A.S.Famintsyn and the intellectual environment of St. Petersburg in the second half of the XIX century: influences and ideas

Abstract

The article is devoted to the scientific heritage of the founder of the national ethnointrumology Alexander Sergeyevich Famintsyn. The purpose of the study is to analyze the intellectual environment in which Famintsyn was formed as a scientist and reflect the ideas, methods and achievements of the humanities of the XIX century in his works. The purpose of the proposed article is to consider the main works of the scientist "Deities of the ancient Slavs" and "Buffoons in Russia" in the context of scientific ideas of his time and as the basis of his later instrumental works. The relevance lies in the need to study the period of the beginning of the formation of national ethnoinstrumentology, its methodological foundations, which were laid in the works of Famintsyn. The article analyzes the features of A.S.Famintsyn's scientific method, which consists in the use of a comparative method formed in religious studies and literary studies, the presence of hermeneutical reading of sources. Methodology: the author applied source-based, comparative-historical, system-ethnophonic methods to the study of the topic. The prerequisites for the formation of a scientific picture of the scientist's world (gymnasium years), the influence on the concept of Famintsyn of the national school of literary studies (A. N. Veselovsky, I. I. Sreznevsky), the German comparative mythological school (M. Muller) are considered. The author comes to the conclusion about the fundamental novelty of the approach, which was present in the musicological (instrumental) works of A. S. Famintsyn – both by the choice of the object of research (song and instrumental layers of traditional culture), and by the methodology formed within the framework of the comparative method of linguistics and religious studies. The scientific novelty lies in the subject itself - the scientific heritage of A.S.Famintsyn, who has not been the object of a separate study until now. The author comes to the conclusion that the intellectual environment in which Famintsyn-scientist was formed had a direct impact on the specifics of his instrumental works, their methodology, orientation, and source base. An important role in this belonged to the related humanities - philology, history, religious studies, ethnography.