Thursday 2 January 2020

Hill and Timofeeva


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.