Download or read book A Bride for the Tsar written by Russell E. Martin and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-15 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1505 to 1689, Russia's tsars chose their wives through an elaborate ritual: the bride-show. The realm's most beautiful young maidens—provided they hailed from the aristocracy—gathered in Moscow, where the tsar's trusted boyars reviewed their medical histories, evaluated their spiritual qualities, noted their physical appearances, and confirmed their virtue. Those who passed muster were presented to the tsar, who inspected the candidates one by one—usually without speaking to any of them—and chose one to be immediately escorted to the Kremlin to prepare for her wedding and new life as the tsar's consort. Alongside accounts of sordid boyar plots against brides, the multiple marriages of Ivan the Terrible, and the fascinating spectacle of the bride-show ritual, A Bride for the Tsar offers an analysis of the show's role in the complex politics of royal marriage in early modern Russia. Russell E. Martin argues that the nature of the rituals surrounding the selection of a bride for the tsar tells us much about the extent of his power, revealing it to be limited and collaborative, not autocratic. Extracting the bride-show from relative obscurity, Martin persuasively establishes it as an essential element of the tsarist political system.
Download or read book The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe written by Daniel Defoe Defoe and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-24 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defoe’s The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe was almost always published together with The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Only after 1950 was the first volume printed alone—a shorter work for some classes. But in addition to fulfilling the promise of the first volume, The Farther Adventures is an exciting adventure novel by itself. Crusoe returns to his island to learn about his colony, and then travels to Madagascar, India, and China before returning to England after some exciting encounters. Complete with an introduction, line notes, and full bibliographical notes, this is an edition like no other. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Download or read book In the Land of the Romanovs written by Anthony Cross and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2014-04-27 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of more than three centuries of Romanov rule in Russia, foreign visitors and residents produced a vast corpus of literature conveying their experiences and impressions of the country. The product of years of painstaking research by one of the world’s foremost authorities on Anglo-Russian relations, In the Lands of the Romanovs is the realization of a major bibliographical project that records the details of over 1200 English-language accounts of the Russian Empire. Ranging chronologically from the accession of Mikhail Fedorovich in 1613 to the abdication of Nicholas II in 1917, this is the most comprehensive bibliography of first-hand accounts of Russia ever to be published. Far more than an inventory of accounts by travellers and tourists, Anthony Cross’s ambitious and wide-ranging work includes personal records of residence in or visits to Russia by writers ranging from diplomats to merchants, physicians to clergymen, gardeners to governesses, as well as by participants in the French invasion of 1812 and in the Crimean War of 1854-56. Providing full bibliographical details and concise but informative annotation for each entry, this substantial bibliography will be an invaluable tool for anyone with an interest in contacts between Russia and the West during the centuries of Romanov rule.
Download or read book Spies and Scholars written by Gregory Afinogenov and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Financial Times Best Book of the Year The untold story of how Russian espionage in imperial China shaped the emergence of the Russian Empire as a global power. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire made concerted efforts to collect information about China. It bribed Chinese porcelain-makers to give up trade secrets, sent Buddhist monks to Mongolia on intelligence-gathering missions, and trained students at its Orthodox mission in Beijing to spy on their hosts. From diplomatic offices to guard posts on the Chinese frontier, Russians were producing knowledge everywhere, not only at elite institutions like the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. But that information was secret, not destined for wide circulation. Gregory Afinogenov distinguishes between the kinds of knowledge Russia sought over the years and argues that they changed with the shifting aims of the state and its perceived place in the world. In the seventeenth century, Russian bureaucrats were focused on China and the forbidding Siberian frontier. They relied more on spies, including Jesuit scholars stationed in China. In the early nineteenth century, the geopolitical challenge shifted to Europe: rivalry with Britain drove the Russians to stake their prestige on public-facing intellectual work, and knowledge of the East was embedded in the academy. None of these institutional configurations was especially effective in delivering strategic or commercial advantages. But various knowledge regimes did have their consequences. Knowledge filtered through Russian espionage and publication found its way to Europe, informing the encounter between China and Western empires. Based on extensive archival research in Russia and beyond, Spies and Scholars breaks down long-accepted assumptions about the connection between knowledge regimes and imperial power and excavates an intellectual legacy largely neglected by historians.
