Kevin M. F. Platt, TERROR AND GREATNESS: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths, Cornell University Press, 2011



http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=9875



About the Author



Kevin M. F. Platt is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Chair of the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of History in a Grotesque Key: Russian Literature and the Idea of Revolution and Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda.



introduction: Toward a Cultural Historiography of Russia					

	Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great							

	Materials and Methods 										

	Terror and Greatness 										



chapter one: Liminality 											

	Liminal Heroes 												

	History and Identity: Nikolai Karamzin and Nikolai G. Ustrialov 			

	The Historical Novel as Ritual: Ivan Lazhechnikov’s The Last Novice and Aleksei K. Tolstoi’s Prince Serebrianyi 					



chapter two: Trauma 											

	Terror as Greatness 											

	Aleksandr Pushkin’s Petrine Project 								

	Slavophiles and Westernizers 									



chapter three: Filicide 											

	Page versus Stage 											

	Bloody Fathers and Dead Children: Tsarevich Aleksei and Tsarevich Ivan 										

	. . . and Canvas: The Murdered Tsareviches in Historical Painting 		



chapter four: Prognostication 										

	History as Myth 											

	Divination: Dmitrii Merezhkovskii’s Antichrist (Peter and Aleksei) 		

	Dialectic: Pavel Miliukov’s The Outlines of Russian Cultural History 		

	Irony’s Reprise: Ilia Repin’s Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan 		



chapter five: Rehabilitation 										

	Stalinist Revisionism 										

	The 1920s: History without Actors, Historiography without the State		

	Last Words: Andrei Shestakov’s Short Course in the History of the USSR 										



chapter six: Repetition 208

	Analogy and Allegory 										

	Afterimages: Aleksei N. Tolstoi’s Many Returns to Peter the Great 		

	Allegory of Historiography: Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible 		



conclusion: Redux 												



Selected Bibliography 											



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.

Reviews

"In this engaging book, Kevin M. F. Platt analyzes the enduring cultural and political importance of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great in a deftly comparative, rigorously theorized argument. The interplay between greatness and terror, trauma and collective identity, memory and prognostication frames his discussion. Platt's richly nuanced readings cover historical studies, the fine arts, imaginative literature, and the very latest films. As engaging a story as the histories of its two protagonists, Terror and Greatness deserves to be read by anyone interested in Russia, past or present."—William Mills Todd III, Harvard College Professor and Harry Tuchman Levin Professor of Literature, Harvard University



"This cultural historiography—truly original, genuinely interdisciplinary, and extraordinarily erudite—examines representations of Ivan and Peter as despotic yet heroic rulers, and the role these myths have played in the development of Russian political culture and national identity."—Gregory Freeze, Victor and Gwendolyn Beinfield Professor of History, Brandeis University



"Kevin M. F. Platt regards both Ivan and Peter as liminal figures of national history who in many ways defined its collective unconscious. They both—for different reasons and with different degrees of historical accuracy—embodied for the significant part of the nation its glorious past. Ivan's rule started Russian expansion eastward, and Peter, by his victories and reforms, brought it into the concert of European powers. At the same time, these two rulers who taken together governed Russia for three-quarters of a century brought an incredible amount of suffering to many of their subjects, and both were guilty of murdering their elder sons and official heirs to the throne. For centuries Russian thinkers, writers, artists, and the general public were engaged in an ardent debate about their legacy. Platt traces the fascinating history of this debate dealing with intellectual history, literature, iconography, and film. His ability to analyze so many media as common pools of myths and ideological metaphors is very impressive."—Andrei Zorin, Professor and Chair of Russian and Fellow of New College, University of Oxford