Personality and Place in Russian Culture || Personality and Place

Personality and PlaceAuthor(s): SIMON DIXONSource: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 88, No. 1/2, Personality and Place inRussian Culture (January/April 2010), pp. 1-13Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20780407 .

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SEER, Vol. 88, Nos. 1/2, January /April 2010

INTRODUCTION

Personality and Place SIMON DIXON

In what must surely be one of the most evocative recreations of a

sense of place in any language, Richard Cobb (1917-96) conjured up an English childhood of the 1920s and 1930s in the Royal Borough of

Tunbridge Wells. Still Life recalls a favourite gate, associated with a

particular birthday; a small boy's fantasies about the giant ferns near

the town centre (cThe Congo, Java, Borneo, the Gran Chaco lay, for

those in the know, within a few hundred yards of the Pantiles and of

[the church of] King Charles the Martyr'); mental snapshots, captured on teenage cycle-rides, to be savoured in a bleak moment (there were

many) at Shrewsbury School.1 Above all, however, Cobb recovers 'a

society based on elaborate, if unstated, hierarchies of class relations of

considerable subtlety'.2 Mount Ephraim ? home to 'the best dentists

(but not the best doctors, less ostentatious) and elderly retired female

courtiers' ? sat comfortably enough alongside aspirant, respectable, snobbish Mount Sion. But neither sensed much fellow feeling for 'the

ill-defined population of Monson Road and Calverley Road', still less

for the menacing inhabitants of neighbouring High Brooms ? 'not a

place, just a sordid word'.3 did not know anything about the Russian

Revolution', Cobb admitted, 'though there were flag-days and collections

in King Charles for the Relief of the Famine in the Ukraine. But I

certainly did know about class antagonism and class fear.'4

Swanscombe, where Lindsey Hughes (1949-2007) was born, and

nearby Dartford, where she went to school, lay in an altogether less prosperous part of Kent than the Royal Borough. Increasingly

Simon Dixon is Sir Bernard Pares Professor of Russian History at UCL SSEES. I am grateful to my friend Jim Cutshall for helping me with this essay in so many ways,

both spoken and unspoken. 1 R. Cobb, Still Life: Sketches from a Tunbridge Weih Childhood, London, 1984 edn, pp. 9 and

passim. 2 Ibid., , xiii.

3 Ibid., pp. 6, 7, 18, 30 (p. 18). 4 Ibid., p. 32.



2 PERSONALITY AND PLAGE

indistinguishable from the sprawling suburbs stretched out along London's eastern edge, they could boast none of Mount Ephraim's fading Regency charm; their shops were no match for the fashionable

Pantiles; their air was not so clean (until the 1990s, Swanscombe was a

centre of the cement industry).5 Yet behind the ubiquitous net curtains, 'the minutely defined frontiers separating middle class from lower

middle class'6 were just as valiantly defended in the flatlands of the

post-war Thames estuary as they had been thirty years earlier in

Tunbridge Wells. Matched by anguish about lower-middle-class

security among a generation haunted by memories of the Great

Depression, such frontiers were still the crucial fault-lines of English society.7 Language was one obvious signifier in this status-obsessed culture ? 'a mutual recognition of the right sort of accent, the emission and reception of a verbal semaphore in a recognised code that would exclude others'.8 Costume was another. At one level, it took historical

imagination of a very high order for the adult Lindsey Hughes to reconstruct the dress codes of the Muscovite elite.9 At another, such distinctions had been with her all her life. In Dartford, as in Tunbridge

Wells ? indeed, anywhere in England in the middle decades of the

twentieth century ? 'clothes called to clothes, cutting out words and

greetings'.10

Lindsey first encountered Russian language and culture at Dartford Grammar School for Girls, where Marjorie Vanston taught her a

crash-course '-level in her first year in the Sixth Form and cA'-level in the second. Only an extraordinary pupil would have been capable of the achievement; only an outstanding school would have offered her the chance. (It is some index of the commitment and flexibility of the best grammar schools, already under pressure from a Secretary of State determined to 'destroy' them,11 that Mrs Vanston should have returned from maternity leave to teach Lindsey in the upper sixth,

having been allowed to bring the baby into school provided she

5 Elementary statistical comparisons can be attempted through <http://www.visionofbritain.

org.uk>, a digital resource supported by the University of Portsmouth and the Joint Information Systems Committee.

