Conclusion: Aesthetics, Delusions, Conclusions

Abstract

Narrative aesthetics call for a story to have a beginning and an end, a plot and a conclusion. History, in the sense of the real time unfolding of human events, has no such structure—it merely provides the raw material historians fashion into a narrative for the purpose of making it comprehensible and meaningful. The story told in this book forms part of a larger one, which in my previous book Exile to Siberia, 1590–1822 began with Siberian exile’s late sixteenth-century origins and concluded with the promulgation of Speranskii’s 1822 Reforms. This larger story will continue with a forthcoming book on the period after 1861. The book at hand, despite lacking an aesthetically gratifying beginning or conclusion, nevertheless does have a plot, by which I have tried to communicate some conclusions that will now be summarized.