1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910810698703321

Autore

Pravilova E. A (Ekaterina Anatolevna)

Titolo

A public empire : property and the quest for the common good in imperial Russia / / Ekaterina Pravilova

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Princeton : , : Princeton University Press, , [2014]

©2014

ISBN

1-4008-5026-6

Edizione

[Course Book]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (449 p.)

Disciplina

333.10947/09034

Soggetti

Public domain - Russia - History

Right of property - Russia - History

Government ownership - Russia - History

Russia History 1613-1917

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Whose nature? Environmentalism, industrialization, and the politics of property -- The meanings of property -- Forests, minerals, and the controversy over property in post-emancipation Russia -- Nationalizing rivers, expropriating lands -- The treasures of the fatherland -- Inventing national patrimony -- Private possessions and national art -- "Estates on Parnassus": literary property and cultural reform -- Writers and the audience: legal provisions and public discourse -- The private letters of national literature.

Sommario/riassunto

"Property rights" and "Russia" do not usually belong in the same sentence. Rather, our general image of the nation is of insecurity of private ownership and defenselessness in the face of the state. Many scholars have attributed Russia's long-term development problems to a failure to advance property rights for the modern age and blamed Russian intellectuals for their indifference to the issues of ownership. A Public Empire refutes this widely shared conventional wisdom and analyzes the emergence of Russian property regimes from the time of Catherine the Great through World War I and the revolutions of 1917. Most importantly, A Public Empire shows the emergence of the new practices of owning "public things" in imperial Russia and the attempts



of Russian intellectuals to reconcile the security of property with the ideals of the common good.The book analyzes how the belief that certain objects-rivers, forests, minerals, historical monuments, icons, and Russian literary classics-should accede to some kind of public status developed in Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. Professional experts and liberal politicians advocated for a property reform that aimed at exempting public things from private ownership, while the tsars and the imperial government employed the rhetoric of protecting the sanctity of private property and resisted attempts at its limitation.Exploring the Russian ways of thinking about property, A Public Empire looks at problems of state reform and the formation of civil society, which, as the book argues, should be rethought as a process of constructing "the public" through the reform of property rights.