.
Librarian of Congress Emeritus, James H. Billington, celebrated the 50th anniversary of his book, The Icon and the Axe, at a symposium hosted by the Carmel Institute of Russian Culture and History at American University in Washington D.C., which dedicated a discussion of the classic. A timeless piece of literature, The Icon and the Axe examines Russian history through culture, and illuminates non-western tradition in a new light. In an exclusive interview, Dr. Billington shares his inspiration for writing The Icon and the Axe, and explains how a fifty-year-old history book remains relevant half a century later.
The Icon and the Axe has been described as one of the most groundbreaking classics in the field of Russian cultural history. What aspects of this book have helped set it apart from the traditional westernizing narrative of Russian culture?
The main difference between The Icon and the Axe and other narratives of Russian culture is that The Icon and the Axe (I and A), like all my historical writing, is explicitly interpretive. It is designed to open up the entire subject of Russian history, rather than just cover some particular part of this broad subject more narrowly and definitively.
Another implicit difference is the original and still enduring purpose of I and A, which is to stimulate continuing dialogue about Russian history by exploring its cultural tradition. Most other histories of Russia written at that time relied on cherry-picking sources to reinforce and support previously held ideological and methodological preferences of the author. This phenomenon has been most common in political and economic histories. Remarkably little had been written then about Russia's vernacular modern culture, except for studies of its late-blooming literary culture.
The appropriate and continuous question for me has been how better to relate neglected aspects of Russia's past culture to its present problems and future prospects. I and A was then a rare narrative history of Russian culture as a whole. I was exploring in I and A the non-western aspects of Russian culture, such as Eastern Orthodox Christianity and other Eurasian belief systems, against the aggressively secularizing and westernizing rule of Peter the Great and his largely neglected father, Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
How has the Icon and the Axe remained relevant fifty years after publication? Why is it important that we continue this discussion on Russian culture?
I and A remains relevant fifty years later mainly because it did not share the widespread assumption in the 1950s that the Soviet system would survive more or less indefinitely without being fundamentally changed. I and A strongly suggested that the Soviet system would be ended by Russian people themselves through the power of their own culture, as suggested then in Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago.
I and A is also relevant now because it clearly suggested in its final ten-page conclusion, "The Irony of Russian History," that Russian history has been largely shaped by what the great cultural historian, Yury Lotman, calls its unique "culture of explosions." This often produced totally unexpected sudden cultural changes that were often exactly contrary to what had been expected. These explosions were the determining force in shaping long periods of Russian history as a whole.
What connects you personally to the content of this book? What instilled your passion for this topic?
What connected me personally then and now to the content of this lengthy book was my early discovery of Russia through reading War and Peace. Tolstoy's novel was the first really long book I ever read and the first one that inspired me to study Russia. I read War and Peace just as the USA and Russia had become allies in World War II. Thanks to Tolstoy's novel, I soon discovered that Hitler was making the same mistake invading Russia that Napoleon had previously made. I also first realized then that there was much in common between the life and culture in which I had lived in lower middleclass America and the very different and distant culture of tsarist and aristocratic imperial Russia.
On Tolstoy's pages I encountered strong family values and young men going off to war, such as we were experiencing then in America. I became passionate to find out more about Russia, which was supposed to be an inaccessible enigma, but impressed me from the beginning through the contagious passion of Tolstoy's writing–and also by his focus on the eternal megasubjects of going to war and living in peace. I discovered that I was learning more from reading yesterday's novel than today's newspaper. I was affected from within and not just influenced from without by Tolstoy and later by Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and The Possessed.
How were you able to compile all the information necessary for this book? Who or what were your sources? How long did the research process take?
My "research process" of conceiving and completing I and A lasted twenty-five years beginning with my first fulltime research on modern Russian culture as a doctoral student at Oxford under Isaiah Berlin. I and A grew out of the multimedial course on the history of Russian culture that I had been teaching for more than a decade first at Harvard and then at Princeton. Initially my source for the many types of materials and methods for organizing them into a coherent narrative was my own surprisingly accurate long-term memory. But more important was the diverse and highly generous help I received from librarians, archivists, and humanistic scholars in America and abroad. They made it possible for me to gather in and make informed use of the immense recorded and still preserved record of humanity's cultural and intellectual creativity.
The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of any other organization.
