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)
artyom-skvorcov@yandex.ru
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
