By Christopher Thompson
Marina Valerevna Timofeeva’s
2009 thesis on Christopher Hill’s analysis of the 17th-Century English
Bourgeois Revolution is another matter. It was submitted to the Ural State
University at that time and appears not to be available on-line or in print at present.
An abstract of the thesis can, however, be found and seems to be the prelude to
an analysis of his writings from the start of the Second World War until he
stopped writing in the 1990s. To the best of my knowledge, its existence and
apparently formidable length have not been known hitherto. Dr Timofeeva’s
objective was to emphasise the significant contribution Christopher Hill had
made to the development of Marxist historiography in the West drawing on his
published works, the tributes of friends and colleagues in the 1978 and 1988
festschrifts dedicated to him and on appreciations that appeared in newspapers
and periodical publications. Hill’s own papers now held in the library of
Balliol College, Oxford do not appear to have been used.
On the other hand, she does
deploy material from authors in the former Soviet Union and its successor
states to support her analysis. Until reading her abstract, I was unaware of
the works of Pavlova, Sharifzhanov and Meshcheryakova on the historiography of
the ‘bourgeois revolution’. Nor did I know about the analysis of Repina on the
ambiguities of the Marxist concept of the English Revolution of the
seventeenth-century. It is clear that large sections of Hill’s corpus of works
had been translated into Russian, Polish and other eastern European languages
with official sanction and that they had and still have a measure of influence
in those countries that they have lost in the U.K. and other English-speaking
countries.
There are also indications
that Dr Timofeeva’s sympathies lie with Christopher Hill’s evolving approach to
the English Revolution, to issues of class and cultural and intellectual
changes up to and after 1640. His reaction to the rise of ‘revisionism’ in the
mid-1970s also appears to have elicited her approval. His concept of a
‘revolution from below’ built of social and economic transformations is one she
accepted. And she was able to draw upon methodological studies of British and
Western historiography, some of them her own, equally unfamiliar to British
scholars and historians in North America and elsewhere.
It would be altogether wrong
in my view to disregard such a study which, in its full form, must be a work of
formidable length. It would be a mistake too to dismiss the other sources upon
which she has drawn as misguided or not as well-informed as they might have
been. But Dr Timofeeva like her fellow historians in Russia is clearly a person
of intelligence and with an admirable degree of diligence. What she appears,
prima facie, to have lacked is the contact with academic historians of the
period in Britain and elsewhere whose work has taken the study of mid-Stuart
England and Wales, Ireland and Scotland along way forward since Christopher
Hill was in his prime. She does not seem to have heard of the problems of
multiple kingdoms or, if she has, it does not figure in the abstract of her
thesis. There have been major historians in the field since the days of Conrad
Russell. Inevitably, the influence of historians fades after their deaths. This
is what has happened to Christopher Hill. But attempts to preserve his memory
and to acknowledge his contribution have begun here in the U.K. Perhaps, her
work will come to be acknowledged here too.
