Presents an in-depth biography of the mysterious Russian leader who was responsible for bringing Russia into the modern age.
Annotation
"In this analysis of late Muscovite and early Imperial court culture, Ernest A. Zitser provides a corrective to the secular bias of the scholarly literature about the reforms of Peter the Great. Zitser demonstrates that the tsar's supposedly "secularizing" reforms rested on a fu…
"In this analysis of late Muscovite and early Imperial court culture, Ernest A. Zitser provides a corrective to the secular bias of the scholarly literature about the reforms of Peter the Great. Zitser demonstrates that the tsar's supposedly "secularizing" reforms rested on a fu…
The author suggests that by implicating Peter's "royal priesthood" in taboo-breaking, libertine ceremonies, the organizers of such "sacred parodies" inducted select members of the Russian political elite into a new system of distinctions between nobility and baseness, sacrality …
This exciting and psychologically penetrating account of the life and rule of Russia's eighteenth-century tsar-reformer develops an important theme. What happens when the drive for "progress" is linked to an autocratic, expansionist impulse rather than a larger goal of human ema…