Eighteenth-Century Russia

This volume incorporates some forty papers from the seventh international conference of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia, held at Wittenberg in July 2004. The group's conferences traditionally offer a mixture of pièces d’occasion and trailers for larger-scale works in progress. So it is here, in a rich, interdisciplinary collection covering the ‘long’ eighteenth century from 1680 to 1825 and divided into sections on ‘Literature, Theatre, Censorship’, ‘Ideas, Discourse, Cultural Transfer’ and ‘Society, Individuals, Economy’. Thirteen of the papers are in Russian, the remainder in English—the other working language of the group. Essays drawn from wider projects include those by Gary Marker on the sermon at the coronation of Peter I's second wife, Ekaterina Alekseevna, in 1724; Nancy Kollman on change and continuity in the law under Peter I; Ol’ga Tsapina on Moscow University and the mid-century ecclesiastical censorship; and Alexander Martin on the impact of the Napoleonic invasion on Moscow's middling sorts (‘Down and Out in 1812’). Among the social groups given prominence in the volume, the notoriously unstable and frequently neglected merchantry stands out. Here they are the focus of studies of citizenship and identity (a characteristically thoughtful piece by David Ransel); the impact of the Great Northern War (Janet Hartley); Western trade and merchant banking in Riga (the late Elisabeth Harder-Gersdorff); merchants’ lives in Iaroslavl (George Munro); and bankruptcy and the courts (Robert E. Jones). There are also innovative essays on actresses (Wendy Rosslyn), children (Ol’ga Kosheleva), and beggars (Maia Lavrinovich). Ingrid Schierle contributes a striking paper on the concept of otechestvo (fatherland)

Ancient history · Art history · Censorship · Citizenship · Coronation · Economic history · Political science · Politics · Wife · Classics · History · Law · Soviet and Russian History