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Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

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Publié par	Read Books Ltd.
Date de parution	06 août 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781528760232
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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OUTLINES OF RUSSIAN CULTURE
P UBLISHER S N OTICE

OUTLINES OF RUSSIAN CULTURE was published originally in three separate volumes:
Religion and the Church Literature Architecture, Painting, and Music
Because of the continued interest in this subject, and in order to make the work available at lower cost, the three parts have been bound as one volume, without change of text or of pagination .
OUTLINES OF RUSSIAN CULTURE
By PAUL MILIUKOV

Edited by MICHAEL KARPOVICH
Translated by VALENTINE UGHET and ELEANOR DAVIS
Philadelphia UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS 1948
Copyright 1942
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
Manufactured in the United States of America
Second Printing, July 1943
Third Printing (Bound as One Volume), January 1948
London
Geoffrey Cumberlege
Oxford University Press
AUTHOR S PREFACE
S OME five and thirty years ago in the first book of mine to be published in the United States, 1 I tried to give American readers a clearer understanding of Russia and of Russian problems through an analysis of the long evolution that had produced them. In the present book my method remains the same but how profoundly have things changed in Russia since 1905!
The crisis that I then foretold has really come, and with it real revolution. The avowed aim of the victors in the revolution was the obliteration of all of Russia s bourgeois past and the founding of a Russia that would be a fatherland for the toiling masses of the whole world. I was not alone in believing that the habitual course of such attempts would be followed again, and that the high ideals and early successes would be greatly modified by the conditions that Russia s past had brought forth. Indeed, in my second American book, published in 1928 as the new r gime reached the end of its first decade, I presented the trend in that light. The today of 1928 was far from the tomorrow predicted in 1918. Actuality had forced such substantial concessions that the result held few extraordinary revelations.
But there was no admitted surrender. There were further exertions, and the sacrifice of more millions of lives. Another dozen years has elapsed, and where are we now?
The revolutionary cycle has apparently reached its predestined end. Under the new name of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Russia is still there-a Russia even more centralized and ruled more severely than ever under the ancien r gime , but still Russia. The new Union is heir to all the evils of the old bureaucracy, evils that have been exaggerated while its few virtues have been eliminated. Far from international, Russian communism has been restricted within its national borders and has followed a pattern that, whatever else it may be, is certainly not socialistic. The only description, good or bad, that can be applied to Russian foreign policy is nationalistic imperialism. It was quite consistent with this policy when the rulers of Russia issued orders that the communist manuals of history were to be rewritten to include the traditional structure of Russian history with the saints and heroes of the olden days. The link with the past was officially recognized.
But it was only with the remote past, and between that past and the communist present there lay a period still inacceptable to the present rulers of Russia-the intermediate period of Russian bourgeois civilization. For the educated class that had made that civilization and had nurtured its growth in the last two or three centuries had been mercilessly destroyed in the storm, and as yet no other had taken its place. So the ascending spirals of evolution suffered a break, and the wit and wisdom of the old literature was not carried forward. The result was a lowering of the standards of culture. As in a geological cataclysm, lower strata were forced up to displace the higher.
I do not believe that this is the inevitable law of all revolutions, but our revolution was an elemental one ruled by elemental law. The law that Lucretius has called the Natura rerum:

. . . Natura nec ullam
Rem gigni patitur, nisi morte adjuta aliena . 2
There is a sort of consolation in this Epicurean sentence. The alien element of higher cultural achievement is hopelessly gone in Russia, but new elements have appeared. Quality has gone, but quantity has succeeded-the larger extension of the social base whence cultural seeds may be borrowed. In this very book the reader can discern, here and there, tendrils of new life pushing their way through the ruins of the old.
In 1905 I ventured to draw a comparison between the young peoples of our two lands, Russia and the United States. Today, when the term has become a political slogan and old has come to be identified with decaying, I would make an exception. Young can mean many things. A people may be very old in its material existence, yet young in civilization. That is the case with Russia. Or a young people, materially, may be the bearers of a very old civilization, as America is. My comparison still holds so far as the material bases of the two peoples is concerned, for they are both the result of a great migratory process carried through in rich and undeveloped lands peopled by primitive races. The process resulted for each in a unification into a great nation conscious of its historical mission. But here the comparison must stop. For the American settlers brought from their old homes the principles and habits of political liberty and social order, and what has recently happened to Russia could therefore never happen to them. Russian pioneers, on the other hand, began their process when they first emerged into history. That is why young America s torch of liberty illumines the world while today s young Russia hesitates in a stage equally distant from the modern order and medieval violence unbridled by law.
But happily this young Russia is not all of Russia. Russia as a whole needs no rehabilitation. This book will show the reader what Russia has achieved in the long chain of her generations. A few decades cannot utterly destroy the fruit of these centuries. My book was not written to prove this, but if proof is needed, it is here.
That is why I am particularly glad that this part of my larger work on Russian civilization has now found its way to the nation whose development I witnessed for a third of a century, and which in studying I came to admire and love. I am extremely obliged to Mrs. Ughet and to my learned friend, Professor Michael Karpovich of Harvard University, for the excellent form they have given the English translation of my Russian text. I feel that this third book to appear under my name in America deserves it especially, for it renders accessible a part of my life-work.
P AUL M ILIUKOV
Montpellier, France
No l, 1940 .
1 Russia and Its Crisis (1905).
2 Nature does not suffer one thing to be born, unless aided by another s death.
EDITOR S FOREWORD
T HE author of this work scarcely needs introduction to English-speaking readers. Eminent scholar and statesman, he has long been known far outside the boundaries of his native land. The dean of Russian historians, he has to his credit a number of scholarly works of primary importance. And he himself belongs to history as the recognized leader of the constitutional opposition during the last years of the Imperial r gime, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the first democratic government Russia ever had. An exile from his country since the establishment of the Communist dictatorship, today, at the age of eighty-two, he lives in Unoccupied France, maintaining both his interest in historical problems and his faith in the ultimate triumph of liberty and justice.
The present version of the Outlines of Russian Culture is only a part of the Russian original. It is, however, its central part and the only one that so far has been completed. Volume One of the last revised Russian edition, 1 dealing with the material foundations of Russian culture, is not complete, and as yet only the first section of it has been published. Volume Three of the original, devoted to the history of political ideas in Russia, in its present form does not go beyond the eighteenth century. From Volume Two of the Outlines we have selected for translation sections dealing with culture in the proper sense of the word-religion, literature, art. We have omitted the section on education, partly because there are some competent books on the subject available in English, but mostly because of considerations of space.
In addition, the sections that we are offering in our translation have been abridged because it was felt that such a detailed account was not necessary in a book addressed to non-Russian readers. The task of making the deletions was at once the most difficult and the most responsible part of my work as editor. In performing it I was guided by the desire to retain intact all the essential material and all the shades of the author s thought. The manuscript has been carefully gone over by Mr. Miliukov, and it has been a source of great satisfaction to me that it has met with his unqualified approval. The present book, therefore, is more than a mere translation. It is an authorized abridged version of the original, specially prepared for the American edition.
In writing this work for his compatriots, the author naturally presupposed a certain knowledge of facts on the part of his Russian public to a degree which we have no right to expect from our non-Russian readers. This has necessitated occasional explanatory notes which I have tried to provide without intruding too often between the author and the reader. I have tried also to summarize in brief postscripts the development in the fields of religion, literature, and art, respective