“I Began to Understand Piłsudski, When I Reached His Age”. Memoirs of G.F. Matveev in the Form of Interview

Abstract

Gennady Filippovich Matveev (born in 1943), Doctor of Historical Sciences, Honored Professor of Moscow University, Head of the Department of the History of the Southern and Western Slavs of Moscow State University, one of the leading domestic specialists in the modern history of Poland, tells about his life and professional activities at the request of the editors of the journal Slavic World in the Third Millennium. Born on the banks of the Volga, G.F. Matveev spent his childhood and youth in Western Ukraine. Since 1966, his whole life has been inextricably linked with the Moscow University, where he received a diploma in history, completed his postgraduate studies, defended his candidate’s and doctoral theses, and where he has been teaching for half a century and was head of the department for more than three decades. The students of G.F. Matveev completed and defended a large number of diplomas, master’s and candidate’s theses, they work in different cities of the country and abroad. As a historian, G.F. Matveev invariably relies on deep researches in archives, introduces a lot of new material into circulation, his innovative research on the history of the Soviet-Polish war of 1920 caused fruitful discussions both in Russia and in Poland, prompting other historians to further research. Gennady Filippovich is the author of the first fundamental biography in Russian of the key statesman of Poland of the 20th century Józef Piƚsudski. Not limited to the problems of Polish history, G.F. Matveev turned to comparative historical research on the material of various Slavic countries, in particular, on the ideology of peasant movements in the period between the two world wars. As an author and editor, he took part in the work on textbooks on the history of the southern and western Slavs. For more than half a century, G.F. Matveev maintains close ties with the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, he is a member of the editorial boards of historical journals, both Russian and Polish. G.F. Matveev talks about his post-war childhood, youth, impressions of his student years, about his work at the Moscow University, about his numerous trips to Poland and more than half a century of communication with Polish colleagues. He also shares his opinion on the current development and prospects of Polish studies in Russia, the possibilities for further dialogue between the two cultures.