6Cobb, Still Life, p. 121. 7 See, generally, R. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, igi8-igji, Oxford, 1998, and

B. Harrison, Seeking a Role: The United Kingdom igji-igyo, Oxford, 2009, pp. 199-209. 8 Cobb, Still Life, p. 17. 9 L. Hughes, 'From Caftans into Corsets: The Sartorial Transformation of Women

during the Reign of Peter the Great', in P. Barta (ed.), Gender and Sexuality in Russian Civiliza

tion, London, 2001, pp. 17-32, is merely the most explicit engagement with this subject in

Lindsey's oeuvre. For a bibliography of her work, see Part Three, below. 10 Cobb, Still Life, p. 18.

11 See S. Crosland, Tony Crosland, London, 1982, p. 148.



SIMON DIXON 3

kept the pram with her during lessons.)12 At first hearing, the school's motto ?

quietness and confidence' ? sounds an echo of the

hushed, mildly repressive temple remembered by Joan Bakewell from

Stockport High School for Girls in the late 1940s.13 Dartford Grammar was indeed a purposeful place, reinforcing Lindsey's lifelong capacity for industry and self-discipline (much of her prolific writing was done before breakfast; she rarely worked at weekends). Yet while some of her

contemporaries rebelled against a passing world of berets and indoor

shoes, Lindsey was happy to make the most of gifted teaching in what

was, by the early 1960s, a far from repressive institution under its remote but enlightened headmistress, Kathleen Janes.14 When Lind

sey's mother died in 1965, it was Miss Janes who helped to resolve the tensions that plagued so many lower-middle-class households in less acute form ? intellectual opportunity versus alien social values and

urgent economic need.15 Lindsey was permitted to remain at school and

eventually to pursue her new-found passion for Russia at university. Turned down by an unimaginative Oxford college

? her teachers were unsure whether to attribute the rebuff to her estuary accent (which soon evaporated) or to a determination to do things her own way

(which did not) ?

Lindsey went to Sussex in 1967. That was the year in which the new university at Brighton (f. 1961) reached its initial

target of something over 3,000 students, taught by 197 members of

faculty.16 Asa Briggs, the newly-appointed vice-chancellor, had been determined to ensure that rigid departmental divisions (and with them

professorial power) were dissolved in a network of multi-disciplinary schools. Yet in Beryl Williams, Sergei Hackel and especially Robin

Milner-Gulland, Lindsey found three mentors whose commitment to

interdisciplinary innovation needed no stimulation from on high. A sense of the connections between history, spirituality, literature and the visual arts was as integral to much of their work on Russia as

it subsequently became to hers. Though she understandably looked back on her undergraduate dissertation on seventeenth-century church

12 The Independent, 18 May 2007. Mrs Varistori and her former colleague, Angela Norton,

generously talked to me about the school. 13 J. Bakewell, The Centre of the Bed, London, 2003, pp. 60-67, esP- P- 67. 14 See L. Hughes, 'The 1960s', in A Hundred Tears On: Dartford County School, 1904-2004,

Dartford, 2004, pp. 70-88. I owe this reference to Angela Norton, who taught Lindsey German in the Sixth Form.

15 Compare L. Heron (ed.), Truth, Dare or Promue: Girls Growing Up in the Fifties, London,

1993; J. Street-Porter (b. 1946), Baggage, London, 2004. 16 A. Briggs, 'The Years of Plenty, 1961-1976', in The Sussex Opportunity: A New University

and the Future, ed. R. Blin-Stoyle in association with G. Ivey, p. 15. (Still relatively small, Sussex now has over 10,000 students, of whom almost 3,000 are postgraduates.)




architecture as 'rather na?ve5, the kernel of her intellect had already formed by 1971, when she left for Cambridge to develop this early work into a doctoral thesis under the supervision of Nikolay Andreyev. By the time she took up her first academic job at Queen's University Belfast three years later, her interest in the ?seventeenth-century "age of transition" had spread beyond architecture to encompass virtually every aspect of the era, including its leading personalities'.17 Long after her research had ranged back and forth for several centuries beyond the 1670s, 1680s and 1690s, its centre of gravity remained firmly in the decades that originally sparked her imagination.18

