Before Cultural History. Functions and Dynamics of Russian Historiography in an European Context (1750-1830)

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The objective of the proposed project here is the analysis of historiographical texts of the Sattelzeit (R. Koselleck) of the late 18th and early 19th century in Russia, created as translations, adaptations or originally. The project asks formost for the conceptualizations of culture: culture of mankind, culture of Europe, culture of the Russians, but not for conceptualizations of ethnos, people or nation. It should be asked then firstly whether there was a cultural history before the establishment of a professionalized historiography for the case of the Russian Empire. It will analyzed, secondly, which concepts and ideas from which Europe's historiographic traditions were adapted or were originally devoloped within the discourse of the Russian imperial elite. The third question will be that oft he purposes oft he texts in the transition from the enlightenment to romanticism. The development of an educated public and the emergence of a historiography under the conditions of a controlled and censored book market are the most important precondition tobe taken into account fort he analysis of the textcorpus. Methodological issues here are the deconstruction of narrative strategies in the texts, the analysis of (historical) terms and semantic fields in these texts, and finally the reconstruction of the contexts and intellectual/political networks.