Cracraft James The Petrine Revolution In Russian Culture

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004 - 577 c.This book examines the core verbal aspect of the Petrine revolution in Russia: “Petrine” referring to Peter I “the Great,” tsar and first emperor (lived 1672–1725), and “revolution” to encapsulate the radical changes in culture engineered by his regime. Two previous books, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Architecture (Chicago, 1988) and The Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery (Chicago, 1997), documented such changes in Russian visual culture, leaving the present volume to concentrate on language and the project as a whole.
The volume recounts in detail the verbal transmission to Russia under Peter of contemporary European naval, military, bureaucratic-legal, scientific, and literary practices, values, and norms, thereby documenting the crucial first stage in the constitution of a modern Russian verbal culture, one that necessarily included a standardized written language. Throughout the discussion an effort is made to situate the subject in its wider European as well as in its local settings. Related historiographical problems are also considered at appropriate points, as are some of the wider implications of my findings. The volume’s concluding chapter attempts both to sum up the Petrine revolution in Russian culture and to delimit its reach. I thus hope to help resolve the overriding question of how medieval Muscovy became modern Russia and a dominant yet distinctive presence in Europe and the world. I also hope that this book, like my companion studies of architecture and imagery, may contribute something of value to the burgeoning exchanges among scholars taking interdisciplinary and comparative if not global approaches to their work.