«Считаю своим долгом…»: к проблеме этоса российского ученого на рубеже XIX–XX вв.

Abstract

The article suggests one possible account of the motives that prompted more than 130 Russian university professors to quit in 1911 as part of the so-called "Casso affair." For this purpose, the author draws on ego-documents, mostly private letters, to analyze the ethos of various social roles which the professor of crystallography Yuri Wulf and his subordinate mineralogist Iosif Sioma took on while corresponding with their colleague, the natural scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The analysis shows that Wulf and Vernadsky, as well as a number of their colleagues, did not separate the ethos of the social role of a scientist from that of a citizen with liberal political convictions, and that a ‘decent person’. This allows us to suggest that their resignation from Moscow University was a move in the political struggle, a demonstration of corporate spirit, and offended decent persons’ response to dishonest behavior on the part of the Minister of Education Léon Casso. However, not all university employees demonstrated such inseparability of social roles: Sioma’s letters to Vernadsky show that he distinguished more clearly the ethos of a representative of the oppressed Polish people, the ethos of a researcher and the ethos of a university employee. This suggests that a range of intermediate variants between the two poles could be identified by a study drawing on a broader range of sources.