Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Since the decline and final disintegration of the Soviet Union, the history and nature of freemasonry have received increasing scholarly attention in Russia (see for example, the publication of A. I. Serkov). The major question is the real or putative role of freemasons in bringing about the fall of imperial Russia and in the policies of the Provisional Government. This concern has led to a reawakening of curiosity concerning freemasonry in earlier times, in particular the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We can speak of a reawakening because, in the last decades of the imperial regime, much valuable work was done to bring to light important sources and to publish monographic and biographic studies on prominent freemasons. True, even in Soviet times, literary scholars addressed the fact that seminal figures in the early history of modern Russian literature (e.g. Mikhail Kheraskov, Nikolai Novikov, Nikolai Karamzin, Aleksandr Pushkin) had had associations with masonic lodges. It so happens also that, stimulated by the seminal work of Reinhart Kosellek, Jürgen Habermas, Roger Chartier, and Franco Venturi, to mention only a few, historians of eighteenth-century Europe and of the Enlightenment have turned their attention to freemasonry as a form of sociability and cultural life that fostered and disseminated liberal and enlightened norms of comportment among the educated classes.

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Building on this historiographic background, both Russian and Western, Douglas Smith offers an account of Russian elite (i.e. educated and noble) society in the second half of the eighteenth century. Smith places freemasonry firmly in its historic and existential contexts and, in so doing, clarifies its role in and contribution to Russia's europeanization (or "modernization"). He provides a careful reconstruction of the membership, ritual practices, and activities—cultural and philanthropic—of the lodges. He draws not only on the published sources (contemporary periodicals, plays, tracts) and monographic literature but also on much unpublished documentation (correspondence, individual records, and investigatory reports).

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