Valerie A. Kivelson – författare

Combining the talents and expert knowledge of an early modern historian of Russia and of a Soviet specialist, Russia's Empires is the first major study of the entire sweep of Russian history from its earliest formations to the rule of Vladimir Putin. Looking through the lens of empire, which the authors conceptualize as a state based on institutionalized differentiation, inequitable hierarchy, and bonds of reciprocity between ruler and ruled, Kivelson and Suny displace the centrality of nation and nationalism in the Russian and Soviet story. Yet their work demonstrates how imperial polities were key to the creation of national identifications and processes that both hindered and fostered what would become nations and nation-states. Using the concept of empire, they look at the ways that ordinary people imagined their position within a non-democratic polity - whether the Muscovite tsardom or the Soviet Union - and what concessions the rulers had to make, or appear to make, in order to establish their authority and preserve their rule. While other works in the existing historical literature have applied the concept of empire to the study of Russian history, the story told here is in several ways unique. First, the book tackles the long stretch of the history of the region, from the murkiest beginnings to its most recent yesterday, and follows the vicissitudes of empire, the absence, the coalescence, the setbacks of imperial aspirations, across the centuries. The authors do not impose the category, but find it a productive lens for tracking developments over time. Second, the framework of empire allows them to address pressing questions of how various forms of non-democratic governance managed to succeed and survive, or, alternatively, what caused them to collapse and disappear. Studying Russia's long history in an imperial guise encourages the reader to attend to forms of inclusion, displays of reciprocity, and manifestations of ideology that might otherwise go unnoted, overlooked under the bleak record of coercion and oppression that so often characterizes ideas about Russia.Russia's Empires follows imperial patterns of rule through distinction, inclusion through reciprocity, and structures for legitimacy in order to trace the experiences of empire by both rulers and ruled. The book traces the coalescence and development of imperial relationships across more than a thousand years. This book brings histories of the peripheries and of the growth and rule of empire into central narratives based in Moscow and Leningrad or Petersburg, in order to understand all the pieces as part of an interrelated whole. The book brings together stories of despots and dictators at the center with those of people of all classes, conditions, and nationalities who jointly made the Russian Empire.

Orthodox Christianity came to Russia from Byzantium in 988, and in the ensuing centuries it has become such a fixture of the Russian cultural landscape that any discussion of Russian character or history inevitably must take its influence into account. Orthodox Russia is a timely volume that brings together some of the best contemporary scholarship on Russian Orthodox beliefs and practices covering a broad historical period—from the Muscovite era through the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Studies of Russian Orthodoxy have typically focused on doctrinal controversies or institutional developments. Orthodox Russia concentrates on lived religious experience—how Orthodoxy touched the lives of a wide variety of subjects of the Russian state, from clerics awaiting the Apocalypse in the fifteenth century and nuns adapting to the attacks on organized religion under the Soviets to unlettered military servitors at the court of Ivan the Terrible and workers, peasants, and soldiers in the last years of the imperial regime. Melding traditionally distinct approaches, the volume allows us to see Orthodoxy not as a static set of rigidly applied rules and dictates but as a lived, adaptive, and flexible system.Orthodox Russia offers a much-needed, up-to-date general survey of the subject, one made possible by the opening of archives in Russia after 1991. Contributors include Laura Engelstein, Michael S. Flier, Daniel H. Kaiser, Nadieszda Kizenko, Eve Levin, Gary Marker, Daniel Rowland, Vera Shevzov, Thomas N. Tentler, Isolde Thyrêt, William G. Wagner, and Paul W. Werth.

In the courtrooms of seventeenth-century Russia, the great majority of those accused of witchcraft were male, in sharp contrast to the profile of accused witches across Catholic and Protestant Europe in the same period. While European courts targeted and executed overwhelmingly female suspects, often on charges of compacting with the devil, the tsars' courts vigorously pursued men and some women accused of practicing more down-to-earth magic, using poetic spells and home-grown potions. Instead of Satanism or heresy, the primary concern in witchcraft testimony in Russia involved efforts to use magic to subvert, mitigate, or avenge the harsh conditions of patriarchy, serfdom, and social hierarchy. Broadly comparative and richly illustrated with color plates, Desperate Magic places the trials of witches in the context of early modern Russian law, religion, and society. Piecing together evidence from trial records to illuminate some of the central puzzles of Muscovite history, Kivelson explores the interplay among the testimony of accusers, the leading questions of the interrogators, and the confessions of the accused. Assembled, they create a picture of a shared moral vision of the world that crossed social divides. Because of the routine use of torture in extracting and shaping confessions, Kivelson addresses methodological and ideological questions about the Muscovite courts' equation of pain and truth, questions with continuing resonance in the world today. Within a moral economy that paired unquestioned hierarchical inequities with expectations of reciprocity, magic and suspicions of magic emerged where those expectations were most egregiously violated. Witchcraft in Russia surfaces as one of the ways that oppression was contested by ordinary people scrambling to survive in a fiercely inequitable world. Masters and slaves, husbands and wives, and officers and soldiers alike believed there should be limits to exploitation and saw magic deployed at the junctures where hierarchical order veered into violent excess.

