Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter – författare

Here is the first social history devoted to the common soldier in the Russian army during the first half of the 19th-century--an examination of soldiers as a social class and the army as a social institution. By providing a comprehensive view of one of the most important groups in Russian society on the eve of the great reforms of the mid-1800s, Elise Wirtschafter contributes greatly to our understanding of Russia's complex social structure. Based on extensive research in previously unused Soviet archives, this work covers a wide array of topics relating to daily life in the army, including conscription, promotion and social mobility, family status, training, the regimental economy, military justice, and relations between soldiers and officers. The author emphasizes social relations and norms of behavior in the army, but she also addresses the larger issue of society's relationship to the autocracy, including the persistent tension between the tsarist state's need for military efficiency and its countervailing need to uphold the traditional norms of unlimited paternalistic authority.By examining military life in terms of its impact on soldiers, she analyzes two major concerns of tsarist social policy: how to mobilize society's resources to meet state needs and how to promote modernization (in this case military efficiency) without disturbing social arrangements founded on serfdom. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Here is the first social history devoted to the common soldier in the Russian army during the first half of the 19th-century--an examination of soldiers as a social class and the army as a social institution. By providing a comprehensive view of one of the most important groups in Russian society on the eve of the great reforms of the mid-1800s, Elise Wirtschafter contributes greatly to our understanding of Russia's complex social structure. Based on extensive research in previously unused Soviet archives, this work covers a wide array of topics relating to daily life in the army, including conscription, promotion and social mobility, family status, training, the regimental economy, military justice, and relations between soldiers and officers. The author emphasizes social relations and norms of behavior in the army, but she also addresses the larger issue of society's relationship to the autocracy, including the persistent tension between the tsarist state's need for military efficiency and its countervailing need to uphold the traditional norms of unlimited paternalistic authority.By examining military life in terms of its impact on soldiers, she analyzes two major concerns of tsarist social policy: how to mobilize society's resources to meet state needs and how to promote modernization (in this case military efficiency) without disturbing social arrangements founded on serfdom. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A category of persons best defined by what they were not, the raznochintsy-"people of various ranks" or "people of diverse origins"-inhabited the shifting social territory between nobles and serfs in preindustrial Russia. Neither merchants nor clergy nor military servicemen, they may have been by occupation administrative clerks, teachers, artists, retired soldiers, or street vendors. In official society, they were outsiders. In this first major study of the raznochintsy, Wirtschafter draws on a rich array of archival, legal, administrative, and public sources to show how this important but elusive category functioned in Russian society from the time of Peter the Great to the late nineteenth century. Challenging the traditional image of a rigidly hierarchical social structure, her conclusions indicate that there was much more mobility within imperial Russian society than historians have previously thought. Developing a representational interpretation, Wirtschafter examines the raznochintsy as a legal, social, and cultural category. Focusing on the usages, meanings, and dynamic evolution of the category, she analyzes the origins of the raznochintsy as well as larger theoretical issues of social categorization and delimitation. Her depiction of a society where social boundaries were porous and social definitions fundamentally indeterminate provides a new perspective on some of the most stubbornly problematic themes in imperial Russian history.

A panoramic view of Russian imperial society from the era of Peter the Great to the Revolution in 1917. Combining scholarship reading with archival research, it focuses on the interplay of Russia's key social groups with one another and with the state.

How did enlightened Russians of the eighteenth century understand society? And how did they reconcile their professed ideals of equality and justice with the authoritarian political structures in which they lived? Historian Elise Wirtschafter turns to literary plays to reconstruct the social thinking of the past and to discover how Enlightenment Russians understood themselves. Opening with an illuminating discussion of the development of theater in eighteenth-century Russia, Wirtschafter goes on to explore dramatic representations of key social questions. Based on an examination of nearly 300 secular plays written during the last half of the century, she shows how dramas for the stage represented and debated important public issues-such as the nature of the common good, the structure of the patriarchal household, the duty of monarchs, and the role of the individual in society. Wirtschafter presents a striking reconstruction of the way educated Russians conceptualized a society beyond the immediate spheres of household and locality. Seeking to highlight problems of "social consciousness," she asks what Enlightenment Russians thought about social experience-and how their ideas related to actual social relationships in a society organized around serfdom and absolute monarchy. She portrays Russian Enlightenment culture on its own terms, while at the same time shedding light on broader problems of social order and political authority in imperial Russia.