Sussex gave Lindsey, as it gave others, as much social as intellectual freedom. Buildings were at the heart of its sense of community. As the architect, Basil Spence, had told the BBC in 1963, his modernist

designs were intended to 'give the student a feeling of confidence',19 and it was in the distinctive environment he created that a group of

bright young things over the following decade helped to turn Sussex, however fleetingly, into the most fashionable university in England. Sex, drugs and rock and roll were a crucial part of their culture ? 1967 was also the year in which two former Dartford schoolboys, Keith Richards (b. 1943) and Mick Jagger (b. 1946), were imprisoned on drugs charges. Lindsey always believed that people of her generation were

deep-down either Rolling Stones or Beatles: she was the former.20 The official history of Sussex University prefers to concentrate on the excite ment of technological advance. But then, as Lindsey observed in her

biography of Sofiia Alekseevna, One should never assume that lack of

explicit reference to sexual activity indicates its absence'.21 The same cool, sceptical interrogation of the sources was to remain

the defining characteristic of Lindsey's work throughout her career.22

17 L. Hughes, Sophia: Regent of Russia, 1637-1704, London and New Haven, CT, 1990,

p. ix. 18 To take only one example, the icon-painter Simon Ushakov (1629?86), who appears

in many of Lindsey's works, first figured in an essay on 'The Moscow Armoury and Innovations in Seventeenth-Century Muscovite Art', Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 13, 1979, 1-2, pp. 207-08, 214, eventually merited articles of his own ? 'The Age of Transition:

Seventeenth-Century Russian Icon Painting', in S. Smyth and S. Kingston (eds), Icons 88, Dublin, 1988, pp. 63-74; 'Simon Ushakov's Icon "The Tree of the Muscovite State"

Revisited', Forschungen zur osteurop?ischen Geschichte, 58, 2001, pp. 223-34 ? and was due to

be the focus of a chapter in her uncompleted Landmarh in Russian Culture. 19

<http://www.bas?spence.org.uk/learning/buildings/sussex-university> [accessed 1

September 2009]. 20 She was delighted to learn that Jagger was presenting the prizes at Dartford Grammar School for Boys in the year in which she returned to present them at the Grammar School for Girls.

21 Hughes, Sophia, p. 50. 22 From Belfast (1974-77), she moved to the University of Reading (1977-87) and London

University's School of Slavonic and East European Studies (1987-2007), now part of UCL.



SIMON DIXON 5

Tor the most part', she commented in her magnum opus on the tsar

reformer, 'Peter's correspondence is very concrete and lacking in sustained metaphysical musings'.23 The same might be said of her own

scholarship. There is no point in searching her oeuvre for reflections on

the philosophy of history. Neither did she make overt use of the binary models that were to prove so fertile in the hands of Russian scholars

working on the eighteenth-century transformation of Muscovite culture. Indeed, it sometimes exasperated Lindsey's Russian friends that she should have remained so immune to their lure.24 Hers, how

ever, are not concept-driven books. Occasionally, critics hinted, she veered towards Cobb's temptation never to give fifteen examples where

fifty would do. Yet the vast majority of her work is written with ruthless

economy and characterized by a self-denying empiricism intended to

strip away accumulated myth. As she pointed out in her study of Peter I's half-sister, 'If we base our knowledge on reliable contemporary sources alone, we know rather less about certain aspects of Sophia's life than previous writers would have us believe'.25

As so often happens, social class proved an unreliable indicator of future scholarly interests.26 While Richard Cobb went on from

Tunbridge Wells, Shrewsbury and Oxford to immerse himself in the

petit peuple of Revolutionary France, exposing 'the lowest, most private, and most obscure' levels of their seedy lives,27 Lindsey Hughes's intel lectual journey took her via Dartford, Brighton and Cambridge to the

study of public imagery and ceremonial at the apex of the Russian Court. While Cobb became 'a local historian, not a national one',28 the heart of Lindsey's historical world remained in the power-houses of Moscow and St Petersburg. While Cobb was determined to write

'history from below', Lindsey unashamedly offered 'history from

above'.29 Yet the contrasts must not be stretched too far. Though her

23 L. Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, London and New Haven, CT, 1998, P- 378? 24

She did, however, acknowledge the binary models developed by lu. M. Lotman and B. A. Uspenskii as 'particularly fruitful' in L. Hughes, 'Cultural and Intellectual Life', in

M. Perrie (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russia, 1: From Early Rus ' to 1698, Cambridge, 2006,

p. 640. 25 Hughes, Sophia, p. 274.

