Век Просвещения. Вып. 7 : Петр I и «окно в Европу»

НАУЧНЫЙ И ИЗДАТЕЛЬСКИЙ ЦЕНТР 
«НАУКА»
CENTRE DE RECHERCHE ET D’EDITION
 «NAOUKA»

Centre d’etude du XVIIIe sie` cle

Pierre Ier

et la
«fenetre sur l’Europe»

MOSCOU   NAOUKA   2021

Le Si`ecle des Lumi`eres

VII

ˆ

Петр I 
и 
«окно в Европу»

 
 

МОСКВА   НАУКА   2021

Век Просвещения

VII

УДК 94(100)«654»
ББК  63.3(0)5 

В26

Издание основано в 2006 году

Редакционная коллегия:

А. Алименто, Е.Э. Бабаева, В.Я. Берелович, П.Р. Заборов, 
А.Б. Каменский, С.Я. Карп (ответственный редактор),  
Г.А. Космолинская (составитель и ответственный секретарь),  
Н.Д. Кочеткова, Г. Маркер, С.А. Мезин, Ж.Д. Мелло, Е.Е. Рычаловский, 
А.Ю. Самарин, Е.Б. Смилянская, А.В. Чудинов, Е.Б. Шарнова

Кураторы тематической части
Гэри Маркер
С.А. Мезин

Рецензенты:
доктор исторических наук Е.Н. Марасинова 
кандидат исторических наук Е.В. Акельев

В оформлении переплета использован рисунок Ю.Я. Ярина 
по мотивам картины В.А. Серова «Петр I»

Век Просвещения / [Отв. ред. С.Я. Карп ; сост. Г.А. Космолинская] ; Науч. 
совет «История мировой культуры» РАН ; Ин-т всеобщей истории РАН ; Науч. 
и изд. центр «Наука». – М.: Наука, 2006 –      . – ISSN 2308-4472.
Вып. 7 : Петр I и «окно в Европу». – 2021. – 367 с. – ISBN 978-5-02-040879-1 
(в пер.)

Седьмой выпуск сборника Век Просвещения посвящен 350-летию Петра I. Его тематическую 
часть образуют материалы и исследования, посвященные петровской европеизации, ее восприятию 
современниками и потомками. Их авторы привлекают внимание читателей не только к малоизучен-
ным, но и к таким неожиданным аспектам этой темы, как переписка церковных иерархов, интерес 
к алхимии, претензии российского посла при дворе турецкого султана… В этот выпуск вошли также 
исследования по истории коллекционирования эпохи Просвещения, рецензии на книги и продолжа-
ющаяся библиография.
Для специалистов по изучению XVIII века, а также всех интересующихся историей культуры 

 Просвещения.

ISBN 978-5-02-040879-1 
©   Российская академия наук и издательство 
«Наука», продолжающееся издание (раз-
работка, оформление), 2006 (год основа-
ния), 2021

©   Космолинская Г.А., составление, 2021
©   Государственный Эрмитаж, иллюстрации, 
2021

©   ФГУП Издательство «Наука», редакционно- 

издательское оформление, 2021

INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS: 
THE WINDOW AND THE HISTORIANS

Ma qual cosa le dirò prima, qual poi,
di questa Città, di questo gran finestrone,
dirò cosi, novellamente aperto nel Norte,
per cui la Russia guarda in Europa?1

It is a great pleasure to participate as co-guest editor in this special volume of 
Век Просвещения commemorating 350 years since the birth of Peter the Great 
and its theme of Peter’s «window onto Europe», utterly fitting for a publica-
tion whose title includes the word «Lumières». These introductory comments 
will be both brief and open-ended, with no pretense of encyclopedic coverage 
or interpretive virtuosity. Instead, it offers some subjective and open-ended 
ruminations about the ways in which the Petrine «window» has been crafted by 
the historical discipline, the «historiographic imagination» as I have termed it.
To begin: what might we historians have done if Francesco Algarotti had 
not coined the «gran finestrone»? Would our narratives of the Petrine era be 
any different? We will never know, of course, notwithstanding an extensive 
body of writings over the past two centuries in which multiple authors have 
put their own marks on the window2, a part of the massive library of works 
on the posthumous image of Peter the Great3. We are here today simply as the 