Download or read book Personality and Place in Russian Culture written by Simon Dixon and published by MHRA. This book was released on 2010 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lindsey Hughes (1949-2007) made her reputation as one of the foremost historians of the age of Peter the Great by revealing the more freakish aspects of the tsar's complex mind and reconstructing the various physical environments in which he lived. Contributors to Personality and Place in Russian Culture were encouraged to develop any of the approaches featured in Hughes's work: pointillist and panoramic, playful and morbid, quotidian and bizarre. The result is a rich and original collection, ranging from the sixteenth century to the present day, in which a group of leading international scholars explore the role of the individual in Russian culture, the myriad variety of individual lives, and the changing meanings invested in particular places. The editor, Simon Dixon, is Sir Bernard Pares Professor of Russian History at UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies.
Download or read book Without the Banya We Would Perish written by Ethan Pollock and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first history of the banya, this book offers a sweeping cultural history of an institution that is emblematic of Russian identity.
Download or read book A People Born to Slavery written by Marshall T. Poe and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many Americans and Europeans have for centuries viewed Russia as a despotic country in which people are inclined to accept suffering and oppression. What are the origins of this stereotype of Russia as a society fundamentally apart from nations in the West, and how accurate is it? In the first book devoted to answering these questions, Marshall T. Poe traces the roots of today's perception of Russia and its people to the eyewitness descriptions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European travelers. His fascinating account—the most complete review of early modern European writings about Russia ever undertaken—explores how the image of "Russian tyranny" took hold in the popular imagination and eventually became the basis for the notion of "Oriental Despotism" first set forth by Montesquieu. Poe, the preeminent scholar of these valuable primary sources, carefully assesses their reliability. He argues convincingly that although the foreigners exaggerated the degree of Russian "slavery," they accurately described their encounters and correctly concluded that the political culture of Muscovite autocracy was unlike that of European kingship. With his findings, Poe challenges the notion that all Europeans projected their own fantasies onto Russia. Instead, his evidence suggests that many early travelers produced, in essence, reliable ethnographies, not works of exotic "Orientalism."
Download or read book An Academy at the Court of the Tsars written by Nikolaos A. Chrissidis and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-10 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first formally organized educational institution in Russia was established in 1685 by two Greek hieromonks, Ioannikios and Sophronios Leichoudes. Like many of their Greek contemporaries in the seventeenth century, the brothers acquired part of their schooling in colleges of post-Renaissance Italy under a precise copy of the Jesuit curriculum. When they created a school in Moscow, known as the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy, they emulated the structural characteristics, pedagogical methods, and program of studies of Jesuit prototypes. In this original work, Nikolaos A. Chrissidis analyzes the academy's impact on Russian educational practice and situates it in the contexts of Russian-Greek cultural relations and increased contact between Russia and Western Europe in the seventeenth century. Chrissidis demonstrates that Greek academic and cultural influences on Russia in the second half of the seventeenth century were Western in character, though Orthodox in doctrinal terms. He also shows that Russian and Greek educational enterprises were part of the larger European pattern of Jesuit academic activities that impacted Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox educational establishments and curricular choices. An Academy at the Court of the Tsars is the first study of the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy in English and the only one based on primary sources in Russian, Church Slavonic, Greek, and Latin. It will interest scholars and students of early modern Russian and Greek history, of early modern European intellectual history and the history of science, of Jesuit education, and of Eastern Orthodox history and culture.
Download or read book Language Dynamics in the Early Modern Period written by Karen Bennett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-04-25 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the linguistic situation in Europe was one of remarkable fluidity. Latin, the great scholarly lingua franca of the medieval period, was beginning to crack as the tectonic plates shifted beneath it, but the vernaculars had not yet crystallized into the national languages that they would later become, and multilingualism was rife. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, languages were coming into contact with an intensity that they had never had before, influencing each other and throwing up all manner of hybrids and pidgins as peoples tried to communicate using the semiotic resources they had available. Of interest to linguists, literary scholars and historians, amongst others, this interdisciplinary volume explores the linguistic dynamics operating in Europe and beyond in the crucial centuries between 1400 and 1800. Assuming a state of individual, societal and functional multilingualism, when codeswitching was the norm, and languages themselves were fluid, unbounded and porous, it explores the shifting relationships that existed between various tongues in different geographical contexts, as well as some of the myths and theories that arose to make sense of them.
