Abstract
When Russian memoirists after about 1850 looked back on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which was as far back as living memory extended, they detected a change in the way middling and elite Russians thought and behaved. The priest Filipp F. Ismailov, recalling his own childhood and education, wrote that:
There was much that was dark [in the early nineteenth century], but at the time, Russia itself was dark. Coarseness, foolishness, and vulgarity prevailed in everything.1
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Notes
Nikolai P. Vishniakov, Svedeniia o kupecheskom rode Vishniakovykh, 3 vols. (Moscow, 1903–11), vol. 2, 29–37, here: 52.
Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Oxford and Malden, MA, 2000).
Thomas L. Haskell, ‘Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility’, American Historical Review, 90, 2 (1985): 339–61 and 3 (1985): 547–66.
On the extraordinary significance of 1812 in the history of Russian memoir writing, see Andrei G. Tartakovskii, 1812 god i russkaia memuaristika: Opyt istochniko-vedcheskogo izucheniia (Moscow, 1980), 15–16.
Andrei T. Bolotov, Zhizn’ i prikliucheniia Andreia Bolotova, opisannye samim im dlia svoikh potomkov, 3 vols (Moscow, 1993), vol. 3, 19–20.
Mikhail M. Tiul’pin, ‘Letopis’, in Anna V. Semenova et al., eds., Kupecheskie dnevniki i memuary kontsa XVIII — pervoi poloviny XIX veka (Moscow, 2007), 273.
John T. Alexander, Bubonic Plague in Early Modern Russia: Public Health and Urban Disaster (Baltimore, MD, 1980). The primary accounts listed in Alexander’s bibliography are those by Alekseev, Bantysh-Kamenskii, Bolotov, Dolgorukii, Karzhavin and Sablukov, as well as ‘O morovoi iazve’and ‘Pis’mo ochevidtsa’.
T — v, ‘O 1812 gode’, in Petr I. Shchukin, ed., Bumagi, otnosiashchiiasia do Otechestvennoi voiny 1812 goda, 10 vols. (Moscow, 1897–1908), vol. 4, 332.
Anna G. Khomutova, ‘Vospominaniia A. G. Khomutovoi o Moskve v 1812 godu’ Russkii arkhiv, 3 (1891): 309–28, here: 323; A. Lebedev, ‘Iz razskazov rodnykh o 1812 gode (Izvlechenie iz semeinykh zapisok)’, in Shchukin, Bumagi, vol. 3, 260.
Fedor Bekker, ‘Vospominaniia Bekkera o razzorenii i pozhare Moskvy v 1812 g.’, Russkaia starina, 38 (April–June 1883): 507–24, here: 519.
Murray Melbin, ‘Night as Frontier’, American Sociological Review, 43 (February 1978): 3–22, here: 3.
Craig Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2011), 17.
Joachim Schlör, Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London, 1840–1930, trans. Pierre Gottfried Imhoff and Dafydd Rees Roberts (London, 1998), 16, 241, 287, quotation on 241.
On the closing hours of shops, see I. Slonov, Iz zhizni torgovoi Moskvy (polveka nazad) (Moscow, 1914), 166.
Ivan E. Zabelin, Opyty izucheniia russkikh drevnostei i istorii: izsledovaniia, opisaniia i kriticheskiia stat’i, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1872–1873), vol. 2, 357; N. M. Bychkov, ‘Istoricheskii ocherk osveshcheniia goroda Moskvy’, Izvestiia Moskovskoi Gorodskoi Dumy, vypusk 1 (October 1895), otdel 2, 1–52; G. Le Cointe de Laveau, Guide du voyageur à Moscou (Moscow, 1824), table facing 86.
Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 1986), 47, 55, 56, 60–1, 67.
Petr Volkonskii, ‘U frantsuzov v Moskovskom plenu 1812 goda’, Russkii arkhiv, no. 11 (1905): 351–59, here: 352; François-Joseph d’ Ysarn-Villefort, Relation du séjour des Français à Moscou et de l’incendie de cette ville en 1812 par un habitant de Moscou, ed. A. Gadaruel (Brussels, 1871), 47.
Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge, 2008);
Neil McKendrick, ‘Introduction’ and ‘The Consumer Revolution of Eighteenth-Century England’, in Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J.H. Plumb, ed., The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, IN, 1982).
Dmitrii Rostislavov, Provincial Russia in the Age of Enlightenment: The Memoir of a Priest’s Son, trans. Alexander M. Martin (DeKalb, IL, 2002), 83, 84, 86.
Aleksandr I. Kupriianov, Gorodskaia kul’tura russkoi provintsii: Konets XVIII –pervaia polovina XIX veka (Moscow, 2007), 471.
Leonid Gorizontov, ‘The ‘Great Circle’ of Interior Russia: Representations of the Imperial Center in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, in Jane Burbank, Mark von Hagen, and Anatolyi Remnev, eds., Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700–1930 (Bloomington, IN, 2007), 81.
Mikhail N. Zagoskin, Sochineniia, 7 vols. (St Petersburg: V. I. Shtein, 1889), vol. 5, 70.
Vissarion G. Belinsky, ‘Petersburg and Moscow’, in ed. Nikolai Nekrasov, trans. Thomas Gaiton Marullo, Petersburg: The Physiology of a City (Evanston, IL, 2009), 28.
Mikhail I. Pyliaev, Staraia Moskva: Rasskazy iz byloi zhizni pervoprestol’noi stolitsy (Moscow, 1995).
See, for example: Fedor V. Rostopchin, ‘Mysli v slukh na Krasnom kryl’tse’, in Sochineniia Rastopchina (grafa Feodora Vasil’evicha) (St Petersburg, 1853);
Katherine Pickering Antonova, An Ordinary Marriage: The World of a Gentry Family in Provincial Russia (New York, 2013), 195.
Elena Vishlenkova, Vizual’noe narodovedenie imperii, ili ‘Uvidet’ russkogo dano ne kazhdom’ (Moscow, 2011), 190–95, quotation on 195.
See, for example: Christopher Ely, This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, IL, 2002);
Alison K. Smith, Recipes for Russia: Food and Nationhood Under the Tsars (DeKalb, IL, 2008).
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© 2015 Alexander M. Martin
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Martin, A.M. (2015). The 1812 War and the Civilizing Process in Russia. In: Hartley, J.M., Keenan, P., Lieven, D. (eds) Russia and the Napoleonic Wars. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137528001_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137528001_17
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