1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910460025903321

Autore

Engelstein Laura

Titolo

Slavophile empire [[electronic resource] ] : Imperial Russia's illiberal path / / Laura Engelstein

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Ithaca, : Cornell University Press, 2009

ISBN

0-8014-5945-1

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (253 p.)

Disciplina

947.08

Soggetti

Political culture - Russia - History - 19th century

Slavophilism - Russia - History - 19th century

Liberalism - Russia - History - 19th century

Russians - Ethnic identity - History - 19th century

Nationalism - Russia - History - 19th century

Religion and state - Russia - History - 19th century

Electronic books.

Russia Politics and government 1801-1917

Russia Intellectual life 1801-1917

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: The Discordant Choir -- 1. Combined Underdevelopment -- 2. Revolution and the Theater of Public Life -- 3. The Dream of Civil Society -- 4. Holy Russia in Modern Times -- 5. Orthodox Self-Reflection in a Modernizing Age -- 6. Between Art and Icon -- 7. The Old Slavophile Steed -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Twentieth-century Russia, in all its political incarnations, lacked the basic features of the Western liberal model: the rule of law, civil society, and an uncensored public sphere. In Slavophile Empire, the leading historian Laura Engelstein pays particular attention to the Slavophiles and their heirs, whose aversion to the secular individualism of the West and embrace of an idealized version of the native past established a pattern of thinking that had an enduring impact on Russian political life.Imperial Russia did not lack for partisans of Western-style



liberalism, but they were outnumbered, to the right and to the left, by those who favored illiberal options. In the book's rigorously argued chapters, Engelstein asks how Russia's identity as a cultural nation at the core of an imperial state came to be defined in terms of this antiliberal consensus. She examines debates on religion and secularism, on the role of culture and the law under a traditional regime presiding over a modernizing society, on the status of the empire's ethnic peripheries, and on the spirit needed to mobilize a multinational empire in times of war. These debates, she argues, did not predetermine the kind of system that emerged after 1917, but they foreshadowed elements of a political culture that are still in evidence today.