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Scenarios of Power. Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, Volume 2, by Richard S. Wortman
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Richard Wortman continues his unrivaled inquiry into the lavish ceremonies and celebrations of the Russian imperial court, revealing the myths, symbols, and rituals that were central to monarchical rule. In this volume, he explores the presentations and representations of tsarist power under the last three emperors--Alexander II, Alexander III, and Nicholas II--who faced increasing social pressures from modernizing forces. Coronations, funerals, the blessing of the waters, parades as well as art, architecture, and the printed word all captured the mental worlds of these men and showed how they understood the empire they ruled. Wortman describes the evolution of their scenarios during their upbringing and the early years of their reign, making clear how these symbolic settings defined their policies and goals.
The author finds that the last Russian tsars adapted the myth of the transcendent Western emperor to cope with the challenges of liberalism, nationalism, and democracy. They made use of historical celebrations, the press, art, literature, and films to disseminate their images as popular, national monarchs. Alexander III and Nicholas II presented themselves increasingly as the embodiment of the Russian people, rather than the all-Russian emperor governing a multi-ethnic empire--an image perpetuated by Peter the Great. This new means of appeal, Wortman argues, by presenting the tsar as sole representative of the Russian people, enabled him to sustain his determination to counter the Duma and to restore his autocratic privileges.
- Sales Rank: #3397525 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Princeton University Press
- Published on: 2000-03-20
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.70" h x 6.46" w x 9.44" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 580 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
Co-Winner of the 2006 Etkind Prize, Best Book by a Western Scholar on Russian Literature/Culturey, European University at St. Petersburg
Winner of the 2000 George L. Mosse Prize, American Historical Association
"A brief review can hardly do justice to the wealth of information and sophistication of analysis here; if the outline of Wortman's story is familiar, his telling of it is refreshingly new. . . . Eschewing the kind of treacly romanticism that tends to transform [the tsars] with their many egregious faults into tragic heroes, Wortman enriches our understanding of why they made certain personal choices so ill-suited for the nation they undeniably loved."--Louise McReynolds, Slavic Review
"The formidable variety of evidence Wortman has amassed in this volume for his novel conclusions about the nature of Russian autocracy and downfall of the Romanovs puts Scenarios of Power at the top of the reading list not just for the serious students of Imperial Russia but for all scholars interested in the power of cultural symbols to shape history."--Priscilla Roosevelt, Russian Review
"This is a masterly book. It provides a penetrating analysis of the
political culture of late Imperial Russia. Wortman's sophisticated and stimulating volume should provide a starting point for many more studies of the symbols and ritual of the Tsarist state."--Peter Waldron, Europe-Asia Studies
"A major contribution to the history of Russia, one from which every serious student of that country's tragic destiny will learn."--Abbott Gleason, Journal of Modern History
From the Inside Flap
"Together with the first volume, this second volume of Scenarios of Power will likely long remain the single best interpretive study of the evolution of modern monarchical ideology in Russia. It is also a superb example of the cultural analysis of monarchical politics, and therefore will interest readers outside of the Russia field. Attentive to the symbolic sources of political action, Wortman illuminates the mythic images and narratives--and the changes in these--that monarchs and elite advocates of the monarchy articulated from the middle of the nineteenth century to the final years of the Romanov monarchy."--Mark D. Steinberg, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
From the Back Cover
"Together with the first volume, this second volume of Scenarios of Power will likely long remain the single best interpretive study of the evolution of modern monarchical ideology in Russia. It is also a superb example of the cultural analysis of monarchical politics, and therefore will interest readers outside of the Russia field. Attentive to the symbolic sources of political action, Wortman illuminates the mythic images and narratives--and the changes in these--that monarchs and elite advocates of the monarchy articulated from the middle of the nineteenth century to the final years of the Romanov monarchy."--Mark D. Steinberg, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Most helpful customer reviews
10 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
Welcome to the weird world of Russian monarchism
By pnotley@hotmail.com
How to summarize the history of the Romanov dynasty? Well, Peter "the Great" murdered his son, Catherine "the great" murdered her husband, and Alexander "the Blessed" was complicit in the murder of his father. After that the dynasty went into a bit of a decline. For the past two decades historians have been increasingly interested in the world of monarchist ritual. They have looked at how during the nineteenth century these rituals became more, not less, elaborate and they have pondered on the use of these rituals as examples of aristocratic hegemony. Wortman's well written and well documented second volume looks at the Russian version from the ascension of Alexander II in 1855 to the abdication of Nicholas II. We certainly get a lot of information on the elaborate ceremonies of the monarchy. We learn of the elaborate rituals and liturgies of the coronation ceremonies, along with fulsome and increasingly sycophantic paeans from the ranks of Orthodoxy. We are in a world of great popular feasts for the people, "entertained by acrobats, jugglers, stunt riders, and carousel rides," which comes to its horrible climax when at least 1,500 people are trampled to death on the feast festivals of Khodynka at the coronation of Nicholas II, the direct result of tsarist incompetence. We enter the world of elaborate balls, and the exquisite detail of faberge eggs (one designed to look like Assumption Cathedral). We see new strains in royalist propaganda as Alexander III presents a nationalist and orthodox message, while Nicholas II presents a Victorian and domestic picture of his family. Rather revealingly Wortman quotes Tchaikovsky's contempt for the 1812 Overture that he composed for Alexander III's coronation.
