Book chapter
Месяцеслов в руках Петра Великого: Крещение детей А. Д. Меншикова и традиция русской христианской двуименности
The case of a Sufi shrine of the Dagestani origin in Turkey examined in the article relates to the history of shared transnational Sufi networks. The naqshbandiyya-halidiya brotherhood of the Ottoman origin once moved from the Middle East to Russia’s borderlands in the Eastern Caucasus and then came back to the Ottoman Empire from the North Caucasus. Dagestani Sufi networks and holy places represent a specific kind of interactions between the Muslim elites in the Middle East, the North Caucasus, the Volga-Ural region, and Anatolia from the late nineteenth century up today. The biographies of Muhammad and Sharaf ad-Din from Kikuni buried in Turkey are well documented in various written sources, epigraphs, and oral histories. They participated in the 1877 Uprising, were exiled in the Volga region, and then immigrated to the Ottoman Empire. Their biographies show that the Naqshbandiya-Khalidiyya often crossed political boundaries and ideological barriers established in the region during the demarcation of the possessions of the Ottoman Turkey and the Russian Empire. The exchange of territories and subjects between Turkey and Russia over the past one and a half centuries led to the emergence of hybrid identities. The article traces a micro-history of an identity in a muhajir (immigrant) village community in Western Anatolia. Contrary to popular belief, the Sufi brotherhood never represented a single elusive player in the “Big Game” between the Great Powers. Rather, it included numerous rival factions whose leaders formed complex relations with each other and with local political elites. Sufi ritual networks were and still are closely connected to more local networks of sacred sites (ziyarats) in the regions.
This study focuses on the interaction between Russian princes and nomadic Cumans (Qipčaqs, Polovcians). The starting point of our work are names and family ties of individual Cumans captured in the oldest Russian chronicles which represent "minimum quanta" of the historical information. N. M. Karamzin in the notes to his History drew attention to the fact that some of the names of the Cuman families representatives are obviously associated with Russia. These "Russian" names, in our opinion, are the most important indicator of the cross-dynastic interaction, contacts between Russia and the nomadic world. What is the composition of the corpus of Russian names of Cuman elite representatives? In essence, it consists of only a very limited number of anthroponyms: Yuri (George), Daniil, Roman, Gleb, Yaropolk, Davyd (?), Vasili. It is crucial that all of these names are regularly used as dynastic by the Rurikids in the 11th — beginning of 13th century. Most of the names, borrowed by Cumans from Russians, are Christian names. At the same time attention is drawn to the non-trivial distribution reflected in the information of sources; while discovering Christian names of some representatives of the highest Cuman nobility, we do not find any mention of the fact that any of the owners of these names, their fathers and other close male relatives took baptism. On the contrary, they are consistently characterized as pagans. Moreover, ancient chronicles contain no reports of Cuman princes taking baptism until the beginning of the Tataro-Mongol invasion. Interestingly, Christian names of those few Cumans of whose conversion we can speak more or less confidently cannot be found in any records, whether it is a Cuman wife of a Russian prince, an anonymous monk of Kiev-Pechersk Monastery, an author of an inscription on the church wall or a powerful Cuman Prince, who was baptized on the eve of the Battle of the Kalka. In our work we have sought to demonstrate that the cause of the appearence of Russian names in this environment is a cross-dynastic, intergenic anthroponymic communication, a desire to consolidate the alliance with the Russian princes, but not a conversion of the male representatives of the Cuman elite. The set of "Russian" names used by Cumans allows us to determine the circle of their "anthroponymical donors" among the Rurikids and identify a number of rules and laws on which this communication in the language of names was carried out.
This is a collection of essays on the semiotics of history, a product of the 30 years collaboration of the two co-authors. All the articles are devoted to the history of the Russian culture, treating it not as an isolated phenomenon, but as an integral part of the world culture. Semiotic analysis of various fonts allows to define both universal and pecular characteristics in the history of Rusian culture.
The article examines long-lasting confrontation between Spanish Inquisition and Conversos (and, later, Sephardi Jews in Portuguese Diaspora) as a contest in such intangible values as sanctity, honour and merits deserving memory of next generations. These values were believed to be acquired first and foremost through martyrdom. Martyrological theme and potlatch-like scenarios are traced through a wide range of sources: inquisitorial records, Sephardi and Spanish chronicles and Portuguese poetry.
The article examines translator's notes to fiction at large and epistolary works, in particular, as exemplified by Twenty Letters to a Friend by Josef Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva. Written in Russian in 1963, the epistolary memoirs were translated into English and published in New York by Harper Row Publishers in 1967, thereby becoming accessible internationally for an 'alien' Anglophone culture. Rendering into English appeared to have washed out some emotive and attitudinal subtleties - meaningful but barely perceptible within 'alien' social, cultural and linguistic setting; specifically those which bore associations with Svetlana Alliluyeva's childhood and her family pet name Setanka. Such associative imagery would not routinely transmit between languages. Doing so necessitates translator's notes or comments treated throughout the paper as a special technique - translation escorting device.
The book includes different documents on the history of Novgorod in the age of Peter the Great taken from the Historical Archive of Saint-Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The emancipation of the nobility in 1762 was, arguably, the central event in the social and cultural history of the Russian imperial elite and, indeed, a watershed in the relationship between the elite and the state in Russia, marking official recognition by the monarchy of the nobles’ autonomous subjecthood. The road toward this recognition, it is argued here, was paved with a thorough reconceptualization of human nature in Russian governance practices in the first half of the eighteenth century, and reconstructing the trajectory of this reconceptualization is the goal in this chapter. Indeed, attempts to understand human nature were central for political thinking of the age, from Locke, Puffendorf, and Montesquieu to Smith and the Founding Fathers of the United States. Scholars of government and practicing politicians in the West debated the limitations and opportunities inherent in human nature for organizing better governance of their societies. So, I argue, did their counterparts in Russia. Whereas in Petrine administrative thinking and legislation nobles appear as subjects swayed by their pernicious passions and thus requiring to be restrained, in subsequent decades the members of the elite were increasingly viewed in a more positive light: as entitled, by their praiseworthy ambitions and love of honor, to make decisions regarding their own lives and the public good in general.