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<b>The Great White Bear and the Cradle of Culture</b>: Italian Images of Russia and Russian Images of Italy

2008; Slavica Publishers; Volume: 9; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/kri.0.0007

1538-5000

Daniel L. Schlafly,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

The Great White Bear and the Cradle of Culture Italian Images of Russia and Russian Images of Italy Daniel L. Schlafly Jr. (bio) Nelli Pavlovna Komolova et al., eds., Rossiia i Italiia: Vstrecha kul'tur [Russia and Italy: The Encounter of Cultures]. Volume 4: 361 pp. Moscow: Nauka, 2000. ISBN 5020087130. Volume 5: 335 pp. Moscow: Nauka, 2003. ISBN 5020088641. Giorgio Maria Nicolai , Il Grande Orso Bianco: Viaggiatori Italiani in Russia [The Great White Bear: Italian Travelers in Russia]. 577 pp. Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1999. ISBN 8883193768. €30.99. Renato Risaliti , Storia della Russia: Dalle Origini all'Ottocento[History of Russia from the Origins to the 18th Century]. 290 pp. Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2005. ISBN 884498386. €24.00. Russia's image and self-image, perhaps more than any other country's, has been shaped from abroad. It is fitting that the director Aleksandr Sokurov chooses a foreigner, Astolphe Louis Léonor, Marquis de Custine, to guide viewers through three centuries of Russian history and culture in the Hermitage in his 2002 film Russkii kovcheg(Russian Ark). Since Muscovite times, Russia has looked to foreign experts, whether Italian architects starting in the 15th century, some discussed in these volumes; Greeks consulted by Patriarch Nikon in the 17th century; or Ukrainian clerics under Aleksei Mikhailovich and Peter I, followed by a steady stream of foreign statesmen, military leaders, artists, and scholars. The Pole Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, the Baltic German Andrei Gotthard Budberg, the Greek Ioannis Antonios Kapodistrias, and the German Karl Robert Nesselrode served as Alexander [End Page 389]I's foreign ministers. 1Beyond individual foreigners, Russia looked to the West for models, concepts, and ideologies, whether government structures, 2philosophies, especially Marxism, 3or in the arts. 4Although there was popular resistance to foreigners and foreign ideas, monarchs who looked to the West still became symbols of Russian national identity and power. 5 Since the 18th century, Russian writers and thinkers have had to come to terms with the West, whether they went west, voluntarily or involuntarily—like Aleksandr Radishchev, Nikolai Karamzin, Alexander Herzen, Fedor Dostoevskii, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—or never visited Europe, like Aleksandr Pushkin. Hence, accounts by foreigners have had far greater impact on Russia than foreigners' accounts on other nations. 6Catherine II, for example, was acutely sensitive to her image abroad and constantly attempted to promote herself and her realm to correspondents like Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm, [End Page 390]and foreign visitors. 7Depictions of Russia by Custine, 8August Freiherr von Haxthausen, 9and George Frost Kennan 10were followed closely by the regime and the Russian educated public. The Soviet Union fostered a positive image abroad even more assiduously, enabling and applauding laudatory descriptions by such visitors as Romain Rolland, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Walter Duranty, and John Steinbeck. 11No wonder, then, that historians of Russia have paid special attention to foreign accounts of Russia, and not just because of the relative paucity of native sources for the earlier period. 12 The glasnost'era saw an explosion of interest in the West, including a reassessment of connections distorted by Marxism-Leninism and minimized or denied by Stalinist xenophobia. Russian scholars have sought to reclaim [End Page 391]a place in civilized Europe, challenging older stereotypes of Russia as the "rude and barbarous kingdom" 13or "the bear that walks like a man," 14and the variations of these negative images in the Soviet era. In particular, reasserting Russia's European identity has meant acknowledging the central role of Christianity. Thus the cover of the first volume of the Rossiia i Italiiaseries has a picture of the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg next to one of its prototype, St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. 15Nelli Komolova's preface to this volume and the whole series states that "with the acceptance of Christianity in the tenth century, Rus' also was drawn into the aureole of European civilization." 16The introduction by Aleksandr Chubar'ian, director of the Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, poses the "question how deeply and how organically Russia belongs to Europe and what the problem of European cultural identity means for Russia...