George Vernadsky Research Articles

До іконографії академіка В. Вернадського (з історії пошуків фотопортрета, зробленого В. Совинським)

Two rediscovered letters to Volodymyr Vernadsky from Kyiv zoologist and entomologist Vadym Sovynsky, who worked with the fi rst president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences among other places at the Dnipro (Starosillya) Biological Station in 1928, where he took a photo portrait of the academician, have been analyzed. An additional research into Volodymyr Vernadsky’s correspondence with his daughter Nina Vernadska-Toll and his son George Vernadsky made it possible to track down the original photo in New York and establish the date and place it was taken. The purpose of the research was to fi nd a photo portrait of Vernadsky made by Sovynsky based on the information obtained from the letters, which would be a worthy addition to the academician’s photo archive. The methodology includes general methods of historical research and, fi rst of all, source analysis and archival heuristics, as well as textual attribution of the correspondence. The scientifi c novelty. The researchers were not aware of the correspondence between V. Sovynsky and V. Vernadsky, the Kyiv zoologist’s letters in the academician’s archives were unattributed. It was also unknown which photo portrait of the academician was taken by Sovynsky. Conclusions. The conducted research made it possible to introduce the letters of V. Sovynsky to V. Vernadsky into scientifi c circulation, as well as to fi nd in the Archives of Georgy Vernadsky in the U.S. the original photo portrait of the academician taken by Sovynsky in Starosillya in 1928. Although, as it turned out, the photo was used by researchers earlier, but its author and date were unknown. The research made it possible to expand knowledge about V. Vernadsky’s connections with Ukraine, attribute authorship and establish the exact date and place of making the «Ukrainian photographic portrait» of one of the founders and the fi rst president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. 

Nethercott , Frances Writing History in Late Imperial Russia: Scholarship and the Literary Canon (review)

REVIEWS 771 Nethercott, Frances. Writing History in Late Imperial Russia: Scholarship and the Literary Canon. Library of Modern Russia. Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York, 2020. x + 280 pp. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. £90.00; £28.99: £26.09 (e-book). No-one doubts that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian novelists and poets cast light on Russian history, but Frances Nethercott argues that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian historians reflect or embody trends in Russian literature. This is hardly surprising, for many of the historians who figure in the book received their training in what were once called ‘Historico-Philological Faculties’ (i.e. parts of universities in which both history and literature were studied), and until quite late in the nineteenth century historical writing in most European countries, not just in Russia, was thought to be a subdivision of belles-lettres rather than the less entertaining discipline it often is today. It was a rare historian in nineteenth-century Europe who did not derive a degree of inspiration from the historical novels of Walter Scott. Nethercott knows these things, and by way of contextualizing her Russian historians speaks of the literary dimension of the work of Jules Michelet, Augustin Thierry and Hippolyte Taine. She might have added Lord Macaulay, who was certainly style-driven and no less famous for his Lays of Ancient Rome than for his History of England. Nevertheless, the thesis of the book reminds readers of a truth they may have forgotten, and may also do something to broaden the modern understanding of what should be included in the classical Russian literary canon. Today, pre-1917 Russian historians are usually assigned to political, ideological, chronological, typological, or geographical (rather than literary) categories; they tend to be divided into statists and populists, idealists and postivists,modernistsandmedievalists,synthesizersanddocument-collectors, Russianists and Europeanists, or historians of the ‘Moscow School’ or the ‘St Petersburg School’ (rather than, say, writers of epics or lyrics). Nethercott cuts across such polarities by thinking of her historians as writers first and truthseekers second. Her chapters are thematic rather than chronological (let alone biographical). After discussing, in chapter one, the part that the state thought it should play in the management of historical instruction and publication in Russia (was it to be a hands-off patron or an interventionist overseer?), in chapter two she sketches the literary sensibilities of some of the historians whose work best enables her to make her case (especially Timofei Granovskii, Vasilii Kliuchevskii and Ivan Grevs, who are perhaps the scholars who appear most frequently in the book as a whole). The later chapters deal with Russian historians’ style; their interest in providing portraits of historical figures; the extent to which and the reasons why they made use of literary evidence; their SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 772 depiction of place; and their work on poets and novelists (Grevs, for example, on Turgenev). In the final chapter the author returns to her over-arching question: whether we should be thinking of tsarist historiography not as art or science but, at the very least, as a literary-investigative hybrid. The book makes no attempt to embrace the work of all the historians at work in nineteenth- or early twentieth-century Russia. Indeed, Nethercott’s approach limits the number of historians on whom she can focus, for not all the historians at work in her period are grist to her mill. Different readers will have different views about who should have been included and who omitted. The present reviewer particularly welcomed the appearances in the book of Nikolai Kostomarov and did not regret the near-total absence of Nikolai Ustrialov and Sergei Solov´ev, but he was disappointed that Nikolai Polevoi did not attract much attention and that neither Ivan Beliaev nor Vasilii Semevskii rated a mention. But the book is not trying to supplant George Vernadsky’s Russian Historiography: A History (Belmont, MA, 1978), let alone the monstrous volumes of the collective Soviet Ocherki istorii istoricheskoi nauki v SSSR (5 volumes + 2 volumes of bibliography, Moscow, 1955–85). Dr Nethercott is putting forward a thesis. At times, she protests too much, for the endnotes take up more than a quarter of...