26 At the launch of David Bates's Regesta regum Angh-Normannorum: the Acta of William I,

1066-1087, Oxford, 1998, the late Patrick Wormald remarked that while he had given the

Anglo-Saxon peasantry an accent from Eton, the king now spoke through the vowels of

Nuneaton. 27 R. Cobb, Reactions to the French Revolution, Oxford, 1972, p. 131. 28 R. Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popukr Protest, 1789-1820, Oxford, 1970, p. xvi. 29 L. Hughes, The Romanovs, London, 2008, p. 4.




books incorporated painstaking discussions of foreign and economic

policy, Lindsey was the first to admit that her heart was not quite in it. As Robin Milner-Gulland suggests in this volume, she was fascinated, like Cobb, above all by quirks of personality (though hers was mark

edly less eccentric than his); an acute sense of place made her as

conscious as he was that 'history should be walked, seen, smelt, eaves

dropped as well as read5;30 and she would surely have agreed with him that 'the endless fascination of history, its justification as a discipline, as a field of inquiry, as a form of culture, is the exploration of the wealth and variety of human motivations, the myriad variations of individual lives5.31

Cobb delivered this last verdict in 1971, the year of Lindsey5s gradua tion from Sussex, as a riposte to the impersonal forms of history then dominant in a profession which held its collective nose at the thought of admitting biography to the scholarly canon.32 Nine years later, Derek Beales still felt impelled to argue, in a celebrated inaugural lecture, that biography had been 'too much disparaged5: 'When a great histo rian can mistake a person for a trend [he was speaking of Braudel],

when it is thought more important to analyse social backgrounds than

opinions, then the time has come for a reaction.533 Lindsey, too, sensed this need, for although Peter the Great had never lacked biographers, the tsar who emerged from most twentieth-century scholarship was an

improbably Herculean figure concerned almost entirely with driving the socio-economic development of his expanding secular empire. 'Pig-iron figured strongly5, Lindsey remarked of this literature in her own inaugural lecture in 1998.34

The prevailing consensus was all the odder since abundant evidence was available to fashion a more convincing portrait. As Lindsey recog nized in her biography of Prince V. V. Golitsyn, One of the many

developments of the Petrine age was the gradual emergence of the individual personality and its expression in personal writings5.35 Peter I

30 R. Cobb, 'Maigret's Paris', in Tour de France, London, 1976, p. 179. 31 R. Cobb, 'History by Numbers', in ibid., p. 8.

32 Despite a revival since the 1980s, the author of an outstanding recent study deliberately

'intended to recognize the plurality of "histories" and the interests embodied in them', excluded biography and memoirs while acknowledging that the decision was 'at least in some measure arbitrary and the line of demarcation is a wavering one'. See J. Burrow, A

History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquines from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century, London, 2007, p. xvi.

33 D. Beales, 'History and Biography: An Inaugural Lecture', in T. G. W. Blanning and D. Gannadine (eds), History and Biography: Essays in Honour of Derek Beales, Cambridge, 1996, p. 282.

34 L. Hughes, Playing Games: The Alternative History of Peter the Great, London, 2000, p. 1.

35 L. Hughes, Russia and the West: The Life of a Seventeenth-Century Westernizer, Pr?nce Vastly

Vasil'evich Golitsyn (1643-1J04), Newtonville, MA, 1984, p. 99.



SIMON DIXON 7

epitomized the change, bequeathing to posterity an unprecedented cache of personal papers. Beales points out that One of the principal uses of a biography is to help us appraise the evidence left by the

subject5.36 But Lindsey never confined herself to the textual record. As she reminded readers of one of her most successful and distinctive

books, 'probably no Russian ruler left and inspired so many physical reminders of his life and activities' as Peter the Great.37 It was this

material legacy that Lindsey made her own, not only in her biography of the tsar but also in a series of studies devoted to 'Petrine places', and

especially to the 'little houses' that this master of parody and inversion

preferred to his grander Baroque palaces. 'Like Christ, who was born in a stable and brought up in a carpenter's cottage, Peter exalted himself by making himself humble.'38 This was scarcely the prototype of the New Soviet Man who emerged from modern historiography before the 1980s. On the contrary, it was the artist Valentin Serov's

image of Peter that Lindsey chose to highlight ? a freakish giant 'on

weak, spindly little legs and with a head so small in relation to the rest of his body that he must have looked more like a sort of dummy with a badly stuck on head than a living person'.39