But there is a larger point in Wortman's account. Much of the literature on royal power deals with its ability to dazzle the larger population. Increasingly, however, royal ritual only dazzled its monarchs. Alexander II starts off with the "scenario of love." After the (partial) emancipation of the peasantry, Alexander II increasingly emphasized his "loving" and "benevolent" nature, as if his self-professed amiability automatically deserved to be reciprocated. As it happened Alexander II's marriage was visibly crumbling as he carried on with a much younger woman. At the same time Alexander moved away from a western path of development, he also sought to ignore what laws and regulations existed to force the rest of the nobility to accept his paramour as his second empress.
Alexander III's reign saw an emphasis on an increasingly chauvinist vision of Russia and Russian orthodoxy, with a new emphasis on monarchies and cathedrals. There was a weird, increasingly unreal and almost necrophiliac admiration for 17th century Moscow, before the liberal rot had set in under Peter I. There was a new emphasis on miracle as the country moved towards a military dictatorship. Nicholas II believed in all these ideas and more, but whereas Alexander III relied on the army and the dictatorship, Nicholas increasingly deluded himself into believing that he had a direct relationship with the Russian people. In this increasingly mystic view in which the "real" Russian people gave him their complete and unequivocal support, Nicholas II viewed the bureaucracies, the army, the episcopacy, other politicians simply as barriers to the implementation of his own will.
As a result during his rituals Nicholas II never missed an opportunity to demean the Duma, the parliament he had reluctantly allowed after the 1905 revolution and which he was planning to emasculate before war broke out in 1914. Nicholas became obsessed with "holy men" who supposedly represented the Russian people, and he and his wife shamelessly bullied the Orthodox hierarchy in order to declare one of them a saint. Reading reports from his bribed press, easily impressed by the crowds who flocked to the anniversaries and royal tours, Nicholas had deluded himself into believing that he was one with the Russian people. Becoming commander in chief of the army against the advice of almost all his ministers, by the end of his reign Nicholas could no longer count on the army, or the church, or the conservatives in his rigged parliament, or most of his family, indeed on anyone other than his wife and children. And yet he was outraged after his abdication that his brother Michael might speak hesitatingly of a constitutional monarchy. The emphasis on Victorian domestic harmony was an illusion; Wortman clearly shows that any chance Russia had of moving on towards a non-revolutionary modernity was fatally hampered by its monarch with a seventeenth century soul.
12 of 39 people found the following review helpful.
History clouded by interpretive theory
By A Customer
As is often the case with Western scholars writing on things Russian, one simply cannot properly understand Russia -- culturally or politically -- without first understanding Byzantium and Eastern Orthodoxy. Russia is a heir to Byzantium, and Orthodoxy determined and shaped its culture. Mr. Wortman tends to treat his subject as if he were part anthropologist, part literary theorist, part psychologist -- all premised on the assumption that the idea of Monarchy itself was and is simply a "forest of symbols", as arbitrary in its connection to any sort of transcedental meaning as any other "system. This betrays the disease of modern academia: political systems are mere ideologies, constructions that mask power. To ignore the theology of the Orthodox Church and the various writings both in Greek and Russian on Monarchy is an oversight to say the least. To try and psychologize or play with semiotics as a way to unmask the Russian Monarchy is bad history. The Czar and the Church represented the two heads of the double eagle inheritted from Byzantium. One head -- the Czar -- protected the Kingdom and the Faith from foreign invaders and preserved a Christian Kingdom in rule and law; the Church -- the other head of the eagle -- tended to man's salvation and his soul. These two heads worked synergistically. This is the essence of the Russian Monarchy: the Czar's role cannot be separated from his duty to God and the Church. To understand how this works and why, turn to Byzantium or Pebodenostev.
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