Spatial History, the title of Mikhail Yampolsky’s new book, evokes a vertical, rather than horizontal (or chronological), approach to history. The idea that historical process (and the writing of history) contains some focal points which allow one to take the gist of the events and deploy the logic of history in depth rather than in breadth is not new in principle. According to Yampolsky, the idea of progress at the basis of text teleology can be traced all the way back to ancient historians. Their aim was to show the history of the rise and exaltation of Rome, or, on the contrary, the decline of Greece. Here, textual coherence and narrative began to dictate their terms. Such works contained the concept of time at the level of plot, which implicitly led to a particular purpose. To avoid this in his own work, Yampolsky chooses an unconventional narrative. Spatial History consists of interconnected essays crafted from different materials from all areas of the humanities and are linked to major philosophers, historians, philologists, art historians, writers, poets, and architects.

Teleology and Progress

Yampolsky criticizes the teleology of progress contained in the idea of Natural History. The principle of evolution, according to which the fittest survive, does not prove that such relations are “progressive” in history. One part of the argument quoted in historiography is now perceived with irony (La Grande Armee won because it was the most powerful military structure in its time and Napoleon was the greatest military leader . . .). Another part of the argument is perceived with genuine horror (Wehrmacht won because it was formed by the purebred Aryans and its opponents were subhuman).

Thinking in terms of the theory of evolution (whose language belongs to the nineteenth century) leads to a number of rudiments and strains derived from the mainstream of history and still leading to progress. Preferring a critical approach, Yampolsky deliberately leaves out of his consideration the only idea which might justify the teleology of history from a humanistic point of view— God as the originator of history.

Another “Time” of \History

Taken by itself, the “Instant” is not just a fragment of history, but it has the potential to break the whole temporal structure. Here the author uses as an example a painting by Domenico Ghirlandaio brilliantly deciphered by Aby Warburg. In this analysis, the focus from the artistic value of the work shifts to the truth of the historical detail. So we get authentic material that serves as a historical source (at least in the history of costume and everyday life), a synchronic slice of certain social relations, as if time had stood still.

According to Yampolsky, the writing of history is always “modern” because someone is writing it at the moment. The past, he argues, begins to come into the writing of history through “fragments”. A historian should update and learn history through the remaining characters, decoding them (and I dare continue: a historian, correcting deformation heals traumatic experience). It is significant that contemporary Russian psychoanalysts have come to similar conclusions about the injury to post-Soviet society, placing the responsibility for the crimes on the state system.

Yampolsky makes an ambitious attempt to move away from a key measurement of time-history. Not every historian—and not every witness of the past century—agrees that the movement of history is “progressive”. Time is present in history in a hidden form, so it can affect the historical space in principle. Moreover, time is thought as the only possible dimension of history; as the scale on which the date is checked; or, for example, as a sort of axis with a stranded thread of events, processes, and people. Communication between history and time refers to the ultimate aim of time as existential, or “determinant” of human beings. Yampolsky illustrates this link with examples from the texts of Jacques Lacan, who introduced the concept of up-subject injury.

Yampolsky describes the spatial part of this continuum in terms of landscape painting. “Gazing” is possible only through the window, through the frame, through the context. It is significant that such realities of history as a “person” and a “thing”, which were first studied in full measure only by the Annals school, are significant in this new historiography, and the history itself that it carries with it. The author believes that the story ceases to be chronologically linked. Instead, he claims, consecutiveness gives the way to different stories, unconnected by chronology.

The Artifact: a New Historical Source

There is no place in “spatial history” for “facts”, “events”, “processes”, or “historical figures”. The nomenclature of historiography is written off in the archive. Historical sources entirely replace the historian’s conventions. They do not lose their place in the “context” of the age. Use of the term “context” in quotes here is no accident—it is transferred to the spatial definition of the time domain.