Cronin , Glenn Disenchanted Wanderer: The Apocalyptic Vision of Konstantin Leontiev (review)

SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 772 depiction of place; and their work on poets and novelists (Grevs, for example, on Turgenev). In the final chapter the author returns to her over-arching question: whether we should be thinking of tsarist historiography not as art or science but, at the very least, as a literary-investigative hybrid. The book makes no attempt to embrace the work of all the historians at work in nineteenth- or early twentieth-century Russia. Indeed, Nethercott’s approach limits the number of historians on whom she can focus, for not all the historians at work in her period are grist to her mill. Different readers will have different views about who should have been included and who omitted. The present reviewer particularly welcomed the appearances in the book of Nikolai Kostomarov and did not regret the near-total absence of Nikolai Ustrialov and Sergei Solov´ev, but he was disappointed that Nikolai Polevoi did not attract much attention and that neither Ivan Beliaev nor Vasilii Semevskii rated a mention. But the book is not trying to supplant George Vernadsky’s Russian Historiography: A History (Belmont, MA, 1978), let alone the monstrous volumes of the collective Soviet Ocherki istorii istoricheskoi nauki v SSSR (5 volumes + 2 volumes of bibliography, Moscow, 1955–85). Dr Nethercott is putting forward a thesis. At times, she protests too much, for the endnotes take up more than a quarter of her space and often continue discussions begun in the text. Nevertheless, the book achieves its purpose of suggesting an additional way of reading some of the famous Russian-language historians of the later tsarist period. Newcastle University David Saunders Cronin, Glenn. Disenchanted Wanderer: The Apocalyptic Vision of Konstantin Leontiev. NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Northern Illinois University Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2021. xi + 261 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $49.95. In the years since the fall of the Soviet Union, there has been a flowering of scholarly interest in Konstantin Nikolaevich Leont´ev (1831–91), especially in Russia. Glenn Cronin has written the first English-language biography of Leont´ev since Stephen Lukashevich’s Konstantin Leontev, 1831–91: A Study in Russian ‘Heroic Vitalism’ (New York, 1967). Lukashevich adopted a narrow, psychological approach and failed to produce a convincing picture of his subject. By contrast, Cronin’s highly readable biography is rooted in deep knowledge of the intellectual and literary context of Leont´ev’s life. After studying medicine and serving as a military doctor in the Crimean War, Leont´ev sought to make his mark as a writer. He emerged as a defender REVIEWS 773 of art for art’s sake, as opposed to the view, predominant in Russian letters at the time, that the proper function of literature was to draw attention to social problems. Cronin surveys Leont´ev’s writings from this period of his life, finding early precursors of the emphasis on ‘unity in variety’ which would be the hallmark of his later thought (p. 18). Having failed to earn his living as an author, Leont´ev joined the diplomatic service, and between 1863 and 1871 he served in various Russian consulates in the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Throughout this period Leont´ev continued to write, and Cronin traces his intellectual development through his novels. However, Leont´ev’s official diplomatic activities receive only cursory treatment, despite the availability of his dispatches, which depict how the struggle between the great powers for influence over the Ottoman Empire unfolded between their representatives in remote postings. In July 1871, Leont´ev abandoned his post in Salonica in order to take up residence in the Orthodox monasteries on Mount Athos. His flight was prompted by a simultaneous illness and religious awakening, which, Cronin unconvincingly suggests, were the product of guilt about an illicit relationship with his niece Maria. Cronin’s treatment of Leont´ev’s time on Athos is oddly perfunctory, and relatively little effort is made to connect his experiences as a diplomat and a pilgrim with the developmentoftheviewsexpressedintheprofusionofexplicitlypoliticalworks, most notably Byzantinism and Slavdom (1875), which Leont´ev subsequently produced while residing in Constantinople. Cronin does...

