In memoriam Ned Keenan

Writing a commemorative piece for one recently departed is never an easy task. In struggling with what to say about Ned Keenan, I immersed myself in tapes (for which I thank Nancy Kollmann) of two lectures he delivered at Stanford in May of 1988 on Semën Shakhovskoi (a shortened version of the presentation is in Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Vol. XII/XIII). Ned began by remarking that biography “is the most exacting exercise of the historian’s ability to perceive and to represent past reality,” but that it is “a most alluring occupation for the historian probably because it offers the opportunity to glimpse another’s inner life…and… is also a means of establishing a vantage point from which to take some commensurate measure not only of another mortal but of another age and culture.” I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to apply those thoughts (perhaps excising the “alluring”) to the writing of a memorial tribute about a mentor and friend of long standing, especially where in my case, the most intensive interactions I had with Ned occurred half a century ago in what now seems indeed to be another age. I would not venture to speculate about his “inner life,” although I would be so bold as to maintain that amongst all the historians of Russia I have known, he was the one who conveyed most persuasively an understanding of that other age and culture.

            There is little point in my repeating what was so elegantly expressed by the editors and contributors to Ned’s Festschrift on the occasion of his 60^th birthday (HUS, Vol. XIX) or recapping what I think are the most revealing exchanges that followed on publication of his essay on “Muscovite Political Folkways” (Russian Review, Vols. 45 and 46; see especially Bob Crummey’s carefully crafted critical remarks and Ned’s responses). If Shakhovskoi was, as Ned put it, “intoxicated by the power of the word” and praised “the gift of the divine gift of speech,” for many of us it was Ned’s gift of speech and charisma which so intoxicated us. To listen now to the eloquent rhythms of his rhetoric and nuances of inflection is a reminder that his provocative written legacy alone is but an imperfect reflection of who he was and what he meant for all of us. Above all though, it was “the quickening of his lively mind” (Khomiakov) which has imprinted Ned in our consciousness, even if his leaps of imagination may have left those like this writer who are less talented feeling more than slightly inadequate and provoked others into ill-considered responses. In a different age when commemorating the passing of the most famous “dissident” of his time, Chaadaev, Aleksei Khomiakov further noted “Many loved him… Perhaps he was not so dear to anyone so much as to those who considered themselves to be his opponents.” At least some of Ned’s many critics surely would be so generous.

            In the Stanford lectures, while describing the “shame and honor society” of the Muscovite military elite, Ned drew analogies with the “structured and calculated rituals and humiliations” that are common to “certain religious orders, or the U.S. Marine Corps, or graduate training… exercises [which] had discipline as their justification, discipline as their goal, and discipline as their result.”  Religious orders or the Marines maybe, but in graduate training at Harvard this rather imperfectly describes the experience of those who worked with Ned Keenan. I like to think we were treated as colleagues in a common quest. His expectations were never a kind of ordeal, even if they may have resulted in discipline (of the mind). We surely learned that most valuable lesson from him (the words here a response he gave to a question at Stanford): “You don’t realize how little we know about everything.” The less acute of his critics would be wont to dismiss that as hyper-skepticism and, paradoxically, an invitation to play fast and loose with evidence. In fact, his insistence that we look so closely at the evidence tells us just the opposite. And the end goal was anything but destructive: rather it was to make sense of sources when they would be read anew in their proper context.

            My deep involvement in his Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha probably sets me apart from most others at a similar stage on their road to becoming academics and may explain why some of my colleagues seem to think I might be one of the best candidates to write about Ned. I read for exams with him, but never took a graduate seminar he offered and at most but audited his lectures which had yet to be shaped in their most inspiring form. I was gone from Harvard when he held his stimulating seminar on the Council of 1503. I say these things not to distance myself from Ned, but to caution those who might too glibly talk of a “Keenan school” of Early Russianists. He was not in the business of producing clones of himself.

