Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- ONE: Searching for Enlightenment -- PART I: Wisdom and Wickedness, 1500-1689 -- TWO: God and Politics in Muscovy -- THREE: A Question of Legitimacy -- FOUR: Visions of the State at Mid-Century -- FIVE: Church and Politics in Late Muscovy -- PART II: Ways of Virtue, 1689-1762 -- SIX: Church, State, and Society under Peter -- SEVEN: Virtue and Politics after Peter -- PART III: Straining toward Light, 1762-1801 -- EIGHT: Catherine II and Enlightenment -- NINE: Nikita Panin and Imperial Power

A dazzling work of intellectual history by a world-renowned scholar, spanning the years from Peter the Great to the fall of the Soviet Union, this book gives us a clear and sweeping view of Russia not as an eternal barbarian menace but as an outermost, if laggard, member in the continuum of European nations.

Patrons of Enlightenment is the first English language study of the St. Petersburg Free Economic Study, one of the most prestigious and influential public associations in Imperial Russian history. Established in 1765 under the personal protection of Catherine the Great, its mission was to enlighten the villages and country estates of the Russian Empire by spreading the gospel of scientific agriculture to noble landowners and the peasants working their land. Emulating the patriotic associations of Western and Central Europe, it also sought to put the finishing touches on the cultural westernization of Russia initiated by the reforming tsar Peter the Great. Within the walls of its meeting house in St. Petersburg, it offered a neutral space where people of different rank, status, and lineage assembled to debate the great issues of the day, above all else the role of a privileged and enlightened nobility in a society anchored in serfdom. For its network of readers and correspondents in the provinces, it provided an opportunity to earn distinction on Russia's public stage through its voluminous publications and its flagship journal, the Transactions of the Free Economic Society. The Society provided the template for public activity and initiative in Imperial Russia, as hundreds of other organizations in the nineteenth century would emulate its example.

How did educated 18th-century Russians view society? And how did they reconcile their professed ideals of equality with the monarchical political structures in which they lived? In this study, historian Elise Wirtschafter turns to literary plays to reconstruct the social thinking of the past and to discover how Russians of the Enlightenment understood themselves.

Fyodor Sergeyevich Olferieff (1885&–1971) led a remarkable life in the shadows of history. This book presents his memoirs for the first time, translated and annotated by his granddaughter Tanya A. Cameron. Born into a noble family, Olferieff was a Russian career military officer who observed firsthand key events of the early twentieth century, including the 1905&–7 revolution, the Great War, the collapse of the imperial state, and the civil wars in Ukraine and Crimea. Olferieff wrestles with moral and political questions, wondering whether his own advantages could be justified—and whether, if born a peasant, he might have thrown himself into the revolution. As Gary Hamburg writes in an illuminating companion essay, Olferieff wrote "to understand himself and to record his broken life for posterity" as a privileged observer of a bloody, historically pivotal era.

This collection of essays on Russian religious thought focuses on the extent to which Russian culture and ideology has been informed by the nation's roots in Orthodox Christianity.

How to strengthen our spiritual bodies to experience a direct connection to the ultimate oneness and thereby illuminate the world.

A panoramic, interdisciplinary survey of Russian lives and “a must-read for any scholar engaging with Russian culture” (The Russian Review). In this interdisciplinary collection of essays, distinguished scholars survey the cultural practices, power relations, and behaviors that characterized Russian daily life from pre-revolutionary times through the post-Soviet present. Microanalyses and transnational perspectives shed new light on the formation and elaboration of gender, ethnicity, class, nationalism, and subjectivity. Changes in consumption and communication patterns, the restructuring of familial and social relations, systems of cultural meanings, and evolving practices in the home, at the workplace, and at sites of leisure are among the topics explored. “Offers readers a richly theoretical and empirical consideration of the ‘state of play’ of everyday life as it applies to the interdisciplinary study of Russia.” —Slavic Review “An engaging look at a vibrant area of research . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice “Volumes of such diversity frequently miss the mark, but this one represents a welcomed introduction to and a ‘must’ read for anyone seriously interested in the subject.” —Cahiers du Monde russe

An investigative reporter explores an infamous case where an obsessive and unorthodox search for enlightenment went terribly wrong. When thirty-eight-year-old Ian Thorson died from dehydration and dysentery on a remote Arizona mountaintop in 2012, The New York Times reported the story under the headline: "Mysterious Buddhist Retreat in the Desert Ends in a Grisly Death." Scott Carney, a journalist and anthropologist who lived in India for six years, was struck by how Thorson’s death echoed other incidents that reflected the little-talked-about connection between intensive meditation and mental instability. Using these tragedies as a springboard, Carney explores how those who go to extremes to achieve divine revelations—and undertake it in illusory ways—can tangle with madness. He also delves into the unorthodox interpretation of Tibetan Buddhism that attracted Thorson and the bizarre teachings of its chief evangelists: Thorson’s wife, Lama Christie McNally, and her previous husband, Geshe Michael Roach, the supreme spiritual leader of Diamond Mountain University, where Thorson died. Carney unravels how the cultlike practices of McNally and Roach and the questionable circumstances surrounding Thorson’s death illuminate a uniquely American tendency to mix and match eastern religious traditions like LEGO pieces in a quest to reach an enlightened, perfected state, no matter the cost. Aided by Thorson’s private papers, along with cutting-edge neurological research that reveals the profound impact of intensive meditation on the brain and stories of miracles and black magic, sexualized rituals, and tantric rites from former Diamond Mountain acolytes, A Death on Diamond Mountain is a gripping work of investigative journalism that reveals how the path to enlightenment can be riddled with danger.

In the early sixteenth century, the monk Filofei proclaimed Moscow the "Third Rome." By the 1930s, intellectuals and artists all over the world thought of Moscow as a mecca of secular enlightenment. In Moscow, the Fourth Rome, Katerina Clark shows how Soviet officials and intellectuals, in seeking to capture the imagination of leftist and anti-fascist intellectuals throughout the world, sought to establish their capital as the cosmopolitan center of a post-Christian confederation and to rebuild it to become a beacon for the rest of the world. Clark provides an interpretative cultural history of the city during the crucial 1930s, the decade of the Great Purge. She draws on the work of intellectuals such as Sergei Eisenstein, Sergei Tretiakov, Mikhail Koltsov, and Ilya Ehrenburg to shed light on the singular Zeitgeist of that most Stalinist of periods. In her account, the decade emerges as an important moment in the prehistory of key concepts in literary and cultural studies today-transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and world literature. By bringing to light neglected antecedents, she provides a new polemical and political context for understanding canonical works of writers such as Brecht, Benjamin, Lukacs, and Bakhtin. Moscow, the Fourth Rome breaches the intellectual iron curtain that has circumscribed cultural histories of Stalinist Russia, by broadening the framework to include considerable interaction with Western intellectuals and trends. Its integration of the understudied international dimension into the interpretation of Soviet culture remedies misunderstandings of the world-historical significance of Moscow under Stalin.