Icon and Axe

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am greatly indebted to the libraries in which I have been privileged to work: the Firestone (including the Shoumatoff collection) at Princeton, the Widener and Houghton at Harvard, national libraries at Stockholm, Vienna, and Marburg, the university library at Leiden, the library of the Institut für osteuropäische Geschichte in Vienna, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library, the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkinsky Dom), and the Russian Museum in Leningrad, and the Lenin Library, Tret’iakov Gallery, and Archive of Ancient Acts in Moscow. I am especially grateful to Drs. Valenkoski and Haltsonen and to the excellent national library at Helsinki for a valuable year spent reading in its rich Russian collection. I deeply appreciate the support I received for this work from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, from the Fulbright program in Finland, and from the Council of the Humanities and University Research Funds of Princeton University. I also thank the Center of International Studies at Princeton, the Russian Research Center at Harvard, and the Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants for assistance not directly related to this project, but of real benefit to it. I am grateful to Gregory and Katharine Guroff for, respectively, preparing the index and typing the most difficult sections of this manuscript.

I owe a special debt to Professor Sir Isaiah Berlin of Oxford and the Reverend Professor Georges Florovsky. They are in many ways the spiritual fathers of this book, having generously fortified me with ideas, criticism, and references during and since my years at Oxford and Harvard. I also profited from discussions with Professors Mavrodin and Bialy and Messrs. Malyshev, Gol’dberg, and Volk during my visits to the University of Leningrad as an exchange lecturer in March 1961, and again in January 1965, while on an exchange with Moscow University. On this latter occasion, I had the privilege of lecturing on the substance of this book at both universities. In Moscow, I benefited from discussions with Professors Klibanov and Novitsky and Mr. A. Sakharov. I am grateful for stimulus as well as courtesies to these and others in the USSR, and only hope that the exchange of often differing views in this area will continue and deepen. I also thank Mme Popova and Director Lebedev for enabling me to study in detail (and obtain reproductions from) the rich collections of P. D. Korin and the Tret’iakov Gallery respectively. I owe a real debt to my colleagues in the History Department at Princeton: Joseph Strayer, Cyril Black, and Jerome Blum, who along with R. Tucker, R. Burgi, G. Alef, N. Berberova, and Professors Berlin and Florovsky were good enough to read and comment upon sections of the book. I owe a special debt to Charles Moser for his reading and comments. None of these people should suffer any measure of guilt by association with the emphases and approach, let alone the imperfections of this work.

Among the many others whom I should properly thank, I can mention only my lively—I might even say intelligentnye—students at Harvard and Princeton, and three great, departed teachers who profoundly influenced me and will not be forgotten by any who knew them: Albert M. Friend, Walter P. Hall, and E. Harris Harbison. Finally, I must thank my beloved wife and companion Marjorie, to whom this book is gratefully and affectionately dedicated.

NOTE

For the sake of readability, I have deferred all but the most essential Russian terms to the reference section at the end of the book, and have introduced a few modifications in the usual method of transliterating Russian (principally the use of an initial Ya and Yu and a terminal oy in names, a uniform rendering of all singular adjectives ending in ii or yi as y, and the elimination of terminal soft signs in names like Suzdal and Pestel). I have generally tried to follow familiar usage in determining whether to use the English or transliterated Russian form of a name, but have tended to favor the English version of first names and the transliterated Russian version of last names. Internal soft signs will generally be maintained. Exceptions to general practice in transliteration will be made to conform with accepted English usage in place names (Kharkov, Dnieper), frequently used Russian words (boyar, sobors, Bolshoi Theater), and Russian names rendered differently in English by authors writing themselves in English (Vinogradoff, Gorodetzky).