Indeed, my connection with the book always had a certain distance. Yes, we exchanged an active correspondence (which I later published in his Festschrift), but since I was in Leningrad, I did not participate in the Harvard seminar where he challenged his graduate students with his bold thesis and some in turn challenged him.  Even though I was diligently examining manuscripts related to the book and eventually looked carefully at the textual arguments, the latter never became my preoccupation. (Would that later reviewers who so readily dismissed the book had taken up those textual arguments seriously!)  Later I deliberately chose not to be dragged into the endless round of critiques and summaries and responses about Apocrypha. Ned could not escape what he had started and eventually tired of it, but as one peripheral to the substance of the argument, I could escape and did. While I still believe he was right about the letters and the Kurbskii History, I was not comfortable at the time with some of the leaps of imagination that might have been more effectively documented (others of Ned’s admirers have noted as much about his style). It was difficult ever to come up with a source he had not already carefully considered, but he had a tendency to dismiss things without providing an adequate explanation. For someone who did not have the opportunity to work in the major manuscript collections, he always seemed to know more about them and problems of their study than most who have spent long hours in turning their pages. I am reassured that at least some others still working seriously to test his hypotheses are not finding them lacking. Alas, as we are reminded by contemporary discourse in our own society (think “climate change” just to name one subject), in the end, however rigorous the scholarship and presentation of compelling evidence, many will never abandon what are for them articles of faith or which serve their purposes. The recent popular biography of Ivan Grozny by V. V. Shaposhnik, even if ostensibly based on a careful review of the sources, is a perfect illustration, quoting as it does Kurbskii and Groznyi with gay abandon. For the author, Apocrypha seems to be an “inconvenient truth” that might never have been written.

In 2004 when in D. C., I visited Ned in the elegant residence he occupied as the Director at Dumbarton Oaks. The visit included a rather quick private tour of the Center’s collections (which were not at that hour open) and a memorable glimpse of the rather garish Art Nouveau exercise studio the former resident, Elizabeth Taylor, had installed in the basement of the house. Ned inscribed for me a presentation copy of his just-released book arguing that Josef Dobrovský was author of the Igor’ Tale. I began devouring it on the plane back to Seattle but then had to confess to him I was not convinced (which is not the same as saying he was wrong). Granted, unlike some of his serious critics who claimed that his discussion of Czechisms in the text was ill-informed, I was not in a position to evaluate that critical part of the argument. Frankly, I wish he had spent his time not on Dobrovský but on Muscovy.

One is tempted to draw comparisons between Ned and his somewhat older contemporary Aleksandr Zimin, both of whom embroiled themselves in seemingly Quixotic attempts to question accepted wisdom. No received opinion was sacrosanct, and all the sources required fresh interrogation, precepts which they passed on to their students. Although constrained by the demands of Marxist interpretive conformity, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich was nonetheless hugely prolific. For his heresy in taking on the establishment over Igor’ though, his fate was to be set upon and shunned, rather in the same way that Semën Shakhovskoi fell afoul of the authorities in 17^th-century Muscovy.  Paradoxically, in the American context, the for some surprising response to Ned’s slender Apocrypha was promotion to full professor at Harvard, where, in contrast with many of his colleagues, his published output remained slender until the appearance of his Igor’ book decades later. As others have already noted though, many of Ned’s most significant contributions were in the administrative realm. So in important ways, the trajectories of these two scholars were very different. What they shared was a reputation as charismatic teachers who helped shape a whole generation and then, as in the metaphor of the falcon Ned used at Stanford, set it loose to hunt.  

            It is too early to speculate on what posterity will think about Ned or his Moscow counterpart, once those who have such vivid memories of their personae and provocative ideas are gone and, as seems to be inevitable, the field of Early Slavic Studies, at least in the West, continues to wither away with the passing of the now senior generation. To borrow Ned’s own words about Shakhovskoi, “Everything we say about him must still be considered quite tentative… [Yet] it is not too early to declare that he was really a remarkable figure.” 

Forwarded from Brian Boeck:

To his critics Ned Keenan was a second Kachenovskii or an American Quijote who tilted at Russian windmills. But to his friends and students he was an inspiring scholar, charismatic presence, and raconteur extraordinaire. He rejected received beliefs and reveled in awareness of anomalies. A wordsmith and master of metaphors and allusions, he made Muscovy both familiar and enticing. The boyars resembled the dons of Corleone, Bomelius “dabbled in potions and politics,” ankylosing spondylitis forced Ivan IV to “get by with a little help from his friends”… Ned’s ‘heresy’ constituted both an epistemological challenge to the field and an irreverent assault on several of its sacred groves. Even if decades of striking at the root yielded only a modest clearing, he wasted no time in describing and categorizing branchy cranberry trees.

