That Historical Family: The Bakunin Archive and the Intimate Theater of History in Imperial Russia, 1780-1925
Author(s)
Randolph, John
Abstract
Examines the rise in the second half of the 19th century of interest on the part of Russian historians, including Pavel Annenkov and Aleksandr Pypin, in the Bakunin family and its papers, which include unpublished personal documents by prominent Russian thinkers, among them Vissarion Belinski (1811-48), Nikolai Stankevich (1813-40), and Mikhail Bakunin (1814-76). Describes the creation of the family’s archive and the Bakunin women’s role as archivists; the archive’s and archivists’ fate in the revolutionary period (1903-25); and the process by which the Bakunin family papers were transferred to national institutions. The confluence of politics and politesse that influenced the historical approach to intimacy in the 19th century had a more profound impact on the writing of Russian intellectual history than can easily be recognized. Scholars examined intimate life to supplement public lives, not to historicize intimacy itself as a forum for Russian social thought. They handled intimacy as delicately as possible, with the tragic sense that they had no other recourse but to pry into intimate life due to the underdevelopment and corruption of Russia’s public sphere. Thus, long before the development of 20th-century histories of private life, imperial Russian scholars were subjecting Russian thinkers’ private lives and personal documents to historical analysis. Still, they did not go beyond the “history of personality” and sought to preserve the privacy of the living as best they could.