The new status of a historical source completely changes the attitude of it. We are faced with a number of artifacts which require a completely different approach. Yampolsky does not perceive the historical artifact as a source. The artifact, he argues, exists without any context once the author abandons its narrative description, thus “inscribing” it in historical time. There is a pure subject of history before us, and the descriptive language for it is that of aesthetics; not research, but the experience of artifact redemption and transportation from the dimension of time to the dimension of space.

The past itself exists only in relation to the present. And, if we, after Yampolsky, take Henri Bergson’s point of view regarding the continuity of time, the determination of historical writing by the past is no longer held. The author compares this kind of “Buddhism” in history with “Buddhism” in Osip Mandelstam’s poetry. Mandelstam’s space is an atomized space with unfilled gaps between the atoms. In the case history, the atoms are the “artifacts” and the gaps are the “empty years” of any chronology. Even if the source can be dated to within a year, it does not “tell” (at least, directly) about what happened in that same year.

Here aesthetics itself produces a synthesis of the highest order, and Yampolsky reckons Notre Dame among his examples. The cathedral was renovated by architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in the nineteenth century, and therefore not considered an authentic monument of Gothic architecture. However, at the same time it has become a living symbol, transmitting the perception of Gothic spirit to the mass. Here we could quote Fyodor G. Solntsev’s famous “crafts” as a key to increasing the credibility of Karamzin and Solovyov’s histories “monumental histories”. These artifacts appear as the material of history given to us directly.

The End—and the Restart?

While he analyzes historical teleology, Yampolsky emphasizes not so much historical writing, as history itself. The problem of “source” here comes to the fore. The origin, argues Yampolsky, is the most heavily ideologised mental construction. For Yampolsky two different origins of historical writing (or, more likely, even two types of historical origins) can exist as equals. In the first case, we talk about the purely biological function of human existence. The discourse about global catastrophes and the description of historical “epochs” is inherent in this definition (even in the strict sense of the word “epoch”, which implies the stoppage or a slowed flow of time). In the second case, we have to deal with the beginning, closely connected with the invention of the first artifacts. It is not difficult to guess that the creationist project (and after it, its whole theology, philosophy, and anthropology, as opposed to the natural sciences), in the limit of its development, is more human and humanistic.

These two models of historical writing imply different historical patterns. The first rests on progress and its means, evolution. But this very system exists in a synchronous slice; it is often unstable and varies under the influence of many external factors. It is important to note that here time is “spatialised” to the highest degree. Moreover, it is extended to spatial processes which conceive and describe time in spatial categories and concepts. A kind of “reverse perspective” takes place when the limb—the eschatological character of history—is “discovered” at the very beginning. It is very tempting for the historian to find such an “origin”. This paradigm applies to any national history—and to history in the historical experience of mankind, in general (especially in the “historically long” nineteenth century, 1789–1914). The basis for such construction is not a specific event but the idea of an abstract chronological origin. Due to the apparent patterns of evolution, historians with similar views were inclined to exaggerate the predictive aspect of this scholarly direction. In fact, if all the past is relatively similar to the present, it is possible, with more or less success, to predict the future.

Another trend in historiography focuses on the “end” of history in eschatology, which is close to Francis Fukuyama’s point of view. Here Yampolsky draws quite an unexpected conclusion. He argues that the humanities can learn a great deal from the natural sciences, but not as much in terms of methodology, as in its descriptive language. Yampolsky claims that employment of the metaphors of the labyrinth and Gestalt helps to avoid opposing them in the story and turns the story into a dynamic system. This system includes intricate passages and twists, and its iterative movement creates “a semantic flicker”, which manifests itself in history. This “semantic flickering” is an artifact showing history. The new historical source for Yampolsky contains ciphers and symbols, and they do require recoding and reading.