© Gary Marker, 2021
1  Algarotti F. Viaggi di Russia // Ricorda R. La letteratura di viaggio in Italia: Dal Settecento 
a oggi. Brescia, 2012. Р. 156.
2  А recent compendium intended for middle school students (Окно в Европу от смуты до 
петровских реформ ХVII – начала XVIII в. / [С. Антоненко, Е. Анисимов, А. Богданов 
и др.]. М., 2014) in fact includes an extensive digest of relevant statements from 
leading historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For a more religio-philosophical 
interpretation, one with a strong naval theme as well, see Кантор В.К. Петр Великий и окно 
в Европу: Заметки главного редактора // Философические письма: Русско-eвропейский 
диалог (Электронный научный журнал). 2019. Т. 2. № 1. C. 12–25.
3  The most complete English-language study remains Riasanovsky N.V. The Image of Peter the 
Great in Russian History and Thought. Oxford, 1975. See also: Zitser E.A. The Difference 
that Peter I Made // Oxford Online Handbook of Modern Russian History / ed. by S. Dixon. 
Jun 2016 www.oxfordhandbooks.com

Gary Marker

most recent – and assuredly not the last – group to participate in this dialogue 
across generations. Future investigators, we hope, will take note of what we 
say in the essays to follow, and, if they do, they will most likely challenge 
some of our conclusions. One can only hope so since that is what keeps scho-
larship vibrant.
For the moment let us put aside the fact that we cannot quite agree on what 
this window is all about, when Algarotti first mentioned it, or what he had in 
mind when he did so. Did he write it initially in French in a missive written in 
1739 from St. Petersburg to Lord John Hervey, as some have maintained, or 
only later, in 1762, and in Italian rather than French, for the published collec-
tion of his letters? Was he expressing high regard for Peter, using the window 
as a metaphor for Peter’s opening the frontier to the west on Russia’s behalf, 
as in D.S. Artamonov’s understanding? Or, on the contrary, was Algarotti is-
suing a warning to his fellow Europeans, an ominous foreboding at Russia’s 
looming military presence in European affairs («a bullseye onto Europe» is 
the way M.S. Nekliudova and A.L. Ospovat have read it)?4 Perhaps he had in 
mind something else entirely.
We simply do not know, and, frankly, from the perspective of the histo-
riographic imagination it does not matter all that much what Algarotti was 
thinking. What matters is its endurance in popular memory. By committing 
his Saggio di lettere sopra la Russia to print, Algarotti placed the fate of 
the window into the hands of his readership, who truth be told proceeded to 
ignore it for over a half century. Only after Pushkin reopened the window in 
The Bronze Horseman did the trope gain anyone’s attention. Henceforth, and 
still today, it became inextricably linked to Pushkin’s moving and ambiguous 
paeon to Peter and the capital that he built. If not entirely forgotten, Alga-
rotti’s imprint now was shrouded by the titanic shadow of the national poet. 
From that moment onward the window onto Europe became Pushkin’s, with-
out whom it almost certainly would not have become a «крылатая фраза», 
arguably the most recognizable expression applied to the Petrine era.
Today one can find this phrase anywhere and everywhere, in several lan-
guages, and throughout the fullness of modern media – literature, theater, 
film, television, street festivals, blogs, the Internet, etc. – testimony to the 
panorama of human imagination, as well as to the power of media marketing. 
It is these very qualities, I imagine, the instant and near-universal familiarity, 
enduring relevance, and interpretive plasticity, that in part inspired the editors 
to select this trope as the theme for this special issue of Век Просвещения. 

4  Артамонов Д.С. «Окно в Европу» в культурной памяти: метаморфозы фронтирной метафоры // 
Журнал фронтирных исследований. 2020. № 2. С. 80–91; Неклюдова М.С., 
Осповат А.Л. Окно в Европу: Источниковедческий этюд к «Медному Всаднику» // 
Лотмановский сборник. М., 1997. Вып. 2. С. 263. See also: Андреева Н.С. Франческо 
Альгаротти и его «Путешествие в Россию»: к истории одной книги // Петербургская 
библиотечная школа. 2017. Т. 57, вып. 1. С. 32–36; Franceschetti A. L’Algarotti in Russia: 
dal «Giornale» al «Viaggi» // Lettere Italiane. 1983. Vol. 35, N 3. P. 312–332.