This valuable study explores the Russian Enlightenment with reference to the religious Enlightenment of the mid to late eighteenth century. Grounded in close reading of the sermons and devotional writings of Platon (Levshin), Court preacher and Metropolitan of Moscow, the book examines the blending of European ideas into the teachings of Russian Orthodoxy. Highlighting the interplay between Enlightenment thought and Orthodox enlightenment, Elise Wirtschafter addresses key questions of concern to religious Enlighteners across Europe: humanity's relationship to God and creation, the distinction between learning and enlightenment, the role of Christian love in authority relationships, the meaning of free will in a universe governed by Divine Providence, and the unity of church, monarchy, and civil society. Countering scholarship that depicts an Orthodox religious culture under assault from European modernity and Petrine absolutism, Wirtschafter emphasizes the ability of Russia's educated churchmen to assimilate and transform Enlightenment ideas. The intellectual and spiritual vitality of eighteenth-century Orthodoxy helps to explain how Russian policymakers and intellectuals met the challenge of European power while simultaneously coming to terms with the broad cultural appeal of the Enlightenment's universalistic human rights agenda.Religion and Enlightenment in Catherinian Russia defines the Russian Enlightenment as a response to the allure of European modernity, as an instrument of social control, and as the moral voice of an emergent independent society. Because Russia's enlightened intellectuals focused on the moral perfectibility of the individual human being, rather than social and political change, the originality of the Russian Enlightenment has gone unrecognized. This study corrects images of a superficial Enlightenment and crisis-ridden religious culture, arguing that in order to understand the humanistic sensibility and emphasis on individual dignity that permeate Russian intellectual history, and the history of the educated classes more broadly, it is necessary to bring Orthodox teachings into the discussion of Enlightenment thought. The result is a book that explains the distinctive origins of modern Russian culture while also allowing scholars to situate the Russian Enlightenment in European and global history.

A broad, panoramic view of Russian imperial society from the era of Peter the Great to the revolution of 1917, Wirtschafter's study sets forth a challenging interpretation of one of the world's most powerful and enduring monarchies. A sophisticated synthesis that combines extensive reading of recent scholarship with archival research, it focuses on the interplay of Russia's key social groups with one another and the state. The result is a highly original history of Russian society that illuminates the relationships between state building, large-scale social structures, and everyday life.Beginning with an overview of imperial Russia's legal and institutional structures, Wirschafter analyzes the "ruling" classes, and service elites (the land-owning nobility, the civil and military servicemen, the clergy) and then examines the middle groups (the raznochintsy, the commercial-industrial elites, the professionals, the intelligentsia) before turning to the peasants, townspeople, and factory workers. Wirtschafter argues that those very social, political, and legal relationships that have long been viewed as sources of conflict and crisis in fact helped to promote integration and foster the stability that ensured imperial Russia's survival.

Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter convincingly argues that the Russian Enlightenment is best described as a lived Enlightenment—the commitment to and the practice of living an enlightened life. Wirtschafter examines the Russian Enlightenment with reference to the monarchy (or state), the Russian Orthodox Church, and the educated service classes.Russia’s Lived Enlightenment in the Long Eighteenth Century shows that, for the monarchy, Enlightenment principles provided effective mechanisms and ideological justifications for state building, resource mobilization, and the imposition of social control. For the Church, which prior to the second quarter of the 18th century remained Russia’s primary center of higher learning, Enlightenment thought introduced new forms of philosophical and scientific knowledge that had to be brought into the fold of Orthodox religious belief. For Russia’s educated classes, which remained service classes until the second quarter of the 19th century, Enlightenment culture and sociability became vehicles for developing the independent moral voice of an emergent public (publika) or civil society of the educated (obshchestvo).The book reveals that representatives of the monarchy, Church, and educated classes contributed to the Enlightenment in different ways, including the spread of ideas identified with Enlightenment thought in Central and Western Europe. It also effectively contends that Russian enlighteners sought to promote imperial greatness, reform human behavior, and encourage material, social, and cultural progress, without seeking to abandon tradition or overturn political and social arrangements in the process.

Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter convincingly argues that the Russian Enlightenment is best described as a lived Enlightenment—the commitment to and the practice of living an enlightened life. Wirtschafter examines the Russian Enlightenment with reference to the monarchy (or state), the Russian Orthodox Church, and the educated service classes.Russia’s Lived Enlightenment in the Long Eighteenth Century shows that, for the monarchy, Enlightenment principles provided effective mechanisms and ideological justifications for state building, resource mobilization, and the imposition of social control. For the Church, which prior to the second quarter of the 18th century remained Russia’s primary center of higher learning, Enlightenment thought introduced new forms of philosophical and scientific knowledge that had to be brought into the fold of Orthodox religious belief. For Russia’s educated classes, which remained service classes until the second quarter of the 19th century, Enlightenment culture and sociability became vehicles for developing the independent moral voice of an emergent public (publika) or civil society of the educated (obshchestvo).The book reveals that representatives of the monarchy, Church, and educated classes contributed to the Enlightenment in different ways, including the spread of ideas identified with Enlightenment thought in Central and Western Europe. It also effectively contends that Russian enlighteners sought to promote imperial greatness, reform human behavior, and encourage material, social, and cultural progress, without seeking to abandon tradition or overturn political and social arrangements in the process.

Russia’s Age of Serfdom 1649-1861 offers a broad interpretive history of the Russian Empire from the time of serfdom’s codification until its abolition following the Crimean War. Considers the institution of serfdom, official social categories, and Russia’s development as a country of peasants ruled by nobles, military commanders, and civil servantsIlluminates the reality of absolute monarchy in Russia, with special emphasis on the mobilization of human and material resources, the search for regular government, and the persistence of personal-moral forms of authorityTraces the emergence of modern Russian culture out of and alongside Orthodox religious culture

Russia’s Age of Serfdom 1649-1861 offers a broad interpretive history of the Russian Empire from the time of serfdom’s codification until its abolition following the Crimean War. Considers the institution of serfdom, official social categories, and Russia’s development as a country of peasants ruled by nobles, military commanders, and civil servantsIlluminates the reality of absolute monarchy in Russia, with special emphasis on the mobilization of human and material resources, the search for regular government, and the persistence of personal-moral forms of authorityTraces the emergence of modern Russian culture out of and alongside Orthodox religious culture

In From Victory to Peace, Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter brings the Russian perspective to a critical moment in European political history. This history of Russian diplomatic thought in the years after the Congress of Vienna concerns a time when Russia and Emperor Alexander I were fully integrated into European society and politics. Wirtschafter looks at how Russia's statesmen who served Alexander I across Europe, in South America, and in Constantinople represented the Russian monarch's foreign policy and sought to act in concert with the allies.Based on archival and published sources—diplomatic communications, conference protocols, personal letters, treaty agreements, and the periodical press—this book illustrates how Russia's policymakers and diplomats responded to events on the ground as the process of implementing peace unfolded.Thanks to generous funding from the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot and the Mellon Foundation the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other Open Access repositories.

From Victory to Peace: Russian Diplomacy After Napoleon explores how Russia’s diplomats understood European security as they worked to implement the edifice of pacification and peace constructed in 1814, 1815, and 1818. In response to developments across Europe and in Spanish America, Emperor Alexander I’s hopes for peace, pragmatic adaptability, and commitment to act in concert with the other great powers came fully into focus. Based on sources of Russian provenance, the book challenges characterizations of Alexander’s behavior as erratic and his foreign policy as heavy-handed and expansionist. Indeed, as historians assimilate the Russian perspective on European order (as well as the perspectives of other less well-studied countries), they encounter a multifaceted Restoration built upon practices of enlightened reformism and direct experience of revolution and war.