Abstract
The question of cultural distinctiveness and historical specificity forms the subtext — and sometimes the principal theme — in much recent writing about Russia. To some degree this reflects current preoccupations in the study of the histories and cultures of nations and communities all over the world, a study in which ‘meta-narratives’ and all-inclusive theories have been subjected — with good reason — to severe critical scrutiny. To a considerable extent, too, it is a natural response to the breakdown of the Soviet Union and a reaction, retrospectively, against the imposition of an ideology that subordinated not only the individual personality, but also community and nation to the principles of internationalism and socialism, and in practice placed the demands of a supra-national state dominated by Russia over the claims of its constituent nations and ethnic groups.
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Notes
See, for instance, Russianness: Studies on a Nation’s Identity. In Honor of Rufus Mathewson (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1990);
E. Hellberg-Hirn, Soil and Soul: The Symbolic Expression of Russianness (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), especially the chapter, ‘Mother Russia, Soil and Soul’, pp. 111–35.
There is an extensive literature on this schism. The classic work is A. Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
See R. Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism and Bolshevism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978);
B. A. Engel, Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983);
L. H. Edmondson, Feminism in Russia, 1900–1917 (London and Stanford: Heinemann and Stanford University Press, 1984). The influence on western historians of Soviet historiography, which emphasized this split to the exclusion of almost everything else, was much stronger than was generally recognized, at least until after the fall of the USSR.
See P. L. Alston, Education and the State in Tsarist Russia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969);
J. C. McClelland, Autocrats and Academics. Education, Culture and Society in Tsarist Russia (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1979).
J. B. Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman. Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981);
S. Ruddick, Maternal Thinking. Towards a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989).
S. M. Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979);
M. G. Dietz, ‘Citizenship with a Feminist Face: the Problem with Maternal Thinking’ in J. B. Landes, Feminism: The Public and the Private (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) pp. 45–64;
A. Phillips, Engendering Democracy (University Park: University of Pennsylvania State Press, 1991).
D. Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur (New York: Harper and Row, 1976);
R. W. Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics (Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press and Basil Blackwell, 1987).
For this see W. G. Wagner, Marriage, Property and Law in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
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Edmondson, L. (2001). Women’s Rights, Gender and Citizenship in Tsarist Russia, 1860–1920: the Question of Difference. In: Grimshaw, P., Holmes, K., Lake, M. (eds) Women’s Rights and Human Rights. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333977644_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333977644_10
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