«He Sighed from His Heart and Began to Gather Soldiers»: Emotions in Russian Political Narratives

Russian chronicles represent emotions as a driving force of political actions, as reasons for starting and ending wars, for making and breaking alliances, and for other political decisions. Moreover, emotions often assume a normative, prescriptive character, as in Iaroslav's Testament, which gives princes the precepts to live in brotherly love, to respect seniority, and to avoid hatred 1 . To note the primitive and inefficient character of a political theory based on such a feeble foundation as sentiments of family love has long been a commonplace for Rus scholars 2 . In this respect, they have been no different from Western medievalists who, until the 1990s, shared Marc Bloch's view of the emotional instability of medieval society and the resulting irrationality of medieval politics 3 . However, the paradigm of childlike medieval people dominated by uncontrolled emotional outbursts is now abandoned, and scholars connect historical concepts of emotions with concepts of social relationships and institutions. Emotions history became so prominent that by the early 2000s, some historians were tired of hearing about the role of emotions in medieval politics 4 . This blooming of