Russian Travelers to Constantinople in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. by George P.MajeskaReview by: Charles J. HalperinSlavic Review, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 537-538Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2498021 .

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REVIEWS

RUSSIAN TRAVELERS TO CONSTANTINOPLE IN THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES. By George P Majeska. Dumbarton Oaks Studies, vol. 19. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library & Collection, 1984. xvii, 466 pp. Figures. Illustrations. Maps. Cloth.

In the brief introduction to this sterling monograph George Majeska makes a persuasive case for the utility as valuable, if minor, historical sources of several fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Russian narratives of pilgrimages to Constantinople. The Russians understood what they saw and heard in "Tsar'grad," whereas Westerners often got things wrong and the Byzantines themselves often lacked a motive to record their knowledge. These texts provide considerable data about Byzantine history and Russo-Byzantine re- lations.

Part 1, "Texts and Translations," consists of historical and literary introductions to each of the five texts: Stephen of Novgorod, a pious layman; Ignatius of Smolensk, a monk in the suite of Metropolitan Pimen; the "Anonymous Description," which Majeska argues is a translation of a Greek work; Alexander the Clerk, another Novgorodian; and Zosima the Deacon, from the Trinity-Sergius Monastery. Majeska provides an analysis of the manuscript and the textological traditions of each work based upon his examination, de visu or on microfilm, of the major manuscripts, and a history of the previous (and frequently faulty) translations and publications. He then presents facing critical editions in Cyrillic and elegant English translations with full apparatus. At times he suggests textual emendations, for example, that a passage in Ignatius should read Pimen was buried in, not opposite, the Genoese colony of Galata.

Part 2, "Commentaries," is devoted largely to the subject about which the texts provide the most information, the topography-especially the Christian topography-of Constantinople: its churches, monuments, icons, frescoes, relics, and religious folklore and legend. This part is organized geographically around the sections of the city, cross- referenced with the texts, and keyed to the ground plan of Hagia Sophia and the topo- graphical map of Constantinople included in the book. The contents of the Russian texts are integrated with data from all other available sources on the layout and artistic treasures of Constantinople. In addition, Majeska disusses Ignatius's route to Constantinople, which can be followed on the frontispiece map of all Russian travel routes to the city; the uprising of 1390 in Constantinople, which Ignatius witnessed; and the coronation of Manuel II in 1392. Majeska makes a strong case that Ignatius's description of that coronation deter- mined Metropolitan Makarii's arrangement of the imperial coronation of Ivan IV in 1547.

This is a very professional work of scholarship, in which Majeska draws with ease upon his skills as a philologist-textologist and art historian-archeologist. His analysis of the Russian accounts is masterful. While he accepts the presence in the texts of garbled passages that cannot be reconstructed or interpreted and dismisses fantastic accounts that cannot be confirmed, he views the sources as a whole with genuine understanding and sympathy. While he concedes that at times the Russians may have been naive, he does not take their reportage lightly. Without gainsaying the enormous technical expertise that infuses this study, the general reader might be drawn to those paragraphs in which Ma- jeska traces to their native cultural milieu what the Russians particularly noted-or failed to note: they had not seen mosaics, an art lost in Russia at the time, so they could not describe them well. They were sure to notice a peaked roof on a church since they were accustomed to domed churches. They could easily have confused a statue of an emperor in full imperial regalia with one of Christ Pantocrator (a religious impossibility), since iconographically the one was modeled strongly on the other. They had never seen unction in a coronation before and might have omitted to mention what was unknown to them.

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538 Slavic Review

In addition, Majeska is sensitive to the dynamics of tour guides and tourists and how it affects the communication of local lore between them. He takes advantage of the "amaz- ing continuity of land use" in Constantinople-Istanbul to inform his investigation with observations made in situ.

On the basis of more recent research Majeska would probably wish to moderate his paeans to Novgorodian autonomy from the Tatars and uniqueness as an international commercial center in medieval Russia. Novgorod was neither as immune from the Horde nor as atypical in its economic activities as previously supposed. The Novgorodian origin of three of these five texts strikes me as less significant than one might think at first glance. I do not believe Novgorodians were more likely than others to visit Constanti- nople, and there is nothing especially "Novgorodian" in their reactions to the city. To be sure, the sixth Russian narrative, of a pilgrimage to Constantinople on the eve of its sack by the Crusaders in 1204, was also written by a Novgorodian, Anthony. Majeska promises us a parallel volume on that text.

The book succeeds in taking the reader into the religious world of medieval Ortho- doxy at street level. It is a masterful tour conducted by a masterful guide. Majeska has written a fitting tribute to the memory of his academic mentor, the late George Soulis, to whom the volume is dedicated. Higher praise than that one cannot give this fine study.

CHARLES J. HALPERIN Indianapolis, Indiana

THE IMAGE OF PETER THE GREAT IN RUSSIAN HISTORY AND THOUGHT By Nicholas V Riasanovsky. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. ix, 331 pp. Illustrations. $29.95.

Nicholas Riasanovsky's distinguished and productive scholarly career has focused on the history of Russian nationalism. He started out with a critique of the Normanist origins of Rus' (and by extension of Russia) and devoted his first major monographs to Slavophilism and "Official Nationality." Aside from occasional forays into other domains, the mid- nineteenth-century turning point or caesura in modern Russian culture and national con- sciousness has fascinated him ever since. Naturally, the figure and reign of Peter the Great loomed large in this story. What Aleksandr Kizevetter in his "O P. N. Miliukove-isto- rike" (P. N. Miliukov, Sbornik materialov po chestvovaniiu ego semidesiatiletiia 1859-1929, Paris, 1929) has said about Peter's role in Russian historiography may also be applied to any and all manifestations of Russian culture: "As in France every new stage in the development of historical thought has found expression in a revision of the history of the great French Revolution, so in Russia a similar function, a litmus test so to say, was performed by . .. an historian's understanding of the reforms of Peter." This book is the result of Riasanovsky's wide-ranging and thorough readings of historical and literary sources.

In writing the history of the image of Peter I reflected in the words of writers, think- ers, and historians, Riasanovsky has limited himself to the images created by Russians inside Russia from 1700 to the present (this explains the omission not only of contributions by foreigners, but also-and more questionably to my mind-of much of the work of Russians abroad, especially of emigre writers and scholars in the 1920s and 1930s). The book is divided into four chapters following Riasanovsky's periodization of Russian in- tellectual history (as previously suggested in his A Parting of Ways: Government and the Educated Public, 1801-1855 [Oxford, 1976]): the Enlightenment from 1700 to 1826, the age of Idealistic philosophy and Romanticism (from 1826 to 1860), the Age of Realism and Scholarship (from 1860 to 1917), and the Soviet period.

The first two chapters are the most interesting and suggestive. Riasanovsky is quite clearly in his element here, although I do not always agree with some of his conceptual

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