Forwarded from Konstantin Erusalimskiy:

Yesterday, Edward Lewis Keenan died. This is a great loss for Slavic studies scholars worldwide, and a tragic event for me personally. I have spent my entire intellectual life working on questions which constantly intersect with the problems raised by Keenan. I was far from the first, and will certainly not be the last, of those who must meditate on the 'Paradox of Edward Keenan'. Today I can repeat what I have expressed in my book, and many times in conversation: the discussion, initiated by Keenan concerning the Kurbskii-Groznyi Correspondence, is a famous and definitive one which has enlivened Slavic Studies. That thin volume by Ned Keenan and Dan Waugh is an outstanding memorial to that movement in Slavic Studies which brought together the history of the book, textology of manuscript traditions, codicology, and intellectual history. This book was an invitation to a fruitful discussion, which Keenan did not leave aside until his last years. Thanks to the kind help of my colleague Michael Krom, I was lucky enough to have a discussion with Professor Keenan in St Petersburg 3 years ago. That controversy continues even today. It is impossible for anyone embarking on a synthesising work on Muscovite Russia, or writing on publicisistics in Muscovy or the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, not to take part in that discussion. I think that even the best works published today by 'traditionalists' on this problem, take it as the basis for their synthesis, close to the Keenan-esque 'Synoptic view', especially books by Iu. D. Rykov, I. Auerbach, and V. V. Kalugin. I consider that they are deeply rooted in the problem of Keenan's 'Apocrypha' and their synthetic sections answer his call. In his final years, Keenan dedicated a vivid, and, in many aspects, convincing, book to the 'Igor Tale', demanding a massive effort from those who would defend the idea of its early origins, which efforts have also lead to convincing arguments. I hope that the ambitious call of the Igor Tale book does not cause Keenan's earlier work to fall into obscurity (such as, it seems to me, was the fate of A. A. Zimin's outstanding work 'I. S. Peresvetov and his Contemporaries', which was unfairly overshadowed by his unfortunate 'Igor Tale'). It is essential to value this work as an historiographical landmark for various historians' thoughts and approaches. It would not do to forget that Keenan was also responsible for a multitude of subtle articles and individual observations. He redated the 'Kazan History', advanced a medico-gender conception of the origins of the Oprichnina, formulated the concept of a 'Godunov Renaissance', raised a question regarding the reasons for the absence of the historical genre in 16th century Russia, revisited the question of literacy and the intelligentsia in the Time of Troubles, and opened a discussion on the necessity of an anthropological approach to the study of Muscovite Russia. His pupils are outstanding scholars. At one of the Ukrainian Studies seminars in Harvard, Keenan joked that all of its present participants were his pupils. Unfortunately, Keenan's work, like that of many others, is undervalued in Russia. Only one or two of his articles have been translated into Russian. I know that one such translation is by A. I. Pliguzov, whom Professor Keenan particularly respected. I myself undertook another translation, although I do not know if it ever appeared. There were plans for it to appear three years ago in a publication in Kazan, but I have heard no more about it since then. Keenan was meant to publish a book entitled 'Beyond the Barriers' in Russia, but he somehow managed to have engaged me and Koshelev in that business. I consider that the failure of this book to appear is our collective responsibility, mine and Koshelev's. It is possible that a more objective view of this situation would show that the responsibility is mine alone. The title of the book was thought up by Keenan himself, and I would like to note in conclusion, that it is a fantastic choice. It is particularly appropriate for a book that never made it to publication in Russia. At the risk of offending some of my American colleagues, Keenan spoke Russian far better than many of his contemporaries and pupils. Having spoken with him for 2 or 3 hours, you noticed that he was foreign only because of his somehow outdated dialect, not quite that of the Parisian émigré, and by perhaps 2 or 3 mistakes in stress. He was an amazing, mild-mannered, and warm individual. Photographs of him give a very particular portrait of the man. In eternal memory.