Month: October 2025

Collections of Biographies and Giordano Orsini

Youssim M.A.
Collections of Biographies and Giordano Orsini, in: Proslogion: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Social History and Culture, 2023. Vol. 7(1). P. 123–147.

Mark Arkadjevich Youssim, doctor of history, chief researcher, Institute of World History, Russian Acedemy of sciences, Department of Western Middle Ages and Early Modern times (Leninskiy prosp., 32A, Moscow, Russia, 119334)

Language: Russian

The Renaissance was characterized by an interest for biographies of great personalities, which was reflected in collections of life histories and galleries of portraits that adorned the palaces of antiquity admirers. Francesco Petrarca was one of the first to turn to this genre, compiling his collection exclusively of antique heroes. A collection of more than 300 figures of historical figures of all times decorated the palace of Montegiordano in Rome, where under the auspices of Cardinal Giordano Orsini gathered a circle of humanists. The frescoes have not survived and are known from copies; their composition reflects the ideas about history and great men typical of Renaissance culture.

Keywords: historical painting, Montegiordano, Cardinal Giordano Orsini, vitae, history in persons

URL: http://proslogion.ru/7s-youssim/

10.24412/2500-0926-2023-71-123-147

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Arhivnye rukopisnye materialy I. M. Grevsa: k voprosu o nauchnom nasledii uchenogo

Starostin D. N.
Kuleshova E. V.
Arhivnye rukopisnye materialy I. M. Grevsa: k voprosu o nauchnom nasledii uchenogo, in: Proslogion: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Social History and Culture, 2023. Vol. 7(1). P. 84–100.

Starostin Dmintriy Nikolaevich, doctor of History, assistant proafessor, Saint Petersburg State University (199034, Rossiya, Sankt-Peterburg, Мendeleevskaya liniya, 5)

Elena Vladimirovna Kuleshova, doctor of History, assistant professor, Institute of History, Saint-Peterburg State University (199034, Rossiya, Sankt-Peterburg, Mendeleevskaya liniya, 5)

Language: Russian

In this article an attempt is made to investigate the place of the biography of V. G. Vasilievskii, a well-known Russian scholar of the Middle Ages and of Byz antium, written by his student I. M. Grevs, in the latterʼs handwritten Nachlass. It is shown that many documents were associated with the name of I. M. Grevs, but there were also in his Fondin the Russian Academy of Sciencesʼ Archive many other peopleʼs documents that were lumped together in an emergency during the blockade of Leningrad in 1941–1943. Considering the documents that can be safely attributed to I. M. Grevs himself, we may find that his obituaries and biographies exhibit a pattern: he wrote about his intellectual colleagues, whose concepts and philosophy he well knew and employed in his own research and teaching. Thus the intellectual biography of V. G. Vasilievski, of I. M. Grevsʼ teacher, needs to be understood as an attempt to preserve the intellectual world in which I. M. Grevs developed as a researcher and to hint at the importance of the scholastic achievement of Russian medievalists in the times of Russian great upheaval.

Keywords: V. G. Vasilievskii, I. M. Grevs, history of Russian historical science, history of the Roman Empire, history of the Middle Ages

URL: http://proslogion.ru/7s-grevs/

10.24412/2500-0926-2023-71-101-122

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On the training medievalist-scholars at Leningrad University in the 1930s

Skvortsov A. M.
On the training medievalist-scholars at Leningrad University in the 1930s, in: Proslogion: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Social History and Culture, 2023. Vol. 7(1). P. 84–100.

