New Book Announcement - Terror and Greatness - Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths

[Alex Rudd]

>From time to time I post messages to this list from people who are not
subscribers but who would like to advise SEELANGS list members of a
new product or resource.  This is such a post.  As formatted, this
message complies with the SEELANGS policy dealing with advertising on
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sender, the Cornell University Press, at cornellpressnews at gmail.com.

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TERROR AND GREATNESS
Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths
Kevin M. F. Platt

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.

For more information, please visit:
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.

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