Sign-In
Cart
The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism
Hardcover
Literary CriticismHistoriographyRussian History
ISBN13: 9780801445422
Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr
Published: Feb 16 2007
Pages: 304
Weight: 1.22
Height: 0.97 Width: 6.38 Depth: 9.20
Language: English
Aspiring thinkers require a stage for their performance and an audience to help give their actions distinction and meaning. To be made durable and influential, their charismatic stories have to be framed by supporting ideals, practices, and institutions. Although the biographies of the Empire's most famous thinkers have a comfortable platform in modern Russia's printed record, scholars have yet to explore fully the intimate context surrounding their activities in the early nineteenth century. There is, as a result, a certain homeless quality to our understandings of Imperial Russian culture, which this history of one extremely productive home will help us correct.--from The House in the Garden
The House in the Garden explores the role played by domesticity in the making of Imperial Russian intellectual traditions. It tells the story of the Bakunins, a distinguished noble family who in 1779 chose to abandon their home in St. Petersburg for a rustic manor house in central Russia's Tver Province. At the time, the Russian government was encouraging its elite subjects to see their private lives as a forum for the representation of imperial virtues and norms. Drawing on the family's vast archive, Randolph describes the Bakunins' attempts to live up to this ideal and to convert their new home, Priamukhino, into an example of modern civilization. In particular, Randolph shows how the Bakunin home fostered the development of a group of charismatic young students from Moscow University, who in the 1830s sought to use their experiences at Priamukhino to reimagine themselves as agents of Russia's enlightenment.
Some of the story Randolph tells is familiar to historians. The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, whose early philosophical evolution Randolph describes, was born at Priamukhino, while the radical critic Vissarion Belinsky claimed to have been transformed by his experiences there. When Tom Stoppard sought to portray the spiritual history of the Russian intelligentia in his trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, he chose Priamukhino as the scene for act 1. Yet Randolph's research allows us to watch this drama from a radically different perspective. It shows how the culture of Russian Idealism--so long presumed to be a product of alienation--actually relied on the support provided by the cult of distinction that the Russian government had built around noble homes. It also allows us to see the other actors and agents of private life--and most notably, the Bakunin women--as participants in the creation of modern Russian social thought. The result is a work that revises our understanding of Russian intellectual history while also contributing to the histories of women, gender, private life, and memory in nineteenth-century Russia.
Also in
Russian History
Dangerous Games: Faces, Incidents, and Casualties of the Cold War
Baron, Scott
Wise, James E.
Hardcover
Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster
Higginbotham, Adam
Paperback
Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice
Browder, Bill
Paperback
The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature
English, Charlie
Hardcover
The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I.
Paperback
Beginner's Russian with Interactive Online Workbook, 2nd Edition
Miller, Frank J.
Kagan, Olga E.
Kudyma, Anna S.
Paperback
The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 2]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I.
Paperback
The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 3]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I.
Paperback
Welcome to the Orthodox Church: An Introduction to Eastern Christianity
Mathewes-Green, Frederica
Paperback
The Dark Side of the Earth: Russia's Short-Lived Victory Over Totalitarianism
Zygar, Mikhail
Hardcover
The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West
Walker, Shaun
Paperback
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause (Pulitzer Prize Winner): The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
Nathans, Benjamin
Paperback
Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
Sullivan, Rosemary
Paperback
The Forbidden Garden: The Botanists of Besieged Leningrad and Their Impossible Choice
Parkin, Simon
Paperback
The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia
Jager, Sheila Miyoshi
Paperback
Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation
Borogan, Irina
Soldatov, Andrei
Hardcover
The Future Is History (National Book Award Winner): How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
Gessen, Masha
Paperback
Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath
Browder, Bill
Paperback
The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West
Walker, Shaun
Hardcover
The Return of Russia: From Yeltsin to Putin, the Story of a Vengeful Kremlin
Rodgers, James
Hardcover
When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry
Beckerman, Gal
Paperback
Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire
Baier, Bret
Whitney, Catherine
Paperback
The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky
Kaufman, Andrew D.
Paperback
Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (Large Print Edition)
Baier, Bret
Whitney, Catherine
Paperback
The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World
Davies, John
Kent, Alexander J.
Hardcover
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause (Pulitzer Prize Winner): The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
Nathans, Benjamin
Hardcover
From Sovereigns to Servants: How the War Against Ukraine Reshaped Russia's Elite
Prokopenko, Alexandra
Paperback
The Moscow Playbook: How Russia Used, Abused, and Transformed Sports in the Hunt for Power
Berglund, Bruce
Hardcover
One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964
Fursenko, Aleksandr
Naftali, Timothy
Paperback
The Lighthouse of Stalingrad: The Hidden Truth at the Heart of the Greatest Battle of World War II
MacGregor, Iain
Paperback
Our Supreme Task: How Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain Speech Defined the Cold War Alliance
White, Philip
Paperback
Dancing in Petersburg: The Memoirs of Kschessinska - Prima Ballerina of the Russian Imperial Theatre, and Mistress of the future Tsar Nicholas II
Kschessinska, Mathilde
Paperback
Lost Splendor: The Amazing Memoirs of the Man Who Killed Rasputin
Youssouppoff, Prince Felix
Paperback
Putin's Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia's Collapse Into Mercenary Chaos
Rondeaux, Candace
Hardcover
Red Horizons: The True Story of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescus' Crimes, Lifestyle, and Corruption
Pacepa, Ion Mihai
Paperback
Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability
Kimmage, Michael
Hardcover
Tatiana Romanov, Daughter of the Last Tsar: Diaries and Letters, 1913-1918
Azar, Helen
Nicholson, Nicholas B. a.
Hardcover
First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia's President Vladimir Putin
Gevorkyan, Nataliya
Timakova, Natalya
Putin, Vladimir
Paperback
Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters
Brown, Kate
Paperback
The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (Large Print Edition)
Gessen, Masha
Paperback
Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State
Schrad, Mark Lawrence
Paperback
What's Cooking in the Kremlin: From Rasputin to Putin, How Russia Built an Empire with a Knife and Fork
Szablowski, Witold
Paperback
The Last Tsar: The Abdication of Nicholas II and the Fall of the Romanovs
Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi
Paperback
War in Ukraine Volume 12: The Battle of Kharkiv and the Slobozhan Counteroffensive, February-October 2022
Kharkuk, Andrij
Kharkuk, Daryna
Paperback
Hardship to Homeland: Pacific Northwest Volga Germans (Revised, Expanded)
Scheuerman, Richard D.
Trafzer, Clifford E.
Paperback
The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra
Rappaport, Helen
Paperback
Island of the Blue Foxes: Disaster and Triumph on the World's Greatest Scientific Expedition
Bown, Stephen R.
Hardcover
Russian Literary Journals, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy in St. Petersburg, 1877
Mayhew, Linda M.
Paperback
Replaying the Second World War: Soviet Parallels and Inspirations for Russian Atrocities in the Russo-Ukrainian War, 2014-25
Drachewych, Oleksa
Paperback
Born under the Hammer and Sickle: From Communist Russia to Freedom in Canada
(Tkatschow) Hill, Rita
Paperback
Once Upon a Time in Russia: The Rise of the Oligarchs--A True Story of Ambition, Wealth, Betrayal, and Murder
Mezrich, Ben
Paperback