V.A. Zhukovskij, Alessandro II e la 'storia universale'

In this paper, the Author analyses an important aspect of Tsar Alexander II’s education – his historical background – with particular regard to universal history. Drawing on a series of so-far-unused sources – the young prince’s and his tutor’s notebooks, diaries, library registers – the Author highlights the key contribution made by some historians from the University of Göttingen such as August Schlözer, Johannes Müller and Arnold Heeren. These showed the future tsar a strictly science-based historical perspective, which favoured a comparative and contrastive approach. Thanks to these historians’ manuals and works, and with Žukovskij’s mediation, universal history was thus presented to the future tsar as a system, a field of political, economic and social forces strongly intertwined, from which Russia could not be excluded. Analysing the texts Žukovskij read with his pupil – from memoirs on the French revolution to the French liberal historians’ works – and the learning method itself – based on graphics-only synchronic charts – what emerges is a sophisticated pedagogic strategy, applied by the tutor to undermine some of the cultural myths absorbed by the young prince from his family and at court. This new perspective thus rectifies the well-established critical view that identified the reforming tsar’s education as romantic-sentimental.