Paradigms of War in Russian Literature from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Russian history, like that of all European nations, has been shaped by a constant succession of wars against neighbouring peoples. Although the Kievan state founded in the ninth century saw periods of relative peace, it was riven for much of its existence by internecine conflicts between rival princes of the ruling house. Competition among the Russian princes only really came to an end with the consolidation of Moscow as the dominant political force among the Eastern Slavs in the early sixteenth century. In the meantime it left the Russian lands open to periodic attack from the nomadic peoples of the steppe — the Pechenegs, the Polovtsians and most notably the Tatars (Mongols) — who held Russia under their suzerainty for over two hundred years, from the early thirteenth century to the fifteenth. Later there were regular clashes with the Swedes, Poles, Lithuanians and Teutonic knights to the north and west and with the empire of the Ottoman Turks to the south. As Muscovy gradually expanded eastwards from its European heartland, across Siberia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and into the Caucasus and Central Asia in the nineteenth, it clashed with numerous other populations, which were more or less reluctantly incorporated into the Russian empire. By the late nineteenth century this saga of battle and conquest had not only defined the geographical boundaries of the Russian state, but had also exercised a profound influence over its cultural self-definition.