Russians about Serbia and Serbs. Volume 1. Letters, articles, memoirs

The complex of evidence of Russian contemporaries about Serbia and Serbs presented in the collection made it possible to reconstruct the sociocultural context in which the process of modernization “in Serbian” took place. The objective view from the part showed that, despite the significant state-political evolution, the Serbian society, right up to the First World War, retained its traditional character. Traditional ideas about the people and the authorities, about the collective and personality, about “their own” and “alien” permeated all the layers of society, including a significant part of the elite. Russian observers examined the patriarchal skills and approaches hiding there - both in everyday life and in politics hiding there. From the evidence of Russian eyewitnesses that the real life of Serbia in the last third of the XIX - early twentieth century. It was far from corresponding to the forms in which a number of modern Serbian historians are trying to put it on, in the desire to present its homeland with a completely established “European state.”