Émigrés, Immigration, and the Historical Profession in the United States

Émigrés, Immigration, and the Historical Profession in the United States Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter Jonathan W. Daly, Pillars of the Profession: The Correspondence of Richard Pipes and Marc Raeff. xx + 433 pp. Leiden: Brill, 2019. ISBN-13 978-9004361669. $147.00. Oleg Igorevich Zakharov, Otkryvaia Ameriku: Monografiia (Discovering America: A Monograph). 214 pp. Moscow: U Nikitskikh vorot, 2019. ISBN-13 978-5000957585. The history of Russian émigré scholars working in the United States is one that touches on the personal and professional lives of many currently practicing historians. Although some readers may find the topic difficult to approach from a strictly scholarly point of view, Oleg Zakharov's Otkryvaia Ameriku is sufficiently removed from the subject(s) of study, in time and space, to qualify as scholarly analysis. Zakharov explores the immigration to the United States of four historians from diverse subfields who belonged to a Russian academic community formed before the Bolshevik Revolution. These include the classical scholar Mikhail Ivanovich Rostovtsev (Michael Rostovtseff), the Byzantine scholar Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Vasil´ev (Alexander Vasiliev), the Russian and Byzantine historian Georgii Vladimirovich Vernadskii (George Vernadsky), and the Russian historian Mikhail Mikhailovich Karpovich (Michael Karpovich). Among Russianists, Vernadsky is remembered for disseminating a Eurasianist interpretation of Russian history and Karpovich for the historians he trained and the émigré publication he edited. All four scholars emigrated (or remained abroad) because of ideological disagreements with the Soviet regime, which made them vulnerable to Bolshevik repressions. All of them also made successful academic careers in the United States, though for a time, they lived with [End Page 660] the expectation or hope that the fall of Soviet power would allow them to return to Russia. Based on letters, memoirs, diaries, scholarly works, and journalistic writings, Zakharov's study covers the period from Rostovtsev's arrival in the United States in 1920 to Vernadsky's death in 1973. The author situates his monograph within scholarship dating from the 1990s that explores how Russian émigrés adapted to the United States. Focused on the everyday life, material and emotional, of the historians and their families, Zakharov identifies four stages in the process of adaptation: the introduction (usually dominated by financial and job insecurity), the stage of tolerance or indulgence (terpimost´), and the final stages of accommodation and assimilation. In taking this approach, Zakharov follows sociological theory and the "social history of science" (32), which lead him to highlight the economic, social, and cultural conditions of the émigrés' lives together with their strategies of survival and integration. After tracing the progression from initial financial hardship to the securing of academic positions to the ability to pursue scholarship and the recognition that they would not be going home, Zakharov seeks to determine whether or not his subjects found fulfillment in their new home. Zakharov's émigré scholars generally preferred European life but benefited from greater professional opportunity in the United States. Their distance from Russia (in contrast to the émigré community that settled in Prague) and the limited bureaucratic demands imposed on them (once the long investigations required to obtain a visa had been completed) also facilitated integration into American society. Although in the United States the émigrés lacked the social networks and government support available in Czechoslovakia, they obtained suitable academic employment prior to the Great Depression. By the 1930s, allowing for individual differences, they achieved a measure of economic security and could afford cars, summer homes, and housekeepers. The émigrés could be critical of American education (describing the universities as factories) and culture (decrying the dominance of sports and cinema), but over time they began to feel comfortable and even expressed satisfaction with their life circumstances. An important aside for American historians is that the émigré scholars came to the United States as members of the elite Russian intelligentsia. They displayed little sympathy for the Russian common people (the muzhik), and they considered scholarship and culture in the United States to be underdeveloped and inferior to what existed in Europe and Russia. Although the émigrés could find Russian communities and neighborhoods in the United States, these were not intelligentsia enclaves but rather home to people from all classes and [End Page 661] occupations. The...

