I Am Suffocating аnd Starving Without Interior Life: Stepan Veselovskiy’s Ethical Principles While in Inner Emigration

Abstract

Drawing on ego-documents and scholarly works of the outstanding historian Stepan Borisovich Veselovskiy, this article analyzes the ethical principles he adhered to between the 1920s and 1950s, when he, though staying in the USSR, lived in inner emigration. Particular attention is paid to the concepts of “academic ethics” and “professional ethics”. The author studies both universal and specific value orientations of scholars within the framework of professional ethics. As applied to Veselovskiy’s scholarly work while in inner emigration, the relationship between professional ethics and the scholar’s epistemology is traced. Academic ethics is analyzed using Robert K. Merton’s theory of the ethos of science, which makes it possible to single out such imperatives as communism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism in Veselovskiy’s scholarly work. In addition, the author considers the correlation between Veselovskiy’s ethical views as a person and as a scholar. The article concludes that it was the ethical principles Veselovskiy developed before the 1917 revolution that conditioned his choice of methods to study the past and his ways of constructing a scholarly text, and allowed him to become an inner emigrant in the face of rejection.