Introductory coMMents: the WIndoW and the hIstorIans

For quite some time philologists and specialists in cultural studies have been 
probing the window’s poetics and offered enlightening insights into its reso-
nance. Curiously, however, historians have not. It matters little whether they 
have been Russian or foreign, old or new, pro-Peter or anti. As a profession 
they – we – have mostly left the window alone. Even those specialists for 
whom Peter loomed as a larger-than-life, epoch-making Europeanizer mostly 
kept the window out of their narratives. As far as I have been able to deter-
mine none of their works give the window an interpretive or explanatory 
role, and most historians do not mention it at all, save in the occasional essay 
directed at a general readership.
This comes as a surprise, but here are some examples based upon my 
own – admittedly less than exhaustive – survey. The window seems not to 
appear anywhere in the scholarly writings of Sergei Mikhailovich Solov’ev, 
not in his classic История России с древнейших времен, in which the bet-
ter part of five volumes (14–18) are devoted to Peter and his times, nor in his 
Публичные чтения о Петре Великом (1871)5. The closest he came, so far 
as I have found, was a passage from an early (1841) and strikingly polemi-
cal essay, «Феософический взгляд на историю России». In the midst of a 
lengthy diatribe that insisted again and again on Russia’s unique (i.e., largely 
non- European) nature and spirituality, he remarked, «Петр, разрушивши 
преграду, отдалявшую Россию от Европы, сам стал на стороже и завещал 
этот пост своим преемникам»6. Given Solov’ev’s valorization of Peter 
in the История России, which cast his reign as the dividing line between 
 ancient and modern in the periodization of Russian history, one assumes he 
meant this to be praise. But the brutal language takes one aback.
The case of Vasilii Osipovich Kliuchevskii is similar. As we know, his as-
sessment of Peter was rather different than Solov’ev’s, much more conditional 
in its praise and less sweeping in its conclusions. Still, his five-volume Курс 
русской истории dedicated the better part of eleven lectures to Peter and his 
reign, including two (LXVIII and LXIX) that focused on Peter’s legacy, old 
and new Russia, including – most relevantly – Peter’s approach to western Eu-
rope vis-à-vis Russia7. He also composed a separate series of lectures entitled 
«Западное влияние в России после Петра» that focused even more closely 
on the subject8. In each of these works he inquired into the thinking behind the 
expansion of European contacts, the simultaneous pragmatism and brutality 
of the process, and its titanic costs and equally enormous benefits. In the end 

5  Соловьев С.М. История России с древнейших времен: В 6 кн. [29 т.]. СПб., 1851–1879; 
Он же. Публичные чтения о Петре Великом. М., 1872.
6  Соловьев С.М. Феософический взгляд на историю России // Соловьев С.М. Первые на-
учные труды. Письма. М., 1996. С. 63.
7  Ключевский В.О. Курс русской истории: В 5 т. М., 1937 (originally published between 
1904 and 1921); the lectures on Peter appear in vol. IV. See also: Cracraft J. Kliuchevskii on 
Peter the Great // Canadian-American Slavic Studies. 1986. Vol. 20, N 4. P. 367–381.
8  Ключевский В.О. Западное влияние в России после Петра // Неопубликованные произ-
ведения. М., 1983. С. 11–112.

Gary Marker

he, like Solov’ev, concluded that they had been necessary and born of level-
headed realism. «Вот для чего нужна была Петру Западная Европа. Он 
не питал к ней слепого или нежного пристрастия, напротив, относился 
к ней с трезвым недоверием и не обольщался мечтами о задушевных 
ее отношениях к России, знал, что Россия всегда встретит там только 
пренебрежение и недоброжелательство»9. As we read these bitter-sweet 
reflections, we can easily imagine Algarotti’s enigmatic aura hovering faintly 
just above Kliuchevskii as he penned them. But while Algarotti’s spirit may 
have been present, his words were not.
Mikhail Petrovich Pogodin, who wrote a great deal about Peter, and whose 
theses on «Peter and the Nation’s Organic Development» famously fore-
grounded the theme of Russia’s Europeanness, seems not to have mentioned 
the window on Europe10. Mikhail Mikhailovich Bogoslovskii’s many writings 
on Peter dwell repeatedly and at length on his determination to  Europeanize 
Russia and the Russian people11. But a keyword search uncovers no mention 
of Algarotti’s window. Among more recent monographs, by  Evgenii Anisimov, 
Lindsey Hughes, James Cracraft, Richard Wortman, to name just a few, if the 
term appears at all it does so with little or no conceptual reflection, either in 
reference to Algarotti himself (Hughes12 and Cracraft13), or as a «ready-made 
cliché» as Anisimov has put it14. Wortman’s magisterial Scenarios of Power, 
a work devoted in its entirety to the dynastic and stately politics of symbol 
and ritual, does cites both Algarotti and Pushkin, the latter several times, 
even quoting from The Bronze Horseman15. Nowhere, though, does he em-
ploy the window metaphor. Nor does Paul Bushkovitch’s 2001 biography of 
Peter, Peter the Great, The Struggle for Power, 1671–1725. However, in a 
subsequent public forum (2003) Bushkovitch did mention it, in the context of 
St. Petersburg: «St. Petersburg was to be Russia’s “window onto Europe”… 