Artyom Mikhailovich Skvortsov, PhD in History, Assistant Professor, Research fellow, S. I. Vavilov Institute for the History of Science and Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg Branch, Saint Petersburg (199034, Russia, St. Petersburg, Universitetskaya emb., 5)

Language: Russian

The year 1934 was a turning point for medieval studies in Soviet Russia. The postgraduate legislation of the 1930s outlined only in the most general terms the process of training scholars, which encouraged professors to freely fill in the content of the training. The old-school specialists involved in this important state undertaking sought to realise the ideas of traditional science and their usual approaches to teaching. I. M. Grevs and O. A. Dobiash-Rozhdestvenskaya insisted on the seminar form of classes as optimal in training researchers, contributing to the formation of research skills in young medievalists. The historical-philological approach implemented in Grevs’s seminars not only developed the skills of reading a medieval source in its original language and analysing it, but also made it possible to embed the findings in a broad historical context. O. A. Dobiash Rozhdestvenskaya’s seminars were held in parallel with I. M. Grevs’s classes: during the first year and a half postgraduates listened to lectures, were engaged in laboratory work on Western historiography, diplomatics, historical chronology and geography under the direct supervision of the seminar leader. Afterwards the students were offered to independently study documents from the collection of the Public Library, which were not directly related to the chosen thesis topic. This is how the restoration of the criteria corresponding to world science took place for the preparation of the young generation for the occupations of science, the most important of which were the skills of working with sources, including those that have arrived in their original form, and historiography.

Keywords: Graves, Dobiaš-Roždestvenskaja, Leningrad State University, Medieval History Department, historiography, seminar, the Soviet Medievalstudies

URL: http://proslogion.ru/7s-skvortsov/

10.24412/2500-0926-2023-71-84-100

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M. A. Gukovsky and the tradition of studying the history of the papacy within the medievalist school of St. Petersburg — Petrograd — Leningrad

Potekhina I. P.
M. A. Gukovsky and the tradition of studying the history of the papacy within the medievalist school of St. Petersburg — Petrograd — Leningrad, in: Proslogion: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Social History and Culture, 2023. Vol. 7(2). P. 63–83.

Irina Pavlovna Potekhina, PhD in History, Associate Professor, Saint Petersburg State Institute of Technology (190013, Russia, Saint Petersburg, Moskovsky pr., 26)

Language: Russian

The formation of medieval studies within the walls of educational and scholarly institutions of Saint Petersburg has been going on for more than a century and a half. However not all the aspects of the history of the European Middle Ages, even in periods relatively favorable for the development of domestic historical science, received an adequate coverage in the works of local scholars. The history of the medieval papacy undoubtedly can be included among such topics as an attractive but relatively little studied theme. As our previous research has shown, Saint Petersburg medievalists (as well as church historians) of the pre-Soviet period addressed themselves to a special study of subjects related to the development of the Western Church and its central institution, the Holy See, quite rarely and moreover within the framework of narrow research issues, as a result of specific ideological attitudes. Research on the history of the papacy also became a «victim of ideology» in the Soviet years. In despite of this M. A. Gukovsky not being directly a specialist in church-historical issues in the conditions of the prevailing Marxist-Leninist dogma, managed to build a rich, well-founded and at the same time fascinating narrative about the Papal See in one of the most difficult periods of its history, in the last centuries of the Middle Ages, which gave birth to the Italian Renaissance. The author of the article suggests paying attention to two main scholarly texts that characterize M. A. Gukovsky’s perception of the late medieval papacy and also of such a phenomenon as papal fiscalism, which in the 20th century became one of the main topics of «papal studies» abroad, but remained practically unknown to Soviet science.

Keywords: history of the Middle Ages, history of the papacy, Saint Petersburg historical school, Saint Petersburg University, Italian Renaissance, M. A. Gukovsky, Yves Renouard

URL: http://proslogion.ru/7s-potekhina/

10.24412/2500-0926-2023-71-63-83

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M. A. Gukovsky on the way to Leonardo da Vinci: the History of Science and Technology in the 1930s

Zmud L. Ya
M. A. Gukovsky on the way to Leonardo da Vinci: the History of Science and Technology in the 1930s, in: Proslogion: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Social History and Culture, 2023. Vol. 6(2). P. 38–62.

