Dimitri Obolensky after the Cold War: Reflections on Saint Vladimir and Orthodoxy

Abstract

The article is devoted to Sir Dmitri Dmitrievich Obolensky, Professor of Russian and Balkan history at Oxford University, who is known for his study of the “Byzantine Commonwealth” and its influence on the Eastern European Slavic peoples: Bulgarians, Serbs and Russians. As a well-known British scholarly historian and philologist and the son of a noble emigrant from Russian Empire, Prince Dimitri Alexandrovich Obolensky, Obolensky tried to remain in close intellectual contact with the Russian science throughout the entire period of the Cold War and until his death in 2001. Obolensky, as a very religious person, was interested not only in the processes of transformation of the Russian society after the end of the Cold War, but also in the Russian spiritual revival that took place in the country after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The article analyzes the changes in the academic and journalistic works by Obolensky in the context of both global processes — perestroika, the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, democratization, the growing influence of the Orthodox Church in Russia — and local issues — family drama, a decline in study of both Russian language and history in universities in Great Britain and in Europe. The personality of Dmitri Obolensky, his spiritual and his intellectual heritage as well as the results of his philosophical studies and forecasts for the development of the Russian society expressed during the last decade of his life are of undoubted interest to the Russian reader.