Before Cultural History. Functions and Dynamics of Russian Historiography in an European Context (1750-1830)
Modern and Contemporary History
Final Report Abstract
The project was able to work out that the authors of the 18th century reflected their cultural world (e.g. nobility, Academy of Sciences, Moscow University) in their "stories" on the one hand through the narrative strategy, on the other hand they went new ways and produced new knowledge, which, depending on the skills and goals of the authors, either stayed in the old cultural model (in Lotman's sense) or went beyond it. Cultural history exists in the first Russian historical works simply because they themselves function as part of cultural history. Each work had a goal that lay outside of "pure" science, such as educating society "to love one's country". The writings of the 18th and early 19th centuries therefore offer an insight into elite discourses, which are based on older Russian traditions on the one hand and on European narratives on the other hand and thus offer a piece of entangled history in which it becomes clear in the transfer which traditions exist were retained even when adopting a specific rhetoric of the Enlightenment and early Romanticism. At the end, a monograph is created, which, in addition to a monographic part, prepares translations of excerpts from several reference works. In this way, a new interpretation of the Russian historiography of this time period will be proposed.
