Russia Reads Rousseau, 1762-1825

Russia Reads Rousseau, 1762-1825 PDF Author: Thomas Paul Barran
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Russia
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
Whether seen as a literary genius, educator, dedicated patriot, misanthrope, scoundrel, proto-Jacobin, or out-right lunatic, Jean-Jacques Rousseau left a bewildering pattern on the Russian intellectual landscape. Fully tracing this pattern for the first time, this book reveals the nature and extent of Rousseau's initial influence in Russia, as well as a great deal about the social, cultural, and political contexts in which he was so variously understood by the Russians. Thomas Barran shows here how Rousseau quickly became a model of the visionary to the Russians. Russia Reads Rousseau makes explicit the selectivity, ambivalence, and energy with which Russians accepted Rousseau's works. Barran's book provides a refreshing corrective to the numerous misinterpretations by both Russian authors who introduced Rousseau to Russia and scholars who have analyzed the Russian reception of Rousseau. Mapping Rousseau's varied and extensive influence, Barran considers major writers such as Denis Fonvizin, Nikolai Novikov, Nikolai Karamzin, and Aleksandr Pushkin, as well as lesser known or forgotten figures. He shows how Rousseau's works were Russianized in numerous ways, as translations, adaptat

Russia Reads Rousseau, 1762-1825

Russia Reads Rousseau, 1762-1825 PDF Author: Thomas Paul Barran
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Russia
Languages : en
Pages : 440

Get Book

Book Description
Whether seen as a literary genius, educator, dedicated patriot, misanthrope, scoundrel, proto-Jacobin, or out-right lunatic, Jean-Jacques Rousseau left a bewildering pattern on the Russian intellectual landscape. Fully tracing this pattern for the first time, this book reveals the nature and extent of Rousseau's initial influence in Russia, as well as a great deal about the social, cultural, and political contexts in which he was so variously understood by the Russians. Thomas Barran shows here how Rousseau quickly became a model of the visionary to the Russians. Russia Reads Rousseau makes explicit the selectivity, ambivalence, and energy with which Russians accepted Rousseau's works. Barran's book provides a refreshing corrective to the numerous misinterpretations by both Russian authors who introduced Rousseau to Russia and scholars who have analyzed the Russian reception of Rousseau. Mapping Rousseau's varied and extensive influence, Barran considers major writers such as Denis Fonvizin, Nikolai Novikov, Nikolai Karamzin, and Aleksandr Pushkin, as well as lesser known or forgotten figures. He shows how Rousseau's works were Russianized in numerous ways, as translations, adaptat

War and Enlightenment in Russia

War and Enlightenment in Russia PDF Author: Eugene Miakinkov
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487503547
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
War and Enlightenment in Russia explores how members of the military during the reign of Catherine II reconciled Enlightenment ideas about the equality and moral worth of all humans with the Russian reality based on serfdom, a world governed by autocracy, absolute respect for authority, and subordination to seniority. While there is a sizable literature about the impact of the Enlightenment on government, economy, manners, and literature in Russia, no analytical framework that outlines its impact on the military exists. Eugene Miakinkov's research addresses this gap and challenges the assumption that the military was an unadaptable and vertical institution. Using archival sources, military manuals, essays, memoirs, and letters, the author demonstrates how the Russian militaires philosophes operationalized the Enlightenment by turning thought into reality.

The Europeanized Elite in Russia, 1762–1825

The Europeanized Elite in Russia, 1762–1825 PDF Author: Andreas Schönle
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501757725
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
This illuminating volume provides a new understanding of the subjective identity and public roles of Russia's Europeanized elite between the years of 1762 and 1825. Through a series of rich case studies, the editors reconstruct the social group's worldview, complex identities, conflicting loyalties, and evolving habits. The studies explore the institutions that shaped these nobles, their attitude to state service, the changing patterns of their family life, their emotional world, religious beliefs, and sense of time. The creation of a Europeanized elite in Russia was a state-initiated project that aimed to overcome the presumed "backwardness" of the country. The evolution of this social group in its relations to political authority provides insight into the fraught identity of a country developing on the geopolitical periphery of Europe. In contrast to postcolonial studies that explore the imposition of political, social, and cultural structures on colonized societies, this multidisciplinary volume explores the patterns of behavior and emotion that emerge from the processes of self-Europeanization. The Europeanized Elite in Russia, 1762–1825, will appeal to scholars and general readers interested in Russian history and culture, particularly in light of current political debates about globalization and widening social inequality in Europe.

A Voltaire for Russia

A Voltaire for Russia PDF Author: Amanda Ewington
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810126966
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Revision of the author's thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literatures, 2001.

Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia

Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia PDF Author: Susan K. Morrissey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781139460811
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
In early twentieth-century Russia, suicide became a public act and a social phenomenon of exceptional scale, a disquieting emblem of Russia's encounter with modernity. This book draws on an extensive range of sources, from judicial records to the popular press, to examine the forms, meanings, and regulation of suicide from the seventeenth century to 1914, placing developments into a pan-European context. It argues against narratives of secularization that read the history of suicide as a trajectory from sin to insanity, crime to social problem, and instead focuses upon the cultural politics of self-destruction. Suicide - the act, the body, the socio-medical problem - became the site on which diverse authorities were established and contested, not just the priest or the doctor but also the sovereign, the public, and the individual. This panoramic history of modern Russia, told through the prism of suicide, rethinks the interaction between cultural forms, individual agency, and systems of governance.

The Books that Made the European Enlightenment

The Books that Made the European Enlightenment PDF Author: Gary Kates
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350277673
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
In contrast to traditional Enlightenment studies that focus solely on authors and ideas, Gary Kates' employs a literary lens to offer a wholly original history of the period in Europe from 1699 to 1780. Each chapter is a biography of a book which tells the story of the text from its inception through to the revolutionary era, with wider aspects of the Enlightenment era being revealed through the narrative of the book's publication and reception. Here, Kates joins new approaches to book history with more traditional intellectual history by treating authors, publishers, and readers in a balanced fashion throughout. Using a unique database of 18th-century editions representing 5,000 titles, the book looks at the multifaceted significance of bestsellers from the time. It analyses key works by Voltaire, Adam Smith, Madame de Graffigny, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume and champions the importance of a crucial innovation of the age: the rise of the 'erudite blockbuster', which for the first time in European history, helped to popularize political theory among a large portion of the middling classes. Kates also highlights how, when, and why some of these books were read in the European colonies, as well as incorporating the responses of both ordinary men and women as part of the reception histories that are so integral to the volume.

Democratic Moments

Democratic Moments PDF Author: Xavier Márquez
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350006181
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. This collection of short essays on texts in the history of democracy shows the diversity of ideas that contributed to the making of our present democratic moment. The selection of texts goes beyond the standard, Western-centric canonical history of democracy, with its beginnings in ancient Athens and its climax in the French and American revolutions, recovering some of the significant body of democratic and anti-democratic thought in Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere. It includes discussions of well-known philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, but also of a variety of thinkers much less well known in English as writers on democracy: Al Farabi, Bolívar, Gandhi, Radishchev, Lenin, Sun Yat-sen, and many others. The essays thus de-center our understanding of the moments where the idea of democracy was articulated, rejected, and appropriated. Spanning antiquity to the present and global in scope, with contributions by key scholars of democracy from around the world, Democratic Moments is the ideal text for all students wishing to expand their understanding of the ways in which this contested concept has been understood.

Engaging with Rousseau

Engaging with Rousseau PDF Author: Avi Lifschitz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316720926
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Jean-Jacques Rousseau has been cast as a champion of Enlightenment and a beacon of Romanticism, a father figure of radical revolutionaries and totalitarian dictators alike, an inventor of the modern notion of the self, and an advocate of stern ancient republicanism. Engaging with Rousseau treats his writings as an enduring topic of debate, examining the diverse responses they have attracted from the Enlightenment to the present. Such notions as the general will were, for example, refracted through very different prisms during the struggle for independence in Latin America and in social conflicts in Eastern Europe, or modified by thinkers from Kant to contemporary political theorists. Beyond Rousseau's ideas, his public image too travelled around the world. This book examines engagement with Rousseau's works as well as with his self-fashioning; especially in turbulent times, his defiant public identity and his call for regeneration were admired or despised by intellectuals and political agents.

Russia in the Early Modern World

Russia in the Early Modern World PDF Author: Donald Ostrowski
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793634211
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 575

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Book Description
This study examines the continuity of Russian policies during the early modern period in the midst of constant change. The author analyzes how Russian rulers from Ivan III to Catherine II—along with their hub advisors—managed to sustain a balance between the two in seeking solutions to problems the country faced.

Dostoevsky's Secrets

Dostoevsky's Secrets PDF Author: Carol Apollonio Flath
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810125323
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
When Fyodor Dostoevsky proclaims that he is a "realist in a higher sense," it is because the facts are irrelevant to his truth. And it is in this spirit that Apollonio approaches Dostoevsky’s work, reading through the facts--the text--of his canonical novels for the deeper truth that they distort, mask, and, ultimately, disclose. This sort of reading against the grain is, Apollonio suggests, precisely what these works, with their emphasis on the hidden and the private and their narrative reliance on secrecy and slander, demand. In each work Apollonio focuses on one character or theme caught in the compromising, self-serving, or distorting narrative lens. Who, she asks, really exploits whom in Poor Folk? Does "White Nights" ever escape the dream state? What is actually lost--and what is won--in The Gambler? Is Svidrigailov, of such ill repute in Crime and Punishment, in fact an exemplar of generosity and truth? Who, in Demons, is truly demonic? Here we see how Dostoevsky has crafted his novels to help us see these distorting filters and develop the critical skills to resist their anaesthetic effect. Apollonio's readings show how Dostoevsky's paradoxes counter and usurp our comfortable assumptions about the way the world is and offer access to a deeper, immanent essence. His works gain power when we read beyond the primitive logic of external appearances and recognize the deeper life of the text.