9  Ключевский В.О. Курс русской истории. Т. 5. С. 224–225.
10  Погодин М.П. Петр Первый и национальное органическое развитие // Русский вестник. 
1863. № 7–8. С. 373–406. For more on Pogodin’s Peter see Riasanovsky N.V. Op. cit. 
P. 109–114.
11  «Итак, Петр был воодушевлен идеалом “регулярного” европейского государства. Под 
этими словами он подразумевал государство, целью которого должно быть общее благо 
людей, средством для достижения этой цели должна служить сама верховная власть, 
окружающая подданных самой внимательной опекой». Богословский М.М. Петр Великий: (
опыт характеристики) // Три века: Россия от Смуты до нашего времени: Исторический 
сборник / под ред. В.В. Калаша. М., 1912. Т. 3. C. 33; Riasanovsky N.V. Op. cit. 
P. 188–189.
12  Hughes L. Russia in the Age of Peter the Great. New Haven, 1998. P. 210.
13  Cracraft J. The Revolution of Peter the Great, Cambridge MA, 2003. P. 48, 153–155.
14  «These stereotypes are so alive that… it is sometimes hard to resist the inertia of the ready-
made cliches – “the tsar-carpenter, the worker on the throne”, who “made a window to 
Europe”…» – Anisimov E.V. The Reforms of Peter the Great: Progress through Coercion in 
Russia / translated with an introduction by John T. Alexander. Armonk, N.Y., 1993. P. 4–5.
15  Wortman R.S. Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy. Princeton, 
1995. Vol. 1. P. 53 (Algarotti), 135, 215, 243 (Pushkin / The Bronze Horseman).

Introductory coMMents: the WIndoW and the hIstorIans

a central piece of Peter’s strategy for changing Russia’s government from a 
medieval court to an up-to-date bureaucracy»16. Pavel Nikolaevich Miliukov 
also employed the term in his political life and in public debates. Legend 
has it that when he bought a dacha in Finland in the early twentieth century, 
he christened it with tongue firmly in cheek his own personal «window onto 
Europe»17. Still, one does not find the metaphor in his major scholarship.
Those historians who have cited the window on Europe in their scholarship 
have done so with scant attention. Nikolai Ivanovich Pavlenko, the author of 
several biographies of Peter, mentioned the window on Europe briefly in the 
context of St. Petersburg, suggesting that it symbolized Russia’s emergence as 
a naval power, which constituted «the shortest routes to economic and cultural 
ties with the countries of Western Europe»18. Viktor Ivanovich Buganov also 
made note of it. Giving homage to Pushkin, Buganov linked the window on 
Europe with Peter’s drive to the Baltic, and he then insisted that we should also 
apply it to Peter’s earlier endeavors of the 1690s, including the Great Embassy, 
the марсовые потехи, as well as «the objective demands of Russia»19. But 
he did not go any further in exploring the metaphor’s interpretive possibili-
ties (i.e., how it might clarify or deepen our understanding), and in fact makes 
no further mention of it. Aleksandr Kamenskii’s history of eighteenth-century 
Russia (subtitled «searching for a place in the world»), offered a one-off ob-
servation that conveyed its potential more concretely, «Peter’s efforts to open 
a “window onto Europe”, as Alexander Pushkin termed it, were not limited to 
the construction of St. Petersburg. A “Manifesto on the Invitation of Foreigners 
to Russia” saw the light of day as early as April 1702»20.
This listing could continue at length, but the pattern is undeniable: histori-
ans have stayed away from the window on Europe. How might we explain the 
reticence? Why is this most readily available metaphor for Peter’s reign all 
but invisible in scholarly historical discourse? Are we historians so wedded to 
the rigors of academic documentation and reasoning that we have somehow 
lost our imaginations? Perish the thought! Solov’ev, Kliuchevskii, Miliukov, 
et al., were afficionados of metaphoric and poetic turns of phrase, especially 
when putting an overarching gloss on a particular subject. So, if not imagina-
tion deficiency, then what? As an alternative let me hypothesize that the very 
capaciousness of the «window on Europe» that makes it so popular generally 
has been an inhibiting factor among historians for considering it as a dynamic 
tool of analysis. From that perspective, this wide-open window seems, on 
one hand, to explain absolutely everything Petrine, but risks, on the other, 