Lindsey, as James Cracraft explains in this volume, had come to

Peter by way of Golitsyn and Sofiia, products of an earlier, less readily recoverable age. A biography of the latter ? 'ambitious and daring above her sex'40 ? posed particular challenges. 'While late seven

teenth-century England enjoyed the "age of the pin-up", with prints of royal mistresses and assorted actresses (sometimes nude) widely available for sale, most Muscovite women remained faceless.'41 One of the pleasures to be derived from reading Lindsey's chapter on Sofiia's

early years is the sense one gains of her ability to manipulate fragmen tary and indirect evidence into a plausible reconstruction of the part the girl played in a household in which she 'aroused little interest as an

individual'.42 The secular name-day ceremonies and multiple religious rituals, whose fate Lindsey would later trace in the Petrine era, offered

36 Beales, 'History and Biography', p. 281.

37 L. Hughes, Peter the Great: A Biography, London and New Haven, GT, 2002, pp. xiii-xiv.

38 Ibid., p. 235. See, in particular, Hughes, '"Nothing's Too Small for a Great Man":

Peter the Great's Little Houses and the Creation of Some Petrine Myths', SEER, 81, 2003, 4, pp. 634-58. 3^

Quoted in Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter, p. 357, the opening paragraph of the chapter on 'Peter: Man, Mind and Methods'.

40 L. Hughes, '"Ambitious and Daring above her Sex": Tsarevna Sophia Alekseevna

(1657-1704) in Foreigners' Accounts', Oxford Slavonic Papers, New Series, 21, 1988, pp. 65-89. 41 Hughes, 'Cultural and Intellectual Life', p. 652. 42 Hughes, Sophia, pp. 23-51 (p. 29).




one clue to the mystery; others were found in the wider environment of the royal Court.43 No less crucial to Lindsey's sense of place were

interiors reconstructed with a sharp eye for detail. Her own house in London is full of expertly chosen Russian silver, porcelain, paintings and engravings, sought out on treasured weekend shopping trips with her partner and husband, James Cutshall. No wonder that the

catalogue of Golitsyn's possessions compiled, after his exile, in 1689-90 allowed her to recapture the Janus-faced meanings of his mansion on

Okhotnyi Riad. Its interior was 'fitted out with a fascinating mixture of traditional and foreign trappings' including a portrait of the owner

himself:

The centrepiece of the main bedroom was a German four-poster bed, lavishly carved with birds, plants and human faces. The occupants of the bedroom could look at both icons and five maps. The list of curiosities continues: the walls of one passageway were covered with red English cloth, there were clocks (as many as seven in one room), Indian and Persian

carpets, German jugs, chests, stained glass, Venetian plates and dishes.44

By the same token, the Palladian architect Prince N. A. L'vov caught Lindsey's attention because he applied 'his skills not only to bricks, stone and wood, but also to the smallest details of furnishings, the installation of modern heating, ventilation, and plumbing systems'.45 It

was in an unerring eye for the 'smallest details' that the key to her own

achievement may be found.

* * *

When Lindsey Hughes died from cancer, shortly before her fifty-eighth birthday, obituarists praised not only the excellence of her scholarship, but also the warmth of her friendships.46 Members of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia, whom she regarded as an extended

family, held a commemorative international workshop as a mark of

43 L. Hughes, 'The Petrine Year: Anniversaries and Festivals in the Reign of Peter the

Great5, in K. Friedrich (ed.), Festival Culture in Germany and Europe from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, Lewiston, NY, 2000, pp. 148-68; ead., 'The Courts of Moscow and St Petersburg, c. 1547-1725', inj. Adamson (ed.), The P?ncely Courts of Europe: Ritual, Politics and Culture under the Ancien R?gime, 1500-1750, London, 1999, pp. 295-313, 336-38. 44

Hughes, Russia and the West, p. 95. 45 Hughes, 'N. A. L'vov and the Russian Country House', in R. P. Bartlett, A. G. Cross

and K. Rasmussen (eds), Russia and the World of the Eighteenth Century, Columbus, OH, 1986, p. 290. 46 The Independent, 4 May 2007 (Anthony Cross); The Guardian, 16 May 2007 (Robert Service); The Times, 10 May 2007 (the late John Klier, who himself met a tragically early death on 23 September 2007). See also Roger Bartlett, 'Professor Lindsey Hughes, 1949 2007', SEER, 85, 2007, 3, pp. 560-65, and Janet Hartley, 'Lindsey Hughes (1949-2007),

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 8, 2007, 3, pp. 705-08.