Toward the end of the sixteenth century, and throughout the seventeenth, thinking in spatial terms assumed extraordinary urgency among Russia's ruling elites. The two great developments of this era in Russian history-the enserfment of the peasantry and the conquest of a vast Eastern empire-fundamentally concerned spatial control and concepts of movements across the land. In Cartographies of Tsardom, Valerie Kivelson explores how these twin themes of fixity and mobility obliged Russians, from tsar to peasant, to think in spatial terms. She builds her case through close study of two very different kinds of maps: the hundreds of local maps hand-drawn by amateurs as evidence in property litigations, and the maps of the new territories that stretched from the Urals to the Pacific. In both the simple (but strikingly beautiful and even moving) maps that local residents drafted and in the more formal maps of the newly conquered Siberian spaces, Kivelson shows that the Russians saw the land (be it a peasant's plot or the Siberian taiga) as marked by the grace of divine providence. She argues that the unceasing tension between fixity and mobility led to the emergence in Eurasia of an empire quite different from that in North America. In her words, the Russian empire that took shape in the decades before Peter the Great proclaimed its existence was a "spacious mantle," a "patchwork quilt of difference under a single tsar" that granted religious and cultural space to non-Russian, non-Orthodox populations even as it strove to tie them down to serve its own growing fiscal needs. The unresolved, perhaps unresolvable, tension between these contrary impulses was both the strength and the weakness of empire in Russia. This handsomely illustrated and beautifully written book, which features twenty-four pages of color plates, will appeal to everyone fascinated by the history of Russia and all who are intrigued by the art of mapmaking.

In the courtrooms of seventeenth-century Russia, the great majority of those accused of witchcraft were male, in sharp contrast to the profile of accused witches across Catholic and Protestant Europe in the same period. While European courts targeted and executed overwhelmingly female suspects, often on charges of compacting with the devil, the tsars' courts vigorously pursued men and some women accused of practicing more down-to-earth magic, using poetic spells and home-grown potions. Instead of Satanism or heresy, the primary concern in witchcraft testimony in Russia involved efforts to use magic to subvert, mitigate, or avenge the harsh conditions of patriarchy, serfdom, and social hierarchy. Broadly comparative and richly illustrated with color plates, Desperate Magic places the trials of witches in the context of early modern Russian law, religion, and society. Piecing together evidence from trial records to illuminate some of the central puzzles of Muscovite history, Kivelson explores the interplay among the testimony of accusers, the leading questions of the interrogators, and the confessions of the accused. Assembled, they create a picture of a shared moral vision of the world that crossed social divides. Because of the routine use of torture in extracting and shaping confessions, Kivelson addresses methodological and ideological questions about the Muscovite courts' equation of pain and truth, questions with continuing resonance in the world today. Within a moral economy that paired unquestioned hierarchical inequities with expectations of reciprocity, magic and suspicions of magic emerged where those expectations were most egregiously violated. Witchcraft in Russia surfaces as one of the ways that oppression was contested by ordinary people scrambling to survive in a fiercely inequitable world. Masters and slaves, husbands and wives, and officers and soldiers alike believed there should be limits to exploitation and saw magic deployed at the junctures where hierarchical order veered into violent excess.

This book explores the possibilities for rich and varied social, cultural, and political development under the rule of an autocratic state. Seventeenth-century Muscovite society was theocentric, highly traditional, largely illiterate, and deeply dependent on the state in all aspects of life, and therefore does not at all fit Western definitions of a civil society. Nevertheless, Muscovites found interstices in the overarching autocratic culture in which to conduct their own affairs as they wished. It is this arena of early-modern social autonomy that this book investigates, focusing on the nature and limits of autonomous activity among a small but important part of Muscovite society, the provincial gentry.The author situates Muscovite history within a comparative framework, demonstrating that seventeenth-century Russia was neither backward nor peculiar, but developed its own variant of the concurrent state-building processes of Western European monarchies. The author's comparisons enable us to understand and appreciate what the gentry of the Muscovite provinces did and thought, illuminating how they typified early-modern petty nobilities, notably in attempting accommodation with rising states and carving out autonomous spaces within and beneath state control.