16  Bushkovitch P. Celebrating «City on the Neva» // The Harvard Gazette. 2003. May 1.
17  Медушевский А.Н. История русской социологии. М., 1993. С. 256.
18  Павленко Н.И. Петр Первый. М., 1975. С. 100 (Серия: Жизнь замечательных людей). 
The phrase does not appear in Pavlenko’s subsequent, much longer and more academic 
biography, Петр Великий (М., 1990).
19  Буганов В.И. Петр Великий и его время. М., 1989. С. 33–34.
20  Kamenskii А. The Russian Empire in the Eighteenth Century: Searching for a Place in the 
World / translated by D. Griffiths. Armonk, N.Y., 1997. P. 79.

Gary Marker

explaining nothing in particular. Simply to invoke the window within a work 
of scholarship immediately requires careful definition and clarification so as 
to delimit what it might mean in one’s own particular research. I strongly 
suspect that for several of our fellow historians this would have amounted to 
a less-than-productive detour away from the analytical narrative.
Nonetheless, as we have seen, the larger set of themes that the window 
onto Europe signifies, Russia’s dynamic and complicated European intercon-
nectedness during and after Peter, literally pervades the scholarship. So, does 
the window have a productive role here? In my view, it does. Very recent 
scholarship has challenged a number of key paradigms that fall under the 
trope’s rainbow, and in ways that could arguably put the window onto  Europe 
at the center of debate. Much of this revisionism has sought to bring Peter 
down from his high command, either by complicating our understanding of 
the actors and agencies of change or by insisting that Peter did not in the 
end change the basic structures and direction already in place in Muscovy. 
Engagements with Europe were nothing new, some maintain. As they see it, 
the push in this direction dates back to the sixteenth century or even earlier. 
After all, they point out, wasn’t Novgorod part of the Hansa; didn’t Prin-
cess Anna Yaroslavna of Kyiv marry the king of France; didn’t Groznyi open 
Arkhhangel’sk to the Muscovy Company; didn’t Posol’skii prikaz devote im-
mense effort to learning about European states, their economies and politics? 
Others have suggested that the historiographic preoccupation with Europe 
and the Russia / Europe binary is in itself more a commentary about the mind-
sets of historians than about Russia itself. The most extreme variant here is 
Neo-Eurasianism’s insistence à la Lev Gumilev that Russia was a civilization 
sui generis neither European nor Asian (an idea for which Solov’ev expressed 
some early affinity in his Theosophical View of Russian History). More em-
pirically, the current spate of empire studies has argued that the move toward 
empire need be understood as a geopolitically (i.e., not ideologically or es-
sentialist) Eurasian phenomenon, as much Asian as European, as much land-
based as sea-based, and begun de facto not by Peter but by Ivan IV.
So, where in all this rethinking does Algarotti’s window, as well as this 
special issue of Век Просвещения fit? In my view all these varied suggestions 
for resituating Petrine Russia into a multidimensional and multi-directional 
longue durée intersect at the window’s threshold. From that perspective they 
make it – and this issue of Век Просвещения – fruitful spaces to interrogate 
their possible interconnections, and in the process they raise the possibility of 
transforming the window onto Europe into a well-defined analytical frame-
work. Some of the contributions within these pages speak directly to this pos-
sibility, others by implication, and readers may be inspired to think further in 
this direction. But let me suggest that this set of papers be seen collectively 
as a first step in situating Algarotti and his beloved window, as an interpretive 
metaphor, more centrally into historical narratives.

Gary Marker