Emigrant Historians. George Vernadsky and Michael Karpovich: Friends and Colleagues

The article is devoted to two historians of the Russian Diaspora in the USA: George Vernadsky and Michael Karpovich, their personal friendship and scientific cooperation. Future colleagues get to know each other as students at Moscow University and carried their friendship through the life. Also, until the death of Karpovich, their correspondence continued. The scientific cooperation of friends began in 1914 and resumed during the years of emigration. The article discusses joint projects of historians, analyzes their correspondence on the most important topics. The author of the article relies on a wide range of both published and unpublished sources. A number of them stored in the GARF are being put into scientific circulation for the first time.

The History of the Relationship between George Vernadsky and Nikolai Ulyanov

The History of the Relationship between George Vernadsky and Nikolai Ulyanov

Decembrist movement in the creativity of George Vernadsky

Decembrist movement in the creativity of George Vernadsky

Talking about Russian Sex in the Era of Pussy Riot

There are important lessons to learn from Alexei Lalo’s engaging essay: lessons about public speech, about Russian sex, and about western studies of Russia. First things first, of course, and that means sex. But is sex the most important concern in Russia? Rest assured, other issues are at least equally important, such as power, money, violence, justice, freedom, religion, alcohol, natural resources, civil society, and finally, oppression. Sex, or rather sexuality, became central in American academia in the 1970s, under the influence of French intellectuals who were defeated in the revolution of 1968. After the defeat of Soviet socialism in the 1990s, talking about ‘sex’ — the Foucauldian discourse of sexuality — was relevant for a Russian society that enjoyed plenty of sex, but could not talk about it because of Soviet taboos. This society, and the relevance of certain ideas about it, has however changed dramatically since then. There is nothing surprising about this, and Lalo’s essay in its dissatisfaction goes well beyond sex. The essay critiques the misapplication of ideas that were good and fair in the 1980s to the society of the 2000s. The problem resembles thinking about Weimar Germany in the 1920s in decadent terms that were fashionable in the 1900s, or rather — a sad thought — like discussing Nazi Germany in Weimarian terms. I wonder what ‘Russian’ actually means in a construction like ‘Russian sex’? Is it ethnicity, or citizenship, or place of action? Does an American sex tourist in Russia, for example, have ‘American’ or ‘Russian’ sex? Or a Russian student in America? And how about Russian-American couples? Could it be that the unhappy ones talk about ‘Russian sex’, while the happy couples talk about other things? Although worrying about the ‘Russian soul’ is even more obsolete than discussing ‘Russian sex’, there are those who continue to do it. Do souls have ethnicity? And how about sex: do ethnic categories characterize the indigenous specificities of sexual actions and feelings? In modern cultures, thoughts and stereotypes about sex are to some extent local and to some extent imported, bartered, or plainly shared with other cultures. Yet, in the classroom and the publishing house, cliches and illusions about exotic sex may remain good stories to sell. Does this business constitute legitimate scholarship? These are broader questions that Lalo asks. But there is also a more specific theme in Lalo’s essay. American studies of Russia have always been enriched — or contaminated? — by the Russian natives who succeeded in finding American jobs. From the emigre historians, such as George Vernadsky at Yale and Michael Karpovich at Harvard, who confronted the Bolshevik