Download or read book Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia written by Nancy Kollmann and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-11 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A magisterial account of criminal law in early modern Russia in a wider European and Eurasian context.
Download or read book At the Vanishing Point in History written by Marina F. Bykova and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-11-14 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Putin's war has prompted a deep analysis and reevaluation of the forces driving this deadly confrontation. At the Vanishing Point in History brings together renowned humanities scholars and prominent novelists to explore the roots and causes of the ongoing catastrophe in Eastern Europe. This distinguished group of Russian émigrés, well-versed in Russian culture, history, and philosophy, aims to examine the past to understand the present. Experts in the inner workings of Russian society who have fled the country, they believe it is their responsibility to critically assess the current crisis, reflect on its origins, and outline the agenda for future research in the humanities. In response to this challenge, they present a collection of analytical essays that offer essential background and context for understanding the unfolding events in Europe. Today's Russia is perhaps the most representative example of the grave threat that tyranny poses to global civilization. In its brutal attack on Ukraine, Putin's regime holds not only Russians but all of humanity hostage. The atrocities committed in the name of the “Russian world” make it urgent to thoroughly investigate Russia's current political pursuit in order to uncover its true origins and find a way forward.
Download or read book A Short History of Russia written by Mark Galeotti and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Library Journal 2020 Title to Watch "Terrific - and an amazing achievement to cover so much ground in such a short and wonderfully readable book." -Peter Frankopan, bestselling author of The Silk Roads Russia’s epic story told in an accessible, lively and short form, using the country's fascinating history to help us understand its actions today and what the future might hold A country with no natural borders, no single ethnic group, no true central identity, Russia has mythologized its past to unite its people, to justify its military decisions, and to signal strength to outsiders. Mark Galeotti takes us behind the myths to the heart of the Russian story, covering key moments such as: the formation of a nation through its early legends, including Ivan the Terrible and Catherine the Great the rise and fall of the Romanovs, the Russian Revolution, the Cold War, Chernobyl and the Soviet Union the arrival of an obscure politician named Vladimir Putin and his ambitions for Russia A Short History of Russia explores the history of this fascinating, extraordinary, desperate and exasperating country through two intertwined issues: the way successive influences from beyond its borders have shaped Russia, and the way Russians came to terms with this influence, writing and rewriting their past to understand their present and try to shape their future. In turn, this self-invented history has come to affect not just their constant nation-building project but also their relations with the world.
Download or read book Russia and the Wider World in Historical Perspective written by C. Brennan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2000-03-01 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new collection of original essays by leading academics explores major issues in Russia's relations with the wider world since the seventeenth century. The emphasis is not on Russian foreign policy per se, but on the different levels of interaction between Russia, its immediate neighbours, and the wider global community, including cultural, political and economic relations. The book has been produced in honour of the distinguished historian, Professor Paul Dukes.
Download or read book To Have and to Hold written by Philipp Blom and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2004-06-01 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From amassing sacred relics to collecting celebrity memorabilia, the impulse to hoard has gripped humankind throughout the centuries. But what is it that drives people to possess objects that have no conceivable use? To Have and To Hold is a captivating tour of collectors and their treasures from medieval times to the present, from a cabinet containing unicorn horns and a Tsar's collection of teeth to the macabre art of embalmer Dr. Frederick Ruysch, the fabled castle of William Randolph Hearst, and the truly preoccupied men who stockpile food wrappers and plastic cups. An engrossing story of the collector as bridegroom, deliriously, obsessively happy, wed to his possessions, till death do us part.
Download or read book Basic principles of psychology in the modern world written by Kolyukh O., Мороз Л., Гульбс О., Кобець О., Діхтяренко С., Лантух В., Лантух І., Dutsiak I., Spytska L. and published by International Science Group. This book was released on 2022-12-13 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collective monograph
Download or read book Study Group on Eighteenth Century Russia Newsletter written by Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Days from the Reigns of Eighteenth century Russian Rulers written by Anthony Glenn Cross and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
