'Sleeping Beauty'? Sense and nonsense in the historiography of Russia

• Published in: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas Vol. 60; no. 3; pp. 373 - 405
• Main Author: Sperling, Walter
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: German
• Published: 01-07-2012
• Subjects: Cultural history; Cultural norms; Gaze; Historiography; Myth; Nation; Otherness; State
• ISSN: 0021-4019

Summary - Russian or East European history is hardly known as an innovative field of inquiry. In the 'Western? world historians of Russia and Soviet Union have not been able to set their marks within the larger international community, neither in social history nor in cultural history nor in new imperial history. For those historians who shared the idea of progress it must have been hard to bear that their colleagues were criticising them as backward just in the same way as they criticised their historical subjects for having failed to find their way to modernity. At first glance, Begriffsgeschichte offers an escape from this structural dilemma for it allows taking a glimpse behind the curtain of modern thinking and the concept of history as it emerged in the late 18th early 19th century in Europe. Reinhart Koselleck described this shiftusing the metaphors of place on the one hand and horizon on the other to denote a stability in pre-modern and an open and therefore dangerous future in modern times, respectively. Abstract printed by permission of Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart, Germany