RICERCA ITALIANA     

Russia in the French Mirror and France in the Russian Mirror: Culture, Politics and Historiography (1789-1989)

Università di Pisa

Abstract

The project aims to set up a small but tight-knit research group in order to explore French reflection on Russia and Russian reflection on France, within the temporal framework of the two great Revolutions that involved these countries. Research will start out from the assumption that such a vast theme can produce better scientific results by isolating several circumscribed thematic nodes, which will form the focus of privileged attention. This project will address the construction of identity categories (concerning both cultural and political identity) and the historiographic debate on the two Revolutions.

Principal Investigator

Regina POZZI Università di PISA

Research Objectives

The research group was set up not only with the aim of investigating Russian and French attitudes in the field of political and cultural thinking, but also to examine in greater depth the historiographic production on the two revolutionary experiences. Thus the research project will address two distinct, albeit intertwined, issues.
During the nineteenth century, France and Russia were situated at the two opposite extremes of the modernisation and, more generally, transformation processes that were taking place in Europe. They symbolise two positions that stood poles apart not only on the political-juridical plane but also in the economic-social sphere, while the horizon of "high" culture, which to some extent still reflected the heritage of the Age of Enlightenment, seemed to constitute the only aspect maintaining a link between such radically different situations. The apparent incommunicability between men and women shaped by so vastly differing cultural and political frameworks is here taken as the privileged field of investigation. It is known that the process through which identity categories are built up utilises, among other things, conceptual tools fashioned in order to define and configure the respective fields of belonging: most often through wide-ranging dichotomic tools (in this case nature/culture; culture/cultures; civilisation/barbarism; individualism/holism; East/West), but also through the definition of sets founded on hierarchies of value (hierarchies >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

If one excludes travel literature and works dealing with diplomatic relations, as well as the field of comparative historiography on the two Revolutions, the research project proposed here is not accompanied – save for a very few exceptions – by a robust literature that can serve as a reference framework. This is rather surprising if one considers that the theme is recurrent in the political-cultural discourse of the respective countries and is of considerable relevance for the history of European culture tout court. But it is clear that the eighteenth century, with the intense cultural exchange prompted by the Age of Enlightenment, and the entire twentieth century, with the hegemonic role assumed by the Soviet Union - in cultural relations as well - have formed the major focus of attention on the part of scholars profiling the history of the two countries. This has produced significant studies which, however, are often situated upstream or downstream from the case studies identified here. Despite this, point A of the bibliographical references lists some studies of particular interest for the general approach adopted.

More circumscribed, and rather more homogeneous with respect to an important sector of this research project, is the contribution deriving from the historiography on the two Revolutions. Taken individually, the Revolutions have generated an enormous range of literature of which it would be impossible to give a full account, even if attention >>>