Terror and Greatness : Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths /
Platt, Kevin M. F.
Terror and Greatness : Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths / Kevin M. F. Platt. - 1 online resource (308 p.) : 2 color plates, 25 halftones
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Note on Transliteration -- Introduction. Toward a Cultural Historiography of Rus sia -- Chapter one. Liminality -- Chapter two. Trauma -- Chapter three. Filicide -- Chapter four. Prognostication -- Chapter five. Rehabilitation -- Chapter six. Repetition -- Conclusion: Redux -- Selected Bibliography -- Index
restricted access http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec
In this ambitious book, Kevin M. F. Platt focuses on a cruel paradox central to Russian history: that the price of progress has so often been the traumatic suffering of society at the hands of the state. The reigns of Ivan IV (the Terrible) and Peter the Great are the most vivid exemplars of this phenomenon in the pre-Soviet period. Both rulers have been alternately lionized for great achievements and despised for the extraordinary violence of their reigns. In many accounts, the balance of praise and condemnation remains unresolved; often the violence is simply repressed.Platt explores historical and cultural representations of the two rulers from the early nineteenth century to the present, as they shaped and served the changing dictates of Russian political life. Throughout, he shows how past representations exerted pressure on subsequent attempts to evaluate these liminal figures. In ever-changing and often counterposed treatments of the two, Russians have debated the relationship between greatness and terror in Russian political practice, while wrestling with the fact that the nation's collective selfhood has seemingly been forged only through shared, often self-inflicted trauma. Platt investigates the work of all the major historians, from Karamzin to the present, who wrote on Ivan and Peter. Yet he casts his net widely, and "historians" of the two tsars include poets, novelists, composers, and painters, giants of the opera stage, Party hacks, filmmakers, and Stalin himself. To this day the contradictory legacies of Ivan and Peter burden any attempt to come to terms with the nature of political power-past, present, future-in Russia.
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
In English.
9780801461439 9780801460951
10.7591/9780801460951 doi
History.
Soviet & East European History.
HISTORY / Russia & the Former Soviet Union.
ivan the terrible, peter the great, nikolay karamzin, russian historical mythology, russian cultural history, russian political life, tsars.
DK38 / .P57 2016
947.043072
Terror and Greatness : Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths / Kevin M. F. Platt. - 1 online resource (308 p.) : 2 color plates, 25 halftones
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Note on Transliteration -- Introduction. Toward a Cultural Historiography of Rus sia -- Chapter one. Liminality -- Chapter two. Trauma -- Chapter three. Filicide -- Chapter four. Prognostication -- Chapter five. Rehabilitation -- Chapter six. Repetition -- Conclusion: Redux -- Selected Bibliography -- Index
restricted access http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec
In this ambitious book, Kevin M. F. Platt focuses on a cruel paradox central to Russian history: that the price of progress has so often been the traumatic suffering of society at the hands of the state. The reigns of Ivan IV (the Terrible) and Peter the Great are the most vivid exemplars of this phenomenon in the pre-Soviet period. Both rulers have been alternately lionized for great achievements and despised for the extraordinary violence of their reigns. In many accounts, the balance of praise and condemnation remains unresolved; often the violence is simply repressed.Platt explores historical and cultural representations of the two rulers from the early nineteenth century to the present, as they shaped and served the changing dictates of Russian political life. Throughout, he shows how past representations exerted pressure on subsequent attempts to evaluate these liminal figures. In ever-changing and often counterposed treatments of the two, Russians have debated the relationship between greatness and terror in Russian political practice, while wrestling with the fact that the nation's collective selfhood has seemingly been forged only through shared, often self-inflicted trauma. Platt investigates the work of all the major historians, from Karamzin to the present, who wrote on Ivan and Peter. Yet he casts his net widely, and "historians" of the two tsars include poets, novelists, composers, and painters, giants of the opera stage, Party hacks, filmmakers, and Stalin himself. To this day the contradictory legacies of Ivan and Peter burden any attempt to come to terms with the nature of political power-past, present, future-in Russia.
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
In English.
9780801461439 9780801460951
10.7591/9780801460951 doi
History.
Soviet & East European History.
HISTORY / Russia & the Former Soviet Union.
ivan the terrible, peter the great, nikolay karamzin, russian historical mythology, russian cultural history, russian political life, tsars.
DK38 / .P57 2016
947.043072