SIMON DIXON 9

their special affection.47 However, to mark Lindsey's wider scholarly interests, which stretched from medieval Rus' to the twenty-first cen

tury, a further tribute seemed both appropriate and necessary. From

everything I have so far said, it will be obvious why 'Personality and Place' stood out as themes for this volume, which incorporates essays

by leading scholars in Britain, Italy and the United States. (It is very much to be regretted that financial considerations have precluded the

participation of Lindsey's many Russian friends, colleagues and admir

ers.) Contributors were encouraged to develop any of the approaches featured in Lindsey's work ?

pointillist or panoramic, playful or

morbid, quotidian or bizarre ? and they have responded with a rich collection of essays ranging from the sixteenth century to the present day. Pig-iron is conspicuous by its absence. Religion, by contrast, looms

large, as befits a volume devoted to a scholar who consistently empha sized its resilience in the face of what was, for much of her lifetime, an overwhelmingly secular historiography on both sides of the Iron Curtain.48

Following a critical appreciation by James Cracraft of Lindsey's contribution to Petrine studies and an introduction by Robin Milner Gulland to her uncompleted project on Landmarh in Russian Culture, the first substantive piece in the volume is a hitherto unpublished essay

by Lindsey herself, originally destined for Landmarks and tracing the history of Cathedral of SS Peter and Paul in St Petersburg.49 The

essay discusses in turn the origins of the building, the vagaries of its construction and repair, and its subsequent fate as both mausoleum and museum. The emphasis throughout, however, is on the shifting meanings and responses the cathedral has evoked among successive

generations of Russians and foreign observers. Here, it might seem,

personality takes a back seat to place. But in Lindsey's mind it was

sometimes hard to distinguish between them: 'All buildings have two characters ? internal and external. This one has lived with an almost

split personality.'50 The next two essays take up Lindsey's interest in royal symbolism

and imagery in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Peter I,

47 The proceedings have been published as A. Cross (ed.), Days from the Reigns of Eighteenth

Century Russian Rulers, Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia Newsletter, 2 parts, Cambridge, 2007. 48 L. Hughes, 'Restoring Religion to Russian Art', in G. Hosking and R. Service (eds), Rmnterpreting Russia, London, 1999, esp. pp. 42-46. Among other passages on the limits of

secularization, see ead., Russia in the Age of Peter, pp. 292 if.; ead., 'Cultural and Intellectual

Life', pp. 658-62. 49 For a parallel essay, conceived as 'research in progress' for Landmarh in Russian Culture,

see L. Hughes, 'St. Basil's Cathedral through British Eyes', in A. B. Davidson (ed.), Rossiia i BHtaniia, 4: Sviazi i vzaimnye predstavleniia, Moscow, 2006, pp. 71-80 (p. 72). 50 See below, p. 25.



IO PERSONALITY AND PLAGE

she believed, 'was certainly the first [Russian] ruler whose image was

produced in three dimensions. (The art of carving human figures in marble and casting them in metal was unknown in Muscovite

Russia)5.51 She evidently had in mind the tradition of classical sculpture, which was indeed absent in Russia before 1700. However, as Sergei Bogatyrev shows here, a partial exception to the rule is to be found on

the Tsar Cannon, cast by the renowned Russian gun founder Andrei Chokhov in 1586. This incorporated a three-dimensional depiction of Tsar Fedor Ivanovich, which Bogatyrev compares with the image of Ivan the Terrible on a Livonian gun produced by the German master

Karsten Middeldorp in 1559. Royal symbolism is equally central to Simon Franklin's essay on the illustrated title page and the elaborate woodcut frontispiece of the bible published in Moscow in 1663. Lavish

though it was, the 1663 Bible made a negligible impact on subsequent Russian print culture. But it was innovative in the context of books

printed in the Russian capital. Included among 'the extraordinary list of its "firsts'" were 'the first Moscow-printed portrait of a Russian

ruler, or indeed of any living person' and 'the first Moscow-printed map of any kind' ? significantly, a map of Moscow itself.52

Moscow is also the subject of Maria Di Salvo's contribution, which takes us into the period studied most intensively by Lindsey Hughes.

