Frances Nethercott. Writing History in Late Imperial Russia

In Russia, over the course of the nineteenth century, the form of writing usually described as ­­“imaginative literature” acquired the status of the discourse through which its producers and consumers grappled ­­collectively with what they—precisely as sharers of this discourse and thus members of a given society and culture—understood to be their common predicament. The form of writing usually described as historiography, which over the course of this same period became progressively professionalized, increasingly specialized, and invested with the credentials of science, was nonetheless produced and consumed with essentially this same ambition—namely, as discourse through the production and consumption of which the members of the historical entity in question, Russia, confronted their shared destiny: their position in historical time, their place in the civilized world, and their broader sense of historical identity. Consequently, there was an ineluctable “elective affinity” between these two fields of writing in late imperial Russia—the ­­literary...

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