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Interview with Dr. James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress Emeritus
December 15, 2016
Librarian of Congress Emeritus, James H. Billington, celebrated the 50th anniversary of his book, The Icon and the Axe, at a symposium hosted by the Carmel Institute of Russian Culture and History at American University in Washington D.C., which dedicated a discussion of the classic. A timeless piece of literature, The Icon and the Axe examines Russian history through culture, and illuminates non-western tradition in a new light. In an exclusive interview, Dr. Billington shares his inspiration for writing The Icon and the Axe, and explains how a fifty-year-old history book remains relevant half a century later.
The Icon and the Axe has been described as one of the most groundbreaking classics in the field of Russian cultural history. What aspects of this book have helped set it apart from the traditional westernizing narrative of Russian culture?
The main difference between The Icon and the Axe and other narratives of Russian culture is that The Icon and the Axe (I and A), like all my historical writing, is explicitly interpretive. It is designed to open up the entire subject of Russian history, rather than just cover some particular part of this broad subject more narrowly and definitively.
Another implicit difference is the original and still enduring purpose of I and A, which is to stimulate continuing dialogue about Russian history by exploring its cultural tradition. Most other histories of Russia written at that time relied on cherry-picking sources to reinforce and support previously held ideological and methodological preferences of the author. This phenomenon has been most common in political and economic histories. Remarkably little had been written then about Russia's vernacular modern culture, except for studies of its late-blooming literary culture.
The appropriate and continuous question for me has been how better to relate neglected aspects of Russia's past culture to its present problems and future prospects. I and A was then a rare narrative history of Russian culture as a whole. I was exploring in I and A the non-western aspects of Russian culture, such as Eastern Orthodox Christianity and other Eurasian belief systems, against the aggressively secularizing and westernizing rule of Peter the Great and his largely neglected father, Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
How has the Icon and the Axe remained relevant fifty years after publication? Why is it important that we continue this discussion on Russian culture?
I and A remains relevant fifty years later mainly because it did not share the widespread assumption in the 1950s that the Soviet system would survive more or less indefinitely without being fundamentally changed. I and A strongly suggested that the Soviet system would be ended by Russian people themselves through the power of their own culture, as suggested then in Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago.
I and A is also relevant now because it clearly suggested in its final ten-page conclusion, "The Irony of Russian History," that Russian history has been largely shaped by what the great cultural historian, Yury Lotman, calls its unique "culture of explosions." This often produced totally unexpected sudden cultural changes that were often exactly contrary to what had been expected. These explosions were the determining force in shaping long periods of Russian history as a whole.
What connects you personally to the content of this book? What instilled your passion for this topic?
What connected me personally then and now to the content of this lengthy book was my early discovery of Russia through reading War and Peace. Tolstoy's novel was the first really long book I ever read and the first one that inspired me to study Russia. I read War and Peace just as the USA and Russia had become allies in World War II. Thanks to Tolstoy's novel, I soon discovered that Hitler was making the same mistake invading Russia that Napoleon had previously made. I also first realized then that there was much in common between the life and culture in which I had lived in lower middleclass America and the very different and distant culture of tsarist and aristocratic imperial Russia.
On Tolstoy's pages I encountered strong family values and young men going off to war, such as we were experiencing then in America. I became passionate to find out more about Russia, which was supposed to be an inaccessible enigma, but impressed me from the beginning through the contagious passion of Tolstoy's writing–and also by his focus on the eternal megasubjects of going to war and living in peace. I discovered that I was learning more from reading yesterday's novel than today's newspaper. I was affected from within and not just influenced from without by Tolstoy and later by Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and The Possessed.
How were you able to compile all the information necessary for this book? Who or what were your sources? How long did the research process take?
My "research process" of conceiving and completing I and A lasted twenty-five years beginning with my first fulltime research on modern Russian culture as a doctoral student at Oxford under Isaiah Berlin. I and A grew out of the multimedial course on the history of Russian culture that I had been teaching for more than a decade first at Harvard and then at Princeton. Initially my source for the many types of materials and methods for organizing them into a coherent narrative was my own surprisingly accurate long-term memory. But more important was the diverse and highly generous help I received from librarians, archivists, and humanistic scholars in America and abroad. They made it possible for me to gather in and make informed use of the immense recorded and still preserved record of humanity's cultural and intellectual creativity.
The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of any other organization.