Kasimovskoe khanstvo (1445-1552 gg.): Ocherki istorii (The Khanate of Kasimov [1445-1552]: Essays in History), and: Zolotaia orda v XIV stoletii (The Golden Horde in the 14th Century) (review)

Reviewed by: Kasimovskoe khanstvo (1445-1552 gg.): Ocherki istorii (The Khanate of Kasimov [1445-1552]: Essays in History), and: Zolotaia orda v XIV stoletii (The Golden Horde in the 14th Century) Carolyn J. Pouncy Bulat Raimovich Rakhimzianov , Kasimovskoe khanstvo (1445-1552 gg.): Ocherki istorii (The Khanate of Kasimov [1445-1552]: Essays in History). 206 pp., illus. Kazan: Tatarskoe knizhnoe izdatel´stvo, 2009. ISBN-13 978-5298017213. Vadim Vintserovich Trepavlov , Zolotaia orda v XIV stoletii (The Golden Horde in the 14th Century). 78 pp., maps. Moscow: Kvadriga, 2010. ISBN-13 978-5917910291. Russia's long subordination (1237-1480) to the Mongols—both the main empire under the great khan and the Juchid ulus, commonly if inaccurately known as the Golden Horde—has not lacked for scholarly attention. In the West, specialists have generally endorsed some version of the idea that the Mongol invasion represented an onslaught of death and destruction, a crisis from which Russia recovered within a century—in part because the princes of Moscow, in particular, did not hesitate to exploit and eventually adopted certain techniques of rule used by the country's Mongol/Tatar overlords.1 Scholars such as Brian Davies, John Fennell, Charles Halperin, Edward Keenan, Craig Kennedy, Michael Khodarkovsky, Janet Martin, Donald Ostrowski, and Jaroslaw Pelenski have explored the pragmatic approach taken by the Russian princes toward the fissiparous Tatar khanates, medieval Russians' religiously based reluctance to acknowledge the Mongol victory, and possible points of connection between Muscovite and Tatar government and military organization.2 [End Page 975] The view inside Russia, as Vadim Trepavlov notes in his introduction to Zolotaia orda v XIV stoletii, has traditionally been different. The lessons taught to schoolchildren regarding the "Mongol-Tatar Yoke," itself a telling term, have emphasized the "harsh enslavement of the Russian land by conquerors" bent on "sucking the juice from long-suffering Russia," a national tragedy of epic proportions (5). In this small book Trepavlov—a leading research fellow at the Institute of Russian History, Russian Academy of Sciences, who has spent most of the last two decades studying Russia and the Tatars—attempts to set the record straight.3 He takes issue with arguments that Moscow was a successor state to the Horde: although he agrees that Russian practices of the 14th-16th centuries may, in specific instances, have resembled those of the Tatars, he insists that "in and of themselves" these similarities "are not an argument for a Golden Horde 'inheritance' or some kind of historical continuity between Russia and the Golden Horde" (7). In this respect, he disagrees with the work not only of Donald Ostrowski and Jaroslaw Pelenski, whom he cites, but also of Russian imperial historians such as N. M. Karamzin and the émigré historian George Vernadsky, whose works inspired much of the Western historiographical tradition on this topic.4 Although I do not find [End Page 976] Trepavlov's noncontinuity argument convincing, his separation of Muscovy and the Mongols allows him to focus on the Juchid ulus as a sociopolitical and cultural entity that had its own independent concerns, among which the subjugation of Russia occupied a minor place. Compared with the traditional "Mongol-Tatar Yoke" approach, Trepavlov's is refreshingly free of ideology. This is not a book for specialists. With only 65 pages of text, Trepavlov has little space for the fine points of academic debate. He does provide a brief overview of the literature, footnotes citing printed sources and secondary works, and a bibliography that lists titles in English, French, and German—impressive in a book aimed at a general Russian-speaking audience. But the book ignores most major studies (including Trepavlov's own); and the literature survey is necessarily cursory, dismissing complex historical arguments in a paragraph or two. Nevertheless, Trepavlov fulfills the task he sets for himself. Short chapters survey the Horde's territory and population, its state structure, its economy, and its military organization. These model essays reveal how the Juchid ulus operated and how Russia functioned within it as an integral part. Trepavlov explains that the two major obligations imposed on the Russian princes—the vykhod, usually translated as tribute but in fact a levy imposed by the khans on all subject towns...

