Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-m42fx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-17T17:13:46.003Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Russia's Perception of Her Relationship with the West

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Marc Raeff
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The old French adage comparaison n'est pas raison indicates that comparison (contrast, too, for that matter) is never made for its own sake but only to lead to some conclusion. That is why the habit of comparing, or contrasting, the history of one country with that of another (or several others) gives rise to such vexing problems and generates such intense passions—and in turn feeds on them. We are dealing here not only with a “scientific” problem, whose solution would be an acquired truth, but with the attitudes of the participants and spectators of historical events as well. Unlike the scholar who is supposed to search only for truth, social and political thinkers and litterateurs engage in comparative analysis and reasoning in order to indulge whatever lies closest to their hearts at a given moment. In his paper Mr. Roberts has concentrated on the problems facing the scholar-scientist. His scientific similes and epistemological caveats are therefore neither mere literary embellishments nor a challenge to C. P. Snow's dichotomized view of the contemporary intellectual but quite deliberate and telling evidence that his main preoccupation is to clarify the methodological issues involved. In this very essential and laudable enterprise he has cut away much of the underbrush that all too often obscures comparative analysis and politically (or culturally or religiously) motivated contrasts. But in so doing he has perhaps allowed himself to lose sight of the reasons that made the question of Russia's relationship to the West an issue of such momentous concern for generations of Russians as well as Europeans—and now for Americans too. By taking up the discussion from the questions of method which Mr. Roberts has elucidated so well, we may be able to come to grips with the problem of attitudes and clarify a bit more the nature of the specific comparative issue with which we are concerned.

Type
Discussion
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , March 1964 , pp. 13 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1963

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Even if a consensus on what is the “West” could have been reached by contemporaries (a task that would not have been much easier then than it is today).

2 (St. Petersburg, 1897).

3 I am, of course, well aware that the dichotomy between the two parts of the Russian nation was not quite as sharp and fixed as the Slavophiles and others believed; otherwise it would be difficult to account, for example, for the popularity and assimilation of the great Russian classic writers of the nineteenth century by the common people as soon as the latter had learned to read.

4 We only need to recall the satirist's description of the young fop in Catherine II's time whose body belonged to Russia but whose soul was French, or that other petit-maître who bewailed the fact that under Russian conditions it was impossible to reach the exalted level of cultural sophistication of his dear Parisian models. And even the fad for Russian history at the end of the eighteenth century was but a form of westernization. Hans Rogger, Cf., National Consciousness in Eighteenth Century Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1960).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 “Kak sladostno otchiznu nenavidet'! / I zhadno zhdat* eia unichtozhen'ia! / I v razrushenii otchizny videt’ / Vsemirnogo dennitsu vozrozhden'ia!” Cited by M. 0. (Moscow, 1908), p. 105.

6 Spiridonakis, Basile G., Mémoires et documents du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères de France sur la Russie (Quebec: Faculté des Arts, Université de Sherbrooke, n.d.)Google Scholar. T

7 Sabatier de Cabre, memoiré of July 31, 1772, Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Mémoires et Documents, Russie, Vol. LXXXV, Supplement No. 6 (1769-1772), p. 227.

8 It is interesting to note that the problem did not even arise during the Napoleonic wars and Russia's occupation of France in 1814-15.

9 Lortholary, Cf. Albert, Les “Philosophes”; du XVIIIe siécle et la Russie: Le mirage russe en France au XVIIIe s. (Paris, 1951)Google Scholar; Groh, Dieter, Russland und das Selbstverstandnis Europas: Ein Beitrag zur europäischen Geistesgeschichte (Neuwied, 1961)Google Scholar and supporting documentation in Dmitrij Tschžewskij and Groh, Dieter, eds., Europa und Russland: Texte zum Problem des westeuropäischen und russischen Selbstverständnisses (Darmstadt, 1959)Google Scholar.

10 See Gerhard, Dietrich, Alte und neue Welt in vergleichender Geschichtsbetrachtung (Gottingen, 1962)Google Scholar; Brunner, Otto, Neue Wege der Sozialgeschichte (Göttingen, 1956)Google Scholar.

11 See Confino, Michael, Domaines et seigneurs en Russie vers la fin du XVIIIe siècle: Étude de structures agraires et de mentalités économiques (Paris, 1963), pp. 136 ffGoogle Scholar.