik materialov (see n.20), pp.383, 394. TsGIA 730/1/183/36. Svodnyi katalog (see n.31), 111, 457. TsGIA 730/1/37/101. TsGIA 730/1/37/108. Sbornik materialov (see n.20), p.335 For Karamzin’s appointment see J . L. Black, Nicholas Karamzin and Russian Society in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Russian Political and Historical Thought (Toronto and Buffalo, New York, 1975), p.3. Starchevskii, Ocherk literatury (see n.34), p.281 F. Ia. Priima, ‘Slovo o polku Igoreve’ v russkom istoriko-literaturnom protsesse pervoi treti X IX veka (Leningrad, 1976), p.76; Moiseeva, Drevnerusskaia literatura (see n.14), p.181. L. L. Dodon, ‘Uchebnaia literatura russkoi narodnoi shkoly vtoroi poloviny XVIII veka i rol’ F. I. Iankovicha v ee sozdanii’, Uchenye zapiski Leningradskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo instifuta im. A.1, Gertsena, 118 (1955). 189, n.2. S. S. Uvarov, 0 prepodavanii istorii otnositel’no k narodnomu vospitaniia (St Petersburg, 1813), especially p.5. I am grateful to Professor J . L. Black for providing me with a copy of this work. See, for example, the book by J. L. Black cited in n.55, above, and V. P. Kozlov, ‘Polemika vokrug “Istorii gosudarstva Rossiiskogo” N. M. Karamzina v otechestvennoi periodike (1818-1830gg.)’. Istoriia SSSR 5 (1984). 88-102.

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