A RUSSIAN BOURGEOIS'S ARCTIC ENLIGHTENMENT

Abstract

Studies of Europe's Enlightenment have been enriched by attending to its real and imagined impacts on indigenous peoples and of indigenous peoples on Europeans. Applying these methods to new-settled eighteenth-century societies offers another standpoint on the Enlightenment. This study is a sample: a civic history of a relatively new – in European terms – place suggests the possibilities. In 1792, a bourgeois, Vasilii Krestinin, from Russia's White Sea shore, published a history of Archangel, founded in 1584. Krestinin's view from a new Arctic society is as far from Europe's elegant metropoles and eloquent lumières as the ship captains, Pacific Islanders, and cat killers in influential recent studies of the Enlightenment. Just as these studies – and others on readers and reading – transformed studies of the Enlightenment, historians can use sources from new societies to observe answers and actions of people casting themselves as Enlighteners. This study of enlightened sensibility in an Arctic society suggests how the Enlightenment – viewed from settler societies – became anxious, how it fanned nationalisms, and how it was ensnared by naïve presuppositions that progress was a prerequisite of power.