While some textbooks still portray the Nemetskaia Sloboda as the

nursery of Western-inspired modernization, Di Salvo paints a more nuanced picture of the suburb's social life, drawing on a range of Italian sources including the unpublished memoirs of a young castrato from Pisa, Filippo Balatri, himself closely linked to Peter I and his

mistress Anna M?ns. Remaining in the Petrine era, Gary Marker examines the controversial figure of the Ukrainian hetman, Ivan

Mazepa, through the prism of accounts written in the early 1720s

by Pyfyp Orlik, the hetman of the Ukrainian forces in exile, and the

archbishop of Novgorod, Feofan (Prokopovich). As the Great Northern War came to an end, ideologists on all sides began to craft rival versions of Mazepa's 'betrayal' of the tsar in 1708-09. Whereas

Prokopovich regarded Mazepa as an irredeemable traitor to his faith,

Orlyk portrayed him as a flawed political actor, 'a real human being, mistaken and conflicted rather than demonic and evil'. However,

focusing on the rhetorical strategies of these two myth-makers, Marker shows that, for different reasons, they agreed that 'the rights and freedoms of the Cossacks were larger than the man himself and that

they were important to maintain'.53

51 L. Hughes, 'Images of Greatness: Portraits of Peter , in Hughes (ed.), Peter the Great

and the West: New Perspectives, London, 2001, p. 260. 52 See below, p. 88. 53

See below, p. 133.



SIMON DIXON II

The next three contributions focus on the early history of Peter I's new capital and its environs, an area traversed time and again by Lindsey in the company of guidebooks old and new.54 Paul Keenan, one of her last research students, compares the St Petersburg Summer

Gardens, a symbol of the tsar's 'Europeanizing' aims for the city, with contemporary palace gardens elsewhere on the continent, focusing on their role as a social space for the ruler, the Court and the elite,

particularly in the 1750s under Elizaveta Petrovna. Roger Bartlett shows that the suburban estate of Ropsha, notorious as the place where Peter III was assassinated, had a more interesting existence, both before and after 1762, not least as the site of Enlightened social experiments by the Livonian Pastor Johann Georg Eisen in the 1760s. That was the decade when the young scholar-monk Platon (Petr Georgievich Levshin, 1737 1812) first attracted the attention of Catherine II. In her analysis of three of Platon's celebrated sermons at Court, Elise Kimerling

Wirtschafter highlights another crucial aspect of the Enlightenment in Russia: 'The Russian Enlightenment, an enlightenment to be lived, stressed the spiritual development and moral perfectibility of the individual human being.'55

David Moon broadens the geographical focus of the volume by discussing the Academy of Sciences expeditions to the steppes in the

reign of Catherine II. In an essay which reaches back in time to Herodotus on the Scythians and forward to the nineteenth-century soil scientist, Vasilii Dokuchaev, Moon emphasizes the reactions of the

expeditions' German-educated leaders to the unfamiliar conditions

they discovered in the treeless steppe. A similar preoccupation with differences recurs in Peter Waldron's discussion of Nikolai Przheval'skii, the nineteenth-century explorer of Central Asia, though, lionized

by society and by Alexander II himself, Przheval'skii was a far more

glamorous personality than Peter Simon Pallas and his Enlightened colleagues.

Between these contributions on the empire come three which illumi nate a period crucial to the development of the self in Russia. In a

study of life-writings by three noblewomen, Wendy Rosslyn shows that while Varvara Sheremeteva (1786-1857) remained within traditional

prescriptions of femininity wherever she was, being more concerned with others' perceptions of her self than with its inner essence, Varvara Bakunina (1773-1840) was powerfully affected by place. By contrast, Anastasiia Kolechitskaia's (1800-71) self was cultivated to be largely

54 L. Hughes, 'Petrine St Petersburg in the works of Pavel Svin'in (1787?1839)', m A. Cross (ed.), St Petersburg 1703-1825: A Collection of Essays to Mark the Tercentenary of the City, Basingstoke, 2003, pp. 148-64. 55 See below, p. 180.




immune to changes of circumstance. Patrick O'Meara focuses on male

sociability at the Second Army HQ at Tul'chin, where the youthful chief-of-staff between 1819 and 1829, P- D. Kiselev (1788-1872), risked

losing an already brilliant career through potentially compromising friendships with several of his staff officers who were Decembrists, in

particular with Pavel Pest?i', the republican ideologist of the Southern

Society. O'Meara's forensic examination of Kiselev's motives shows the extent to which Pushkin's generation were capable of developing, revealing and concealing a sophisticated sense of self. That this capacity sometimes came at a heavy price is suggested by Robin Aizlewood,

whose essay adds a further dimension to our subject by exploring disorientation of the person in Russian culture. Pushkin's poem 'Besy' is shown to be a primary text for this theme, providing one of the epigraphs of Dostoevskii's novel of the same name and informing agonized reflections on the revolution in Iz glubiny (1918). Beginning with this volume of essays and its predecessor Vekhi (1909), Aizlewood discusses conceptualizations of the person (lichnost ') in relation to place in Russian thought, from Chaadaev through to Bakhtin, drawing finally on Bakhtin's notion of Outsideness' to cast light on the disorien tation of the person in Pushkin's poem, alongside that which is

conveyed symbolically through spatial disorientation.

