Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of contributors
- Dates, transliteration and other conventions
- Dates of reigns
- Russian titles of journals, newspapers and miscellanies
- PART I CONTEXT
- PART II INTELLECTUAL CURRENTS
- 4 Russia's eighteenth-century Enlightenment
- 5 Conservatism in the age of Alexander I and Nicholas I
- 6 Nihilism
- 7 Tradition and counter-tradition: the radical intelligentsia and classical Russian literature
- 8 Religious renaissance in the Silver Age
- PART III THEMES AND CONSTRUCTS
- PART IV THE AFTERLIFE OF CLASSICAL THOUGHT
- Biographical details of thinkers and writers
- Selected bibliography
- Index
4 - Russia's eighteenth-century Enlightenment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of contributors
- Dates, transliteration and other conventions
- Dates of reigns
- Russian titles of journals, newspapers and miscellanies
- PART I CONTEXT
- PART II INTELLECTUAL CURRENTS
- 4 Russia's eighteenth-century Enlightenment
- 5 Conservatism in the age of Alexander I and Nicholas I
- 6 Nihilism
- 7 Tradition and counter-tradition: the radical intelligentsia and classical Russian literature
- 8 Religious renaissance in the Silver Age
- PART III THEMES AND CONSTRUCTS
- PART IV THE AFTERLIFE OF CLASSICAL THOUGHT
- Biographical details of thinkers and writers
- Selected bibliography
- Index
Summary
The view once commonly held that the Enlightenment was a unified, bourgeois, anti-clerical and inherently revolutionary movement radiating out from its centre in Paris has given way to a kaleidoscopic picture of national varieties in which the continuous importance of religion and an array of political ideas and social attitudes are discerned. There could even be conservative and religious forms of Enlightenment. Its central core, however, was the urge to modify the way that men and women had traditionally thought and behaved, and to reform church and state institutions with the aim of bettering the human condition.
THE PETRINE AGE
For Russians the eighteenth century dawned with a calendar reform demonstrating that times had changed. Hitherto Muscovy had followed the traditional Byzantine way of counting years from the supposed creation of the world in 5509/8 BC. The year 7208 was for them the last to be officially recorded in this way. Henceforward, Peter the Great decreed, official records would adopt calendar years Anno Domini following the custom of the countries – Prussia, Holland and England – through which he travelled in 1697 on a journey that has been recognised as one of the key moments in a ‘Chronology of the Enlightenment’. However, it was not Peter I's journey that first allowed Russians, by absorbing western European influences, to participate in the process of the early Enlightenment.
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- A History of Russian Thought , pp. 73 - 94Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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