ABSTRACT

Historians remain divided over the epistemology of history, with ongoing debate in historiography creating micro-fissures in the epistemic community of historians. By applying Hayden White’s theory of emplotment to analyse six Anglophone history texts on Russia’s Petrine period, this article engages with this debate, offering evidence which supports the postmodernist approach to the writing of history. The purpose of the study is to identify discursive patterns across the texts and to explore the effect of emplotment on representations of Russia as a nation. Textual analysis reveals that Russia during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is romanticised as a golden era. Such romanticisation is possible because historians implement literary techniques such as Othering, Saming, backgrounding and foregrounding to shape their narratives. The romantic emplotment serves to force a factually liminal Russia into conformity with the prevailing geo-cultural paradigm couched in the West and the rest. Russia is not Othered, but it is also not unequivocally rendered as part of the Western Self. The article demonstrates how normative intersubjective structures affect representations of the past, and how writing on the past simultaneously reflects and reproduces those structures.

摘要

历史学家在历史认识论上仍然存在分歧，历史学方面的不断辩论在历史学家的认识论社区中造成了微裂缝。通过应用海顿·怀特的空缺理论，分析了俄罗斯Petrine时期的六种英语历史文本，本文参与了这场辩论，提供了支持后现代主义历史写作的证据。这项研究的目的是确定文本中的话语模式，并探讨空缺对俄罗斯作为一个国家的代表性的影响。文字分析表明，俄罗斯在十七世纪末和十八世纪初是浪漫的黄金时代。这样的浪漫化是可能的，因为历史学家会采用诸如Othering，Saming，背景和前景之类的文学技巧来塑造自己的叙事。浪漫主义的存在迫使一个事实边缘化的俄罗斯与西方和其他地区流行的地理文化范式保持一致。俄罗斯不是独联体，但也没有明确地将其作为西方自我的一部分。本文展示了规范性的主体间结构如何影响过去的表现，以及对过去的写作如何同时反映和再现这些结构。