Writing History in Late Imperial Russia: Scholarship and the Literary Canon by Frances Nethercott

Author:Frances Nethercott [Nethercott, Frances]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Historiography, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Modern
ISBN: 9781350130418
Google: CS_EDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 49512247
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2019-12-26T00:00:00+00:00

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Historical and Literary Historical Scholarship: A Hybrid Science?

Across Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century, conventional wisdom had it that folklore is deeply, even uniquely, expressive of the community in which it was produced and thus could be of great value to the historian. Among the major sources of inspiration for this view were, of course, Johann Gottfried Herder (his name is often associated with the term Volksgeist1) and the mythological and linguistic theories of Jacob Grimm. In France, Augustin Thierry and Jules Michelet both championed this way of thinking about the past. For Michelet, the oral tradition captured in song and legends provided a profound sense of historical reality because it retained ‘the warmth of people’s voices and the presence of their bodies’. And Thierry, in his three-volume study, Histoire de la conquête de l’Angleterre par les Normands (1825), was, as Donald Kelley notes, equally clear that literary remains rendered most truthfully the spirit of the tribes that lived in Britain at that time: ‘The ancient Britons lived and breathed poetry’, Thierry wrote. ‘The expression may seem extravagant, but not so in reality: for, in their political maxims, preserved to our own times, they placed the poet–musician beside the agriculturalist and the artist, as one of the three pillars of social existence. The poet had but one theme: the destiny of his country, its misfortunes and its hopes’.2

Around 1850, as the romantic ethos gradually gave way to empirical evidence-based enquiry, the importance ascribed to ‘feelings’, ‘spirit’ or the senses was, as I have argued, eclipsed by endeavours to establish the credentials of historical study as an exact (empirical) science. In practice, this required the strict exclusion of the spoken language (oral tradition) as a viable historical source. Historical explanation and style of presentation also needed to be revised. Addressing this matter, one of the chief architects of the ‘scientific method’, Gabriel Monod, called for the removal of what he termed ‘vague generalities or oratory’: instead, ‘every statement would be accompanied by proofs, by references to sources and quotations’.3 It remained, however, that if the demands of ‘science’, understood as commonsense empiricism, were now deemed premium, the question of whether imaginative literature could be of any evidential value did not go away; rather, it was brought back on to the agenda in response to developments in literary historical scholarship as a branch of positivist-scientific study and to questions pertaining to the types of relationship between the two disciplines: should the history of literature be considered a separate branch with its own distinctive methodology and practices, or should it be subsumed under historical scholarship? Debates concerning the place of imaginative literature in historical research, moreover, fed into broader questions about the scientific/scholarly credentials of the discipline, and possibly the most vexed question of all that historians posed in tandem with reflections on the relationship between literary history/history of literature and ‘generalist’ history was an age-old conundrum: is history itself a science or an art? In France, a catalyst for

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