Catherine II’s Instruction (Nakaz) to the Legislative Commission of 1767: New Approaches

This event will be held online only. Register for the Zoom meeting.

This three-paper colloquium situates Catherine II’s Instruction (Nakaz) to the Legislative Commission of 1767 in multiple, mutually illuminating social, political, historical, and conceptual contexts. Bella Grigoryan’s paper contemplates episodes in the reception of Catherine II’s Nakaz (by contemporaries and in subsequent generations) treating these readings as sites for the articulation of an emergent political and legal imaginary, particularly around such concepts as citizen, monarch, and law. Kirill Ospovat’s paper deals with issues of serfdom and the peasant revolution in Catherine II’s discourse, including the Nakaz, in conjunction with the Russian and global radical Enlightenment. Andrei Kostin’s paper explores how the inclusion of 'custom' and 'habit' in shaping the notion of citizen's 'loyal' conduct, which was crucial to the Nakaz, can be traced not only in Catherine's legislation but also in the cultural production of her era, including texts and images that address same-sex desire without a criminalizing attitude. 

INDIVIDUAL PAPER TITLES: 

Bella Grigoryan, “On Reading Catherine II’s Nakaz: Material and Conceptual Histories”

Kirill Ospovat, "Catherine, Montesquieu, and Pugachev: the Nakaz, Serfdom, and Peasant-Cossack Insurrection"

Andrei Kostin, “Nakaz and Lubki: The Art of Negotiating Norms through Ambiguity” 

Bella Grigoryan is an associate professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. She works on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian literary and cultural history, with particular interests in political history and the history of reading. She is the author of Noble Subjects: The Russian Novel and the Gentry, 1762-1861 (2018). 

Kirill Ospovat is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on literary and cultural history of the Russian eighteenth century and has published two books: Terror and Pity: Aleksandr Sumarokov and the Theater of Power in Elizabethan Russia (2016) and Придворная словесность: Институт литературы и конструкции абсолютизма в России середины XVIII века (2020). He is currently working on a book-length study of the Pugachev rebellion and its resonances with global revolutions and radical Enlightenments. 

Andrei Kostin is a researcher at the University of Grenoble. His work focuses on 18th-century Russian literary history beyond canonical forms, texts, and authors. He has edited numerous academic collections and published over a hundred articles. Currently, he is finalizing his first book, which develops a framework for studying marginalized and minor literary forms of the past.