The Vita of Prince Boris Ivanovich "Korybut"-Kurakin: Personal Life-Writing and Aristocratic Self-Fashioning at the Court of Peter the Great
Abstract
This article argues that the autobiographical "Vita del Principe Boris Korybut-Kurakin
de la Familia de Polonia et Litoania," an astrologically-inflected, macaronic, personal
chronicle of the life of one of the leading diplomats of Peter the Great, is not merely
the first eighteenth-century Russian memoir, nor simply an eyewitness account of the
reformist reign of Russia's first emperor. It also constitutes a unique, early modem
"ego-document," which expresses how one extraordinary member of Muscovy's hereditary
service elite understood and experienced the processes of "modernization" and "secularization"
that were the hallmarks of Peter's "cultural revolution." Kurakin's Vita not only
enriches our understanding of these long-term cultural processes, but also offers
an unprecedented opportunity to examine them from the inside-out, so to speak, that
is, from the point of view of a member of a social group (dvorianstvo or shliakhetstvo)
frequently depicted as a blank slate upon which a reforming tsar and faceless historical
forces left their indelible marks. In Kurakin's case, these marks included not only
the prominently-displayed insignia of the chivalrous Order of St. Andrew, or the cravat
and periwig that he sported in his personally-commissioned, engraved portrait (1717),
but also the oozing, "scorbutic" sores and "melancholic" thoughts concealed in plain
sight among all these fashionable trappings of worldly success, like the anamorphic
death's head in Hans Holbein's "The Ambassadors" (1533). Indeed, from a certain angle
of vision, Kurakin's complaints can be seen as psychosomatic manifestations of a disaffected
courtier's desperate and, ultimately, not unsuccessful attempt to use all the tools
at his disposal - including practices associated with such arcane and esoteric fields
of knowledge as iatromathematics and balneology - to reconcile his astrological 'complexion'
with his professional aspirations, and thereby to take control of his own fate. From
this perspective, Kurakin's personal "book of nativity" (kniga rozhdeniia or libro
della mia nascita) constitutes not only an act of self-justification (designed to
counter the impression that its author was a shirker of duty), but also of aristocratic
'self-fashioning.'
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/5735Citation
Zitser, Ernest A. The Vita of Prince Boris Ivanovich "Korybut"-Kurakin. Personal Life-Writing
and Aristocratic Self-Fashioning at the Court of Peter the Great. Jahrbücher für Geschichte
Osteuropas. Neue Folge. Band 59, Heft 2 (2011): 163-194.
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Erik Zitser
Librarian for Slavic & Eastern European Studies
Ernest (“Erik”) Zitser is the Librarian for Slavic and East European Studies,
library liaison to the International Comparative Studies (ICS) Program, and Adjunct
Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University.
He is an active member of a number of professional organizations, including the East
Coast Consortium of Slavic Libr

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