Description
Book SynopsisImperial Russia, is was said, had two capital cities because it had two identities: St. Petersburg was Russia''s window to Europe, whereas Moscow preserved the nation''s proud historical traditions. Enlightened Metropolis challenges this myth by exploring how the tsarist regime actually tried to turn Moscow into a bridgehead of Europe in the heartland of Russia. Moscow in the eighteenth century was widely scorned as backward and Asiatic. The tsars thought it a benighted place that endangered their state''s internal security and their effort to make Russia European. Beginning with Catherine the Great, they sought to construct a new Moscow, with European buildings and institutions, a Westernized middle estate, and a new cultural image as an enlightened metropolis. Drawing on the methodologies of urban, social, institutional, cultural, and intellectual history, Enlightened Metropolis asks: How was the urban environment - buildings, institutions, streets, smells - transformed in the nine d
Trade ReviewEnlightened Metropolis offers an important revisionist challenge to Moscow's marginal status in the modernization of the Russian Empire. * Daniel Beer, The Times Literary Supplement *
[a] fine new history of Moscow * James Cracraft, English Historical Review *
This work will become and should remain a standard reference point for studies of Moscow and indeed Russia of this period for decades to come. * Paul Keenan, History *
Enlightened Metropolis is a prodigiously researched book ... The reader is amazed by the wealth of sources and statistics and the relentless comparison of Moscow with Russian and other European cities ... [Martin] has significantly advanced the urban, social, institutional, and cultural study of the empire during the watershed period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. * Cynthia Hyla Whittaker, Journal of Modern History *
The book will become essential to any course on Russian cities, and would be equally well suited to courses on comparative urban history, or on Russian social history because of its nuanced and original perspective on Russian social hierarchies ... the book offers scholars rich detail on material culture, everyday life, urban personal narratives, the development of Russian urban ethnography, and memory and nostalgia. It should be required reading for anyone interested in the history of imperial Russia. * Katherine Pickering Antonova, Ab Imperio *
Alexander Martin's Enlightened Metropolis is important and admirable work, which gives to Moscow its rightful place in a Russian Enlightenment ... masterful * Albert J. Schmidt, Journal of Social History *
an enormously rich account based on extensive historical research ... contextualizing Moscow's history within the wider history of urban Europe, and providing an account illuminating the city's history from a number of competing perspectives -- including those of the rich, poor, and middling, as well as those of foreigners. Martin's is thus a well-rounded history of Moscow as an idea, a built environment, and a lived community. * Comments from the Urban History Association on the award of the 2015 prize for the best book of 2013-2014 in non-North American urban history *
Table of ContentsIntroduction ; 1. The Enlightened Metropolis and the Imperial Social Project ; 2. Space and Time in the Enlightened Metropolis ; 3. Envisioning the Enlightened Metropolis: Images of Moscow under Catherine II ; 4. Barbarism, Civility, Luxury: Writing about Moscow in the 1790s-1820s ; 5. Government, Aristocracy, and the Middling Sort ; 6. The 1812 War ; 7. Common Folk in Nicholaevan Moscow ; 8. Complacency and Anxiety: Representations of Moscow under Nicholas I ; Conclusion