Leonid Yakovlevich Zhmud’, Doctor of Philosophy, Principal Academic Researcher at the Saint Petersburg Branch of the Institute for the History of Science and Technology named after S. I. Vavilov, Russian Academy of Sciences (199034, Russia, Saint Petersburg, Universitetskaya embankment, 5)

Language: Russian

The paper covers the early period of M. A. Gukovsky’s scholarly work, the 1930s, when his major study on the history of science, “The Mechanics of Leonardo da Vinci”, was written; in 1939 it was defended as a doctoral dissertation though published only in 1947. Gukovsky had been educated by scholars of the old school, such as L. P. Karsavin, I. M. Grevs, A. I. Khomentovskaya, but did not immediately become a historian. His scholarly and organizational activities in the Commission for the History of Knowledge and the Institute for the History of Science and Technology began after the “great break” that sharply increased the ideological pressure on the humanities. In articles and reviews of this time, Gukovsky appears as a scholar of a new generation, capable both to combine academic scholarship with a Marxist understanding of history in general and the history of science and technology in particular and to form a new methodology for their research, meeting the challenges of the time.

Keywords: M. A. Gukovsky, N. I. Bukharin, history of science and technology, Commission on the History of Knowledge, Institute of the History of Science and Technology, Renaissance, Marxism

URL: http://proslogion.ru/7s-zmud/

10.24412/2500-0926-2023-71-38-62

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«I do not know what I am guilty of and what I am being punished for»: based on the materials of the investigative case of M. A. Gukovsky (1949–1956)

Kravtsova E. S. «I do not know what I am guilty of and what I am being punished for»: based on the materials of the investigative case of M. A. Gukovsky (1949–1956), in: Proslogion: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Social History and Culture, 2023. Vol. 7(1). P. 10–37.

Elena Sergeevna Kravtsova, Candidate of Historical Sciences, Researcher, Sector of History of Social and Political Development, Institute of History SB RAS (630090, Russian Federation, Novosibirsk, 8 Nikolaev Str.)

Language: Russian

The arrest of M. A. Gukovsky in 1949 was not formally affiliated with any repressive campaign of that year: neither with the anti-Semitic campaign «against rootless cosmopolitans», nor with the political «Leningrad affair». This gave rise to the multiple versions about the reasons for his arrest. The State Archive of the Russian Federation (GA RF) keeps the investigation case file, covering the period from 1949 to 1956, from arrest of M. A. Gukovsky to his complete rehabilitation. These materials could reveal the link between circumstances of Gukovsky’ life before 1949 and his imprisonment. The case file, on the one hand, includes documents drawn up by government officials. On the other hand, it contains Gukovsky’s statement and petitions, which could be considered as a communication process between the accused and the authorities. Such an approach allows us to reveal, firstly, M. A. Gukovsky’s ideas about power, and to show how a scholar and an administrator forms a narrative explaining its actions. Secondly, the documents drawn up by the authorities demonstrate the isolation of both repressive bodies and commissions for the rehabilitation of the repressed persons. And furthermore, these materials contain a lot of hidden Gukovsky’s biographical details from 1917 to 1949, such as his possible participation in the White movement in the Russian Civil War. Some of these details raise the question of reexamination the scholar’s biography. In conclusion, the author arrives to the idea that Gukovsky’s arrest was primarily due to his administrative activities and proximity to the party officials which fell out of favor of J. Stalin in the 1930s and 1940s. The case file contains also the materials collected, apparently, during the Great Terror (1937–1938), when N. I. Bukharin was repressed, and the materials related to the Gukovsky’s post-war activities at the Leningrad State University led by A. A. Voznesensky, a victim of the Leningrad affair (1949–1950). Interrogation materials dated 1949–1950, however, allow to consider the Gukovsky’s repression as a part of a number of post-war campaigns against soviet scientists and artists. The first publication of petition from M. A. Gukovsky to the First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee N. Khrushchev (dated August 8, 1954) is attached to the article.

Keywords: M. A. Gukovsky, Stalin’s Soviet Union (1945–1953), Stalinist repression, The Leningrad affair, Antisemitism, Amnesty and Rehabilitation, Letters to the authorities

URL: http://proslogion.ru/7s-kravtsova/

10.24412/2500-0926-2023-71-10-37

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