Vladimir Ivanovič Lamanskij in Venice (1868–1869)
From Firenze University Press Journal: Studi Slavistici
Alexey Valeryevich Malinov, National Research University — Higher School of Economics
The scientific heritage of Academician Vladimir Ivanovič Lamanskij (1833–1914) counts over 400 published works, including four monographs, numerous articles, lecture courses, reviews, newspaper publications, editions of archival material, etc. The main sub-ject of his research is Slavic studies. Lamanskij was one of the greatest Slavists of his time, who taught at St. Petersburg University for over 30 years. Also, he was the founder of an independent scientific school (Lapteva 2005; Lapteva 2014; Volkova 2022). Contemporar-ies differed in their assessment of both his personality and his scientific works. Lamanskij never detached his academic pursuits from life, often responding to contemporary events in newspapers and magazines, emphasising the connection of political and cultural real-ities with the history and worldview of peoples in seemingly purely scientific works and lectures. He openly declared himself a follower of Slavophilism and was undoubtedly the greatest representative of this trend at the Imperial University of St. Petersburg. Modern researchers are attracted by Lamanskij’s geopolitical concept (he referred to his works as political geography), in which many see an anticipation of the ideas of the Eurasians (Zadorožnjuk 2016; Pavlov 2017; Seliverstov 2022; Bazanov et al. 2023). His philosoph-ical-historical doctrine, transformed into geopolitical constructions, is expressed in the treatise The Three Worlds of the Asian-European Continent (1892). Lamanskij pointed out both the geographical conditionality of the formation of civilisations (and the peculiarities of their cultural and historical development), and the geopolitical role of languages, the competition and struggle between which, in his opinion, would determine the civilisational development of entire regions.The biography of the scientist is insufficiently studied. There are no major works de-voted to his life so far. The restoration of Lamanskij’s biography requires reference to archives, first, to the scientist’s fund in the St. Petersburg branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Based on archival materials, studies by L.P. Lapteva and M.A. Robin-son were prepared, to whom we owe the actual rehabilitation of both the personality and scientific heritage of Lamanskij and his scientific school (Lapteva 2005; Robinson 2004). In 2004, the first dissertation on Lamanskij, also written based on archival materials, was defended (Saprikina 2004). Unfortunately, this research was not published as a separate edition. In 2010, a volume of Lamanskij’s own works was republished, which significantly fuelled interest in his ideas (Lamanskij 2010). However, the lack of painstaking archival work prevented the book’s compilers from providing quality commentary and showing the context of Lamanskij’s teachings.Lamanskij’s first book, On the Slavs in Asia Minor, Africa and Spain (1859), which not only collected unique historical material that did not always correspond to the scientific ideas of the time, but also for the first time substantiated the Slavophile point of view on the history of the Slavic, caused the most controversy (Kuprijanov, Malinov 2022: 52). While the early Slavophiles were based on the romantic idea of nationality and its spirit expressed in language, literature and folklore, Lamanskij, based on historical facts, tried to show the commonality of the cultural and historical destinies of the Slavic, the unity of the basic psychological attitudes of the Slavs, the typicality of various phenomena of the historical and contemporary life of the Slavs, which allowed drawing non-trivial parallels and similarities in the history of the Slavic nations (Saprikina 2004).In his doctoral dissertation, On the Historical Study of the Greco-Slavic World (1871), Lamanskij undertook a historiographical and philosophical-historical analysis of the views of European scholars, especially Germans, on the Slavs. Nevertheless, he considered his main merit to science to be the publication of an extensive collection of archival material, Secrets d’État de Venise et rapports de la République avec les Grecs, les Slaves et les Turcs au xvi siècle. Documents, extraits, notices et études (State secrets of Venice and relations