Political vs intellectual? Russia’s late Imperial archaeology and the Russian Cause

Abstract

Drawing on the writings of the founding representatives of late Imperial Russia’s Oriental studies, and documents from Russian archives, this article first traces Professor Nikolay Veselovsky’s (1848-1918) formative origins as an influential historian and archaeologist of the East on the national level. He came to be, as pointed out by Vasily Barthold (1869-1930), one of those scholars ferociously ‘counteracting the influence of the West through reliance on the study of the Orient’. The article then studies the impact of his educational background and of the nationalist discourses that were widespread among Russian intellectuals during Veselovsky’s academic formation and mature professional activities. The ongoing international debates on Russian Orientalism and the imperial practices of the time help re-examine the Veselovsky case from new theoretical perspectives and situate it within the broader methodological context of relationships between knowledge and power, academic institutions and state as well as political ideas and scholarship. This further allows us to investigate how Veselovsky’s controversial contribution to Russian scholarship was perceived by his contemporaries as well as the generations of Soviet and post-Soviet scholars, and to conclude by identifying the reasons for such perceptions and the impact of Veselovsky’s scholarship and activities.