Об “украинофильстве” Георгия вернадского, или вариация на тему национальных и государственных лояльностей

SUMMARY: The article by Ernest Gyidel is conceived as the introduction to the commentated publication of the archival documents by George Vernadsky pertaining to his Ukrainian identity vis-à-vis Russian culture and the tradition of Russian imperial statehood. Gyidel revisits the discussion between R. Vulpius, D. Stalunas, and M. Dolbilov ( Ab Imperio 1/2006) about the historical meaning of the term “rusofile,” and suggests possible genealogies of such terms as “rusofile,” “ukrainofile,” “maloross,” and “Ukrainian.” It is against this background that Gyidel introduces the concept of “Ukrainians of the Russian culture” as a very late imperial phenomenon, and presents George Vernadsky as representative of this category. A complicated dialectic of recognition of Ukrainian people-hood and Ukrainian language – yet under the Russian political and (high) cultural umbrella is explicated by Gyidel with the help of a few previously unpublished texts from Vernadsky’s collection in Columbia University’s (New York) Bakhmeteff Archive. There are two articles (“A Short Exposition of the Eurasian Point of View on Russian History” and “Prince Trubetskoi and the Ukrainian Question”), one lecture (“The Kievan and Kozak Period in Ukrainian History”) and two letters (to L. Myshuga and P. Ignat’ev). As a way to provide context for their discussion, Gyidel examines Vernadsky’s published works where different aspects of Ukrainian history are analyzed, including his contacts with Ukrainian emigration. He suggests that if approached within such a context, Vernadsky’s collection can be an invaluable source to study his complex political and cultural loyalties. The main question that he addresses is not Vernadsky’s understanding of “Ukrainianness.” Instead the question is: what meaning he and his fellow “Russian Ukrainians” invested in the category “Russian”? What kind of loyalty – cultural, political, imperial or their combination – did they attach to this subjective “Russianness”?

В Поисках Неевропоцентричного Взгляда На Прошлое: Отклики Эмигрантских Историков на Евразийскую Историю России Г. В. Вернадского

SUMMARY: Ab Imperio continues publication of archival materials related to intellectual history of Russian emigration. In this issue we offer our readership a whole range of documents: correspondence between the Eurasianists George Vernadsky and Petr Savitsky, the conspectus of a lecture by the well known legal scholar Taranovsky, who delivered a crushing critique of Eurasianist writings, and reactions by V. Bartold and N. Kareev to George Vernadsky’s “Scheme of Russian History” and Petr Savitsky’s geopolitical ideas. All documents are focused on the work by George Vernadsky, which represented the only attempt at writing a course of Russian history from a Eurasianist perspective. The publication is introduced and commented by Alexander Antoshchenko, who published a number of works on the subject. Eurasianism is particularly suitable for illustrating paradoxes of modernity in Russian context. Obviously a nativist, quasi-Romantic intellectual movement, which denied the existence of universal values inherent in the Enlightenment understanding of historical processes, Eurasianism at the same time displayed novel features: the Eurasianists, who were not unlike their contemporaries in Italy, Germany or France, vehemently criticized democratic order and placed their hopes on an “organic” state ruled by “idea”. They were equally interested in high culture and technology. Moreover, the Eurasianists owed a great debt to the modernist culture of the last decades of imperial Russia, a cultural ferment bent on experimentation and innovation in the forms of art. It was this relation that prompted the designation of the Eurasianists as “Slavophiles of the epoch of futurism”. The Eurasianists denied that Europe was at the top of the pyramid of social, economic and cultural development of the world. Nicholas Trubetskoi, who compared European civilization to that of Australian aborigines and found no essential difference, boldly proclaimed this idea. But this highly theoretical proclamation needed substance, and it appears that Vernadsky’s history was an attempt to follow suit and produce such history. The published materials illustrate reactions to this venture by Russian émigré intellectuals.

