Russia’s Quiet Revolution, by Paul W. Werth

In this book, Paul Werth makes a compelling argument for why the 1830s—for his study really takes on the entire decade, and not just the single year featured in his title—should be accorded more serious attention by scholars of Imperial Russia. In this slender but comprehensive volume, he examines the ‘drama and dynamism’ of a series of interconnected developments that resulted in ‘the country’s enhanced integration, the increased unification of its people through diverse institutions and practices, and the promotion of shared experience across vast spaces’. All of this, he asserts in his well-reasoned introduction, contributed to the emergence of ‘a Russian nation ... within the empire’. A fine archival researcher and author of numerous scholarly works on Russian religious history, Werth largely steps outside of his area of expertise in this volume to take a more comprehensive view of events in the fields of art, literature, philosophy, religion, industry, statecraft and empire-building that took place in or around the year 1837. In a series of concise and well-written sketches, he demonstrates the breadth and depth of his familiarity with the secondary literature and his great skill at integrating these in a thoughtful, provocative manner. He also reveals a more playful side, as demonstrated by the humour peppered throughout this monograph.

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Argument (complex analysis) · Art · Drama · Dynamism · Empire · Epistemology · Expansionism · Literature · Political science · Politics · Unification · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Philosophy · Soviet and Russian History