by JohnRandolph (Author)
Aspiring thinkers require a stage for their performance and an audience to help give their actions distinction and meaning. To be made durable and influential, their charismatic stories have to be framed by supporting ideals, practices, and institutions. Although the biographies of the Empire's most famous thinkers have a comfortable platform in modern Russia's printed record, scholars have yet to explore fully the intimate context surrounding their activities in the early nineteenth century. There is, as a result, a certain homeless quality to our understandings of Imperial Russian culture, which this history of one extremely productive home will help us correct. -from The House in the Garden
The House in the Garden explores the role played by domesticity in the making of Imperial Russian intellectual traditions. It tells the story of the Bakunins, a distinguished noble family who in 1779 chose to abandon their home in St. Petersburg for a rustic manor house in central Russia's Tver Province. At the time, the Russian government was encouraging its elite subjects to see their private lives as a forum for the representation of imperial virtues and norms. Drawing on the family's vast archive, Randolph describes the Bakunins' attempts to live up to this ideal and to convert their new home, Priamukhino, into an example of modern civilization. In particular, Randolph shows how the Bakunin home fostered the development of a group of charismatic young students from Moscow University, who in the 1830s sought to use their experiences at Priamukhino to reimagine themselves as agents of Russia's enlightenment.
Some of the story Randolph tells is familiar to historians. The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, whose early philosophical evolution Randolph describes, was born at Priamukhino, while the radical critic Vissarion Belinsky claimed to have been transformed by his experiences there. When Tom Stoppard sought to portray the spiritual history of the Russian intelligentia in his trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, he chose Priamukhino as the scene for act 1. Yet Randolph's research allows us to watch this drama from a radically different perspective. It shows how the culture of Russian Idealism-so long presumed to be a product of alienation-actually relied on the support provided by the cult of distinction that the Russian government had built around noble homes. It also allows us to see the other actors and agents of private life-and most notably, the Bakunin women-as participants in the creation of modern Russian social thought. The result is a work that revises our understanding of Russian intellectual history while also contributing to the histories of women, gender, private life, and memory in nineteenth-century Russia.
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 287
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: Jun 2007
ISBN 10: 0801445426
ISBN 13: 9780801445422
In this lucid study, John Randolph brings together the realms of cultural, social, and intellectual history to provide a fascinating new perspective on the Russian Idealist circle of Mikhail Bakunin and Nikolai Stankevich.... It will be of interest to a wide audience of historians, literary scholars, and non-specialists not merely because of its fascinating subject matter and elegant readability but also because of the myriad ways in which it shakes up and challenges many of the old cultural cliches about the roots of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia.
* Slavic and East European Journal *In The House in the Garden, John Randolph shows that intellectual history and biography are completely interwoven. In a straightforward, graceful, unpretentious style, Randolph argues that intellectual life in early nineteenth-century Russia entrenched itself in the home, which was the one venue that could more or less be placed under the sway of the intellect. The achievement of enlightened domesticity was the overriding preoccupation of the Bakunin family-at least for a while. Like other intellectual Europeans, they sought to combine brain, heart, and history as an effective response to the widely perceived crisis of reason.
-- Stephen Lovell, King's College London, author of Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha, 1710-2000Revitalizing the grand old tradition of nineteenth-century Russian intellectual history in this engaging book, John Randolph uncovers the social and cultural foundations of Russian Idealism, a key to the Russian revolutionary spirit that would have an indelible impact on twentieth-century Russian history.
-- Barbara Walker, author of Maximilian Voloshin and the Russian Literary Circle: Culture and Survival in Revolutionary TimesThe House in the Garden is an important and engaging book about one of the most famous families in Russian history-the Bakunins-and of their estate, Priamukhino. The estate was both stage and testing ground for various notions of how private life might become the generative source of public virtues. One of Randolph's achievements is to suggest that Priamukhino's inhabitants were not so much alienated from the larger worlds of the Russian capitals as they were inspired by rhetorics of service and duty which they undertook to live out, in ways that ultimately took them beyond the intentions of the state, and into conflict with each other and with themselves. This book is a wonderful contribution to the history of women in Russia-attending to the roles of several generations of Bakunin women in forging the particular ethos of their estate, and using women's correspondence to argue for their active participation in dramas of duty, sacrifice, and the passionate longings of the heart. We are reminded that intellectual history 'happens' not only between the pages of books but also in the dramatic interstices of drawing rooms, betrothals, and intimate conversation.
-- Jane Costlow, Bates College
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