Anglo-Russian contacts were a subject of particular interest to Lind

sey Hughes, who studied relevant archival sources in both countries.56 The essays on this subject in the present volume exemplify the two cultures' capacity to survive as if in a sealed vacuum when transferred to foreign parts. Anthony Cross tells the story of a house built on St Petersburg's Palace Embankment in the 1780s by Quarenghi, purchased soon afterwards by N. I. Saltykov, and partially occupied by his descendants even while the front portion of the building served as the British Embassy from 1863 to 1918. While Foreign Office officials

agonized about the state of the drains, successive British residents tried to domesticate their cavernous neo-classical palace. As Meriel Buchanan recalled in 1932, once 'the pictures and prints had been hung up, the arm-chairs covered with bright chintzes, some of the more heavily ornate pieces removed and replaced by Queen Anne cabinets, old Dutch chests of drawers, Wedgwood or Empire chairs, the rooms took on a more homelike appearance, so that sometimes with the curtains

drawn, one could almost imagine oneself in some old London Square'.57

56 See, in particular, L. Hughes, 'V. T. Postnikov's 1687 Mission to London: Anglo

Russian Relations in the 1680s in British Sources', SEER, 68, 1990, 3, pp. 447-60. 57 Quoted by Anthony Cross, below, p. 347. Compare the mischievous remark of William

Gerhardi on the tastes of Nicholas IPs consort, 'whose idea of decorating their "ordinary decent life" was a suburban English villa with furniture which might have come ?

and perhaps did come ? from the Tottenham Court Road'. W. Gerhardi, The Romanovs: Evocation of the Past as a Minor for the Present, London, 1940, p. 502.



SIMON DIXON IS

Robert Service shows that the Russian political ?migr?s who inhabited such squares thanks to uniquely generous British immigration legisla tion, barely noticed their surroundings. So impervious were they to local influences that 'their colony might just as well have been in

Africa5.58 Oblivious to virtually every aspect of British political culture,

they arrived and left London with their doctrines intact. Here was a case where 'intellectual formation' was indeed 'far more important than social or geographical origin or physical location'.59

Place, on the other hand, certainly mattered in the case of our last

personality ? the 'mad monk' Iliodor (Sergei Mikhailovich Trufanov,

1880-1952), who died in New York only months before Lindsey Hughes's third birthday. When Sergei Bulgakov complained in his contribution to Vekhi that 'the concepts of personal morality, personal self-perfection, the elaboration of the personality are extremely unpopular among the intelligentsia (and, on the contrary, the word social has a

special, sacramental character)', he knew that he was swimming against the tide.60 By the beginning of the twentieth century, a preoccupation

with celebrity ? a subject of great interest to Lindsey and one of the

liveliest issues in current scholarship on the individual61 ? had gone beyond heroes such as Przheval'skii to penetrate even the most ascetic intellectual circles. Outside their ranks, no one attracted more attention than Iliodor, who exploited the patronage of Rasputin and Nicholas II

(and a variety of mass media) to undermine P. A. Stolypin in one of his former stomping grounds, the traditionally rebellious province of

Saratov, where Iliodor repeatedly defied the government in the name

of the Russian people, paradoxically contributing in the process to the desacralization of the monarchy he purported to defend.

This, then, is a collection of essays intended to emphasize the

significance of personality and place in Russian culture. Some are

directly inspired by the work of Lindsey Hughes; each of them echoes her interests in the kaleidoscopic variety of individual motivations and the shifting meanings attributable to particular settings. We offer them in respectful memory of a creative scholar, an inspired teacher and a

dearly-loved friend.

58 See below, p. 368. 59 Beales, 'History and Biography', p. 273. 60 Quoted by Robin Aizlewood, below, p. 293. 61 Among a rapidly growing literature, see, for example, M. Posde (ed.), Joshua Reynolds:

The Creation of Celebrity, London, 2005, and T. Mole (ed.), Romanticism and Celebrity Culture,

1750-1850, Cambridge, 2009.



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Personality and Place in Russian Culture || Personality and Place