George Vernadsky, Eurasianism, the Mongols, and Russia

Eurasianism, the theory that Russia was neither Europe nor Asia but a world unto itself, Eurasia, runs through much, if not all, of George Vernadsky's enormous scholarly output. Eurasianism was the fuel of his impressive productivity, the central, unifying theme of his varied investigations of Russian, Byzantine, and Inner Asian history. Despite the high esteem in which Vernadsky came to be held, there have been few examinations of his contributions to historical knowledge. Yet Vernadsky's career and his scholarship have much to tell us of the fate of the Imperial Russian historiographic tradition in the twentieth century.Vernadsky is most often associated with the theme of the significance of the Mongols in Russian history. Vernadsky's observations on this topic over the course of his nearly sixty-year career provide an excellent medium for understanding the ambiguities of his adherence to Eurasianism and for tracing the evolution of his Eurasianism in response to the different political and cultural environments in which he worked. As we shall see, the assumption of his eulogists that Vernadsky's Eurasianism was static is too simplistic, while the equally facile conclusion that Vernadsky gradually tempered the extremist elements of Eurasianism is too imprecise to be satisfactory. Indeed, the development of Vernadsky's historical concepts is far more complex than has hitherto been appreciated.

George Vernadsky. Russian Historiography: A History. Edited by Sergei Pushkarev. Translated by Nickolas Lupinin. Belmont, Mass.: Nordland Publishing Co., 1978.

George Vernadsky. Russian Historiography: A History. Edited by Sergei Pushkarev. Translated by Nickolas Lupinin. Belmont, Mass.: Nordland Publishing Co., 1978.

Volume 1:A Source Book For Russian History From Early Times To 1917. Vol. 1: Early Times To The Late Seventeenth Century. Vol. 2: Peter The Great To Nicholas I. Vol. 3: Alexander Ii To The February Revolution. Edited and compiled by George Vernadsky, Ralph T. FisherJr. , Alan D. Ferguson, Andrew Lossky, and Sergei Pushkarev. New Haven and London: Yale

Volume 1:A Source Book For Russian History From Early Times To 1917. Vol. 1: Early Times To The Late Seventeenth Century. Vol. 2: Peter The Great To Nicholas I. Vol. 3: Alexander Ii To The February Revolution. Edited and compiled by George Vernadsky, Ralph T. FisherJr. , Alan D. Ferguson, Andrew Lossky, and Sergei Pushkarev. New Haven and London: Yale

V. L. Ianin and the History of Novgorod

An historian of early Russian history faces many methodological problems, not the least of which is the paucity of sources for the Kievan and Mongol periods. Because of the dearth of material, historians of the medieval Russian town, such as M. N. Tikhomirov and A. M. Sakharov, have generally presented a static conceptualization of urban society, thereby obscuring the dynamic processes and nuances of historical development. Despite the many studies of Novgorod, one can fairly state that historians have often described fourteenth and fifteenth-century Novgorod as though it were virtually unchanged since 1136, when the town declared its independence from Kiev. While recognizing the importance of the Sovet gospod (Council of Lords) and posadnik (mayor), some historians have nevertheless insisted that the veche (assembly) was the sovereign body of the republic. Its meetings were open to the town's citizens, and though the veche at times degenerated into brawls, no prince or posadnik could effectively govern without its concurrence. Indeed, George Vernadsky characterized Novgorod as a democratic republic, somewhat reminiscent of the Greek polis, while Tikhomirov viewed Novgorod's political traditions as similar to those of the urban communes of medieval Europe.

