CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2013
| Author | Ryzhkov, Vladimir S |
|---|---|
| Title | POLITICAL IDEAS IN THE RUSSIAN HISTORICAL WRITING OF THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT: MIKHAIL SHCHERBATOV AND NIKOLAI KARAMZIN |
| Summary | This dissertation is devoted to a comparative analysis of the political ideas of two Russian historians of the late eighteenth—early nineteenth cc., Mikhail Shcherbatov (1733–1790) and Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), the authors of the two first “full” histories of Russia. It demonstrates that although these historians are usually related to the Age of Enlightenment, their use of contemporary European ideas was specific and based on political notions borrowed from the political thought of the Renaissance and classical Antiquity. Both these historians advocated moral, although not legal, limitations to “despotism”. For Shcherbatov this meant the participation of “virtuous” aristocrats in governing the state together with the monarch. For Karamzin this meant the coordination of the monarch’s policy with the “public opinion” represented by the conservative circles of the nobility. The second part of the dissertation is devoted to a detailed comparison of the last volumes of Shcherbatov’s and Karamzin’s histories, which describe the reigns of Ivan the Terrible and Boris Godunov. By comparing the ways in which both historians constructed the plots of the stories of these two rulers, on the basis of available sources, this dissertation seeks to demonstrate how the political ideas of Shcherbatov and Karamzin were expressed in their historical writing. |
| Supervisor | Kontler Laszlo |
| Department | History PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2013/hphryv01.pdf |
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