Russia on the Eve of Modernity
Russia on the Eve of Modernity
Russia on the Eve of Modernity is a pioneering exploration of a world that has been largely destroyed by revolutionary upheavals and obscured in historical memory by scholarly focus on elites. Drawing on traditional religious texts, ethnographic materials and contemporary accounts, this book brings to light the ideas and perceptions of the ordinary Russian people of the towns and countryside who continued to live in a pre-modern, non-Western culture that showed great resilience to the very end of the Romanov Empire. Leonid Heretz offers an overview of traditional Russian understandings of the world and its workings, and shows popular responses to events from the assassination of Alexander II to the First World War. This history of ordinary Russians illuminates key themes ranging from peasant monarchism to apocalyptic responses to intrusions from the modern world and will appeal to scholars of Russian history and the history of religion in modern Europe.
- Brings to light the ideas and perceptions of the ordinary Russian people in Late Imperial Russia
- Shows popular responses to events from the assassination of Alexander II to the First World War
- A major contribution to the history of religion in modern Europe and popular culture in late imperial Russia
Reviews & endorsements
"...a strong--and to my mind correct--statement about how Russian folklore should be studied." -David Elton Gay, Journal of Folklore Research
These books mark a new direction in the study of religious beliefs and practices among the lower classes of the Russian Empire.
"Heretz...has produced a rich and detailed work, which he carries into the Soviet period and places in an international context." -Nadieszda Kizenko, Russian Review
Product details
April 2008Adobe eBook Reader
9780511381003
0 pages
0kg
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- 1. The traditional worldview
- 2. The old believers: modernization as apocalypse
- 3. The sectarians: dualism and secret history
- 4. Folk eschatology
- 5. The assassination of Alexander II and folk tsarism
- 6. Cholera and famine: the demonization of the nobility
- 7. The Japanese war: peasant Russia and the wider world
- 8. 1905: revolution or reaction?:
- 9. The great war and the crisis of the traditional culture
- Epilogue
- Bibliography.
