A Lost Name from the History of Medieval Studies in Odesa: Victor Solomonovych Reizhevsky (1907–1937)

Abstract

The article is dedicated to a forgotten figure in the history of Ukrainian medieval studies – Viktor Solomonovych Reizhevsky (1907–1937). His life is examined within the framework of “intellectual history” and the study of “second-tier” scholars. The latter direction has gained considerable prominence in modern biographical research, drawing attention to “ordinary workers of science and scholarship.” V. S. Reizhevsky came from a Jewish family that was fairly wealthy before the revolution. Reizhevsky’s father was a doctor, and Victor Solomonovych himself received a good home education and matriculated at the Odesa Institute of People’s Education (OINO). After a few years, due to the purely pedagogical nature of the curriculum at the OINO, Reizhevsky transferred to Leningrad University, where he was later arrested for participating in an “illegal” group. From then on, the rest of Reizhevsky’s life was plagued by arrests. Because of this, his main scholarly works (on the history of France, Florence, and the reign of Ivan the Terrible) remained in manuscript. Together with his friends A. Bulanov and Yu. Ostrovsky (the latter arrested in Moscow in 1932), he was eventually sent into exile in the Urals. After his release in 1934, Reizhevsky returned to his “small homeland” of Odesa, where he dreamed of finding a “safe haven.” However, this was not to be: in 1936, after the beginning of the “Great Terror,” he was arrested again and taken to Moscow. The trial lasted six months; the scholar was sentenced to death. Thus, the fate of Victor Reizhevsky is a kind of “story without a moral” – due to repressions and persecution, he was unable to realize his creative potential. In Odesa, where he worked in the last years of his life, he did not leave behind an academic school, and so the Department of Medieval History had to be re-created anew after World War II.