Abridging History: Popular Forms for Patriotic Feelings

• In Event: Nineteenth-Century Russian Conservative Imaginaries

Abstract

“Russia, the mother of heroes, you will declare war and blood will be spilled, or you will make peace and the people will be blessed!” declares the epigraph of an 1862 publication entitled the Historical Map-Table of the Millennium of Russia, 862-1862. Composed in honor of the one thousandth year of the Russian State, then being celebrated across Russia, the Map-Table sought to capture and compress into easily digestible forms a millennium of monarchical rule, war, heroism, innovation, and colonial expansion and to make this history accessible for a broad public. Examining the Map-Table and similar efforts to represent national history as knowable, easily reproducible, and stable, this paper makes an argument for an early reform-era impulse to abridge history into grandiose, yet succinct textual and visual representations that upheld conservative, monarchical values and were designed to elicit patriotic feelings.

Author

• Chloe Simone Papadopoulos, U of Southern California