Reviews of Books

Revising the National Pantheon: The American
National Biography and Early American History

Scott E. Casper

IN the summer of 1803, the recently widowed, thirty-nine-year-old Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov set sail in charge of Russia's first round-the-world voyage. Also designated the envoy plenipotentiary to Japan, Rezanov arrived first in Nagasaki, Japan, where he spent the winter of 1804–1805 under house arrest. After his release in spring 1805, Rezanov sailed for the Russian colonies in America, where he reorganized and expanded the Kodiak school and expanded commerce with Boston fur traders. He traveled to California the following year to obtain food. In San Francisco, he negotiated trade relations with the Spanish authorities—and fell in love. Maria de la Concepcion, the fifteen-year-old daughter of his host, apparently reciprocated Rezanov's affections. The couple made plans to marry after Rezanov returned from Russia, but he died of "a cruel fever" there. "The beautiful Concepcion remained touchingly faithful to her sweetheart and, refusing to believe the tragic news, patiently awaited the return of her beloved" and ultimately died in a convent in 1857. Or so a Bret Harte poem, a 1906 novel, a 1970 Russian poem, and a rock opera would have it. 1

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Most of the 17,658 brief lives in the new American National Biography (ANB) don't deal with Alaska or with Russian colonization, and Rezanov's story, as told by Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov, packs more emotion than most. Nevertheless, it serves as a useful introduction to how this new compendium redefines the national biographical project. "American" and "national" imply the antecedents of all that has become the United States, including early Alaska. A continent of many nations' colonies, America before 1820 was a meeting ground for Russians and Spaniards in California, not only English, French, Dutch, and Native American people east of the Mississippi. "Biography" does more than chronicle accomplishments; it can encompass both purposeful storytelling and the history of stories told about its subject. Thus Rezanov was both a representative of something larger—"that galaxy of Russian statesman [sic] . . . who, following Peter the Great, saw vast prospects for Russia in the Far East, in North America, and the whole North Pacific"—and the protagonist in a much-retold romantic saga. By this definition, biography is necessarily revisionist, dependent on what the writer in a particular context envisions as a "life story." In ways small and large, in its individual portraits and in the vast gallery those portraits compose together, American National Biography engages in re-imagining whose lives—and what stories—have shaped America.

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