Exploring the visual record of the Muscovite tsardom, this book demonstrates that, in imperial settings, images actually do things. Richly illustrated with 120 arresting, little-known images, it considers how those images functioned as active agents for and against empire. Images and the Making of the Russian Empire moves out from the throne room of the Kremlin to engravers’ workshops of Chernihiv and Kyiv, to the Amur River basin, to the icy peaks of Kamchatka, wherever imagery and empire intersected – which was everywhere.The book presents an unexpected array of pictorial material, including Muscovite illuminated histories, Ukrainian political-theological prints, and Siberian reindeer herders’ pictographic signature marks. Valerie A. Kivelson demonstrates how pictures created by conquerors and conquered, by elites and subjects, by the powerful and the disempowered, advanced and shaped the tsardom as it grew into an ethnically and religiously diverse empire, in ways that have remained unnoticed until now. Through its novel visual methodology, it offers original perspectives on both Moscow’s ambitions and the ways in which populations coming under tsarist control pushed back and reshaped the regime’s own understanding of what it meant to be an imperial state.

For any serious scholar of Russian and Ukrainian witchcraft and magic, this volume is a 'must read.'... Scholars of folklore and popular culture also will find much of value. â• FolkloricaThis sourcebook provides the first systematic overview of witchcraft laws and trials in Russia and Ukraine from medieval times to the late nineteenth century. Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, 1000–1900 weaves scholarly commentary with never-before-published primary source materials translated from Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. These sources include the earliest references to witchcraft and sorcery, secular and religious laws regarding witchcraft and possession, full trial transcripts, and a wealth of magical spells. The documents present a rich panorama of daily life and reveal the extraordinary power of magical words.Editors Valerie A. Kivelson and Christine D. Worobec present new analyses of the workings and evolution of legal systems, the interplay and tensions between church and state, and the prosaic concerns of the women and men involved in witchcraft proceedings. The extended documentary commentaries also explore the shifting boundaries and fraught political relations between Russia and Ukraine.

For any serious scholar of Russian and Ukrainian witchcraft and magic, this volume is a 'must read.'... Scholars of folklore and popular culture also will find much of value. â• FolkloricaThis sourcebook provides the first systematic overview of witchcraft laws and trials in Russia and Ukraine from medieval times to the late nineteenth century. Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, 1000–1900 weaves scholarly commentary with never-before-published primary source materials translated from Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. These sources include the earliest references to witchcraft and sorcery, secular and religious laws regarding witchcraft and possession, full trial transcripts, and a wealth of magical spells. The documents present a rich panorama of daily life and reveal the extraordinary power of magical words.Editors Valerie A. Kivelson and Christine D. Worobec present new analyses of the workings and evolution of legal systems, the interplay and tensions between church and state, and the prosaic concerns of the women and men involved in witchcraft proceedings. The extended documentary commentaries also explore the shifting boundaries and fraught political relations between Russia and Ukraine.

Word and Image invokes and honors the scholarly contributions of Gary Marker. Twenty scholars from Russia, the United Kingdom, Italy, Ukraine and the United States examine some of the main themes of Marker’s scholarship on Russia—literacy, education, and printing; gender and politics; the importance of visual sources for historical study; and the intersections of religious and political discourse in Imperial Russia. A biography of Marker, a survey of his scholarship, and a list of his publications complete the volume. Contributors: Valerie Kivelson, Giovanna Brogi (University of Milan), Christine Ruane (University of Tulsa), Elena Smilianskaia (Moscow), Daniela Steila (University of Turin), Nancy Kollmann (Stanford University), Daniel H. Kaiser (Grinnell College), Maria di Salvo (University of Milan), Cynthia Whittaker (City Univ. of New York), Simon Dixon (University of London), Evgenii Anisimov (St. Petersburg), Alexander Kamenskii (Higher School of Economics, Moscow), Janet Hartley (London School of Economics), Olga Kosheleva (Moscow State University), Maksim Yaremenko (Kyiv), Patrick O'Meara (University of Durham), Roger Bartlett (London), Joseph Bradley (University of Tulsa), Robert Weinberg (Swarthmore College)