The Problem of Advice in Muscovite Tales about the Time of Troubles

This chapter mentions celebrated Russian historian V. O. Kliuchevskii, who complained that S. F. Platonov's Old Russian tales and stories about the time of troubles of the seventeenth-century had lacked significant aspects, such as political ideas. It analyses political ideas that could have been in Platonov's work that illustrated the awakening and development of political thought under the influence of the Troubles. It also talks about Kliuchevskii's famous Course in Russian History, where he commented extensively on new political ideas and cast them into a constitutional framework. The chapter suggests that the reason Kliuchevskii failed to produce positive evidence from Platonov's tales in support of his position is that they simply do not reflect the kind of constitutional sentiment he claimed to find in other historical sources. It describes the legal-institutional approach that Kliuchevskii brought to the problem that led him to treat Platonov's tales as a negative echo of ideas.