Review Notices : A Source Book for Russian History from Early Times to 1917. Edited by George Vernadsky et al. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 1972. 3 vols. Each vol. £4.95; set £13.95

Review Notices : A Source Book for Russian History from Early Times to 1917. Edited by George Vernadsky et al. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 1972. 3 vols. Each vol. £4.95; set £13.95

Reviews

The Victoria History of the Counties of England: General Introduction Edited by R. B. Pugh Published for the Institute of Historical Research by Oxford University Press, 1970. xi+282 pp. £5. Building Accounts of King Henry III Edited by H. M. Colvin Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1971 xvi+472 pp. illus., plans. £7. Court rolls of the Wiltshire manors of Adam de Stratton Edited by Ralph B. Pugh Devizes, Wiltshire Record Society vol. xxiv, 1970. viii‐+‐224 pp. Copies are obtainable from Mr. M. J. Lansdown, 37 Hilperton Road, Trowbridge, Wiltshire, for £2.50 excluding postage. An Edition of the Cartulary of Burscough Priory Transcribed, edited and introduced by A. N. Webb Chetham Society, 3rd Series, xviii, Manchester, 1970. viii + 297 pp., map, geneals. £4. Anglo‐Scottish Relations 1174–1328: Some Selected Documents Edited and translated by E. L. G. Stones Clarendon Press: Oxford University Press, 1970. lvi+380 pp., 1 pl. £4. English cursive book hands 1250–1500 M. B. Parkes Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1969. xxxii + 24 pp., 24 pls. £2.50. Niccolo Machiavelli, The first Decennale, a facsimile of the first edition of February, 1306 Harvard University Press. London, Oxford University Press, 1970. 34 pp. £2.40. Oxford Life in Oxford Archives W. A. Pantin Oxford University Press, 1972. x+123 pp., 1 plate. £2. Southwark and the City David J. Johnson Published for the Corporation of London by the Oxford University Press, 1969. xiv + 441 pp., 8 pls., map. £3.15. Early Essex Town Meetings : Braintree 1619–1636: Finckingfield 1626–1634 Edited, with an Introduction by F. G. Emmison Phillimore, London and Chichester, 1970. xviii+147 pp. 3 pls. £1.75. The Tyne, 1800–1850 M. R. Savage and A. G. Thompson (compilers) University of Newcastle, Archive Teaching Units, No. 5, 1970. 80p. Distributed by Harold Hill, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 4SL The Rise of a Central Authority for English Education A. S. Bishop Cambridge, at the University Press, 1971. ix+313 pp. £4–20. Guide to the Historical Manuscripts in the National Archives of Rhodesia T. W. Baxter and E. E. Burke Salisbury, National Archives of Rhodesia, 1970. Rhodesian $8.00. The Politics of Grand Strategy—Britain and France Prepare for War, 1904–1914. Samuel R. Williamson Harvard University Press. London, Oxford University Press, 1970. xiv + 409 pp. £6. Dictionary of Russian Historical Terms from the Eleventh Century to 1917 Compiled by Sergei G. Pushkarev Edited by George Vernadsky and Ralph T. Fisher, Jr. Yale University Press, 1970. xi+199 pp.

Sergei Pushharev, compiler, Dictionary of Russian Historical Terms from the Eleventh Century to 1917, Edited by George Vernadsky and Ralph T. Fisher, Jr.., New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970. xi, 199 pp. $12.50. (Distributed in Canada by McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal).

Sergei Pushharev, compiler, Dictionary of Russian Historical Terms from the Eleventh Century to 1917, Edited by George Vernadsky and Ralph T. Fisher, Jr.., New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970. xi, 199 pp. $12.50. (Distributed in Canada by McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal).

Dictionary of Russian Historical Terms from the Eleventh Century to 1917. Compiled by Sergei G. Pushkarev. Edited by George Vernadsky and Ralph T. Fisher, Jr. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970. xi, 199 pp. $12.50.

Dictionary of Russian Historical Terms from the Eleventh Century to 1917. Compiled by Sergei G. Pushkarev. Edited by George Vernadsky and Ralph T. Fisher, Jr. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970. xi, 199 pp. $12.50. - Volume 30 Issue 1

The Tsardom of Moscow, 1547-1682, in 2 vols. By George Vernadsky. A History of Russia, vol. 5. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969. xiii, 873 pp. $20.00.

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