It is difficult for the historian not to make reference again to Eric Hobsbawm and Karl Polanyi. These authors have written much about static and dynamic periods in the history of “long” and “short” centuries and cycles and their alternation. Another object of their studies was the sense of “outside” (the search for regularities of processes) and “inside” (the reasons for events). One of the brightest examples of such synthesis is the development of the natural world through artifacts (i.e., “landscape”). The relevant research project is geography, which combines cosmography, topology, and, even more significantly, it merges abstract and empirical views from above and from ground level. Such procedure requires particular time costs. Replacement of a successive process by a simultaneous event indicates a gradual acceleration of experienced time. The opposite is true. The story accelerates; therefore, we require iconographic sources, not narrative. For example, we can remember the penetration of whole-language formation, characterizing tectonic shifts, geological ages, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions into a catastrophe discourse. Howard Phillips Lovecraft was the first who noticed the chthonic feature of this language. Not stopping at this, Yampolsky casually observes the pursuit of subsoil language in the later works of Mandelstam, with his usual “space” imagery.

Symbolization and Trauma

Yampolsky asks us to perceive extant historical artifacts also as symbols. But the function of symbolization in this case is not clear. First, the reference to the means is lost, and second, the nature of the material itself transfers this symbol in a slightly different thematic field. If there is no past, there are no regrets about its loss. Sorrow for the passage of time and for the course of history also vanishes, and the artifact itself becomes a carrier of the historical dimension. It does not develop in breadth but in depth, in the “glimpse” into the historical moment. This is the only way to break the continuity of narrativity and of the historiographical text. Yampolsky compares the text to a phenomenon without any ideology and cultural tradition. There is a danger of falling into a vicious circle, but Yampolsky warns us against it. He mentions that the problem is neither in the “wrong” ideas of time, nor in the “wrong” historical representation, but in the mismatch of both of them. So, historiography should pay attention to those artifacts that convey the spirit of history to us. In them we find the historicization of the senses. Thanks to the artifacts, we are able to “recognize” history and give axiology to it, pursuing a line of demarcation between history and the past as such.

Drawing a parallel with the psychoanalytic constructs of Freud, Lacan, and the poststructuralists, Yampolsky rightly observes that discrete and fractional time is closely connected with the experience of “failure to nothing”, even with madness. Meanwhile, wholeness characterizes a convalescent or quite healthy subject. Michel Foucault has also written about the bursts of madness in the historical “short” periods.

Developing this idea, Yampolsky writes that “Historiography” as a project of writing history made by professional historians appears as an endless pursuit of the Apollonian order. The Apollonian beginning is characterized by a high degree of symbolization, helping to overcome the trauma. The strong tendency to abstraction manifests itself most clearly in the draft periodization, which threatens to lead to bad infinity. Endless fragmentation—crushing ages, stages, and periods—leads to infinitely small quantities. For example, Max Weber, using one of the ancient Greek paradoxes, wittily remarked that one manufactory (and two or three, as well) still do not indicate the occurrence of the modern era, but a hundred manufactories show it clearly. This “particularization” of perception leads to the fact that history can be constructed as a set of instants or “glimpses”. These are unrelated to each other, but, with the help of the artifacts produced in them, we should see a special meaning and the depth of the relationship.

Modeling of historical writing is largely determined by style. Yampolsky notes that features of various styles of thinking and their description became paradigms of historical writing with the decline of the “historical” nineteenth century. This epoch in general tried to create multivolume “monumental” histories. In turn, the distinction between the styles and their features came out under the light hand and sharp pen of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, a world-famous “naturalist” who, in addition to the classification of plants and animals, also coined the spectacular aphorism "Le style c’est l’homme" (“the style is the man himself”). “Style” here should be interpreted in the broadest sense. For Yampolsky, style claims to be the abolition of “historicism” in this turbulent time. The very desire for tradition, origins, and roots is, in fact, historical.

As a result, Mikhail Yampolsky's Spatial History appears as a subjective project building a “personal” line in the writing of history. In historical writing, it goes through a set of personal artifacts, unique to each other (the so-called ego-sources, close to the understanding of the modern Russian historian Yuri L. Troitsky). This “personal” history can be created by any person who wants to enter into history. The realization of the project does not depend on terms of historical experience, but on extant sources. In the end, Yampolsky posits the coming of a new historical subject, one which is not satisfied with traditional historiography.