От научных сотрудников II разряда к аспирантам: подготовка кадров высшей квалификации по медиевистике в Ленинграде (1920-1930-е гг.)

Abstract

This article is based on unpublished materials from the collections of A.E. Presnyakov (St. Petersburg History Institute RAS Archive), I.M. Grevs (St. Petersburg Branch of RAS Archive), and O.A. Dobiash-Rozhdestvenskaya (Manuscripts Department of the Russian National Library). Despite the revolutionary events of 1917 and the abolition of academic degrees and ranks in 1918, the Medievalist training system established at the I.M. Grevs School worked and yielded results throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Medievalists were first concentrated in the Historical Institute at Petrograd University, then in the Leningrad branch of the RANION Institute of History, and finally, from 1934, in the Department of Medieval History at Leningrad University. The new institutions were adapting previous procedures for the education of scholars to the changed conditions, while the content of the training remained unchanged and focused on mastering the methods and techniques of historical research, the study of sources and the range of auxiliary historical disciplines. This was achieved through participation in seminars on reading and commenting on medieval sources (usually on the history of Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), and by making reports on highly specialist subjects. Young researchers continued to see the debate (necessary to obtain the right to teach on universities) as a means of self-realisation and self-presentation, a way of entering science, especially in a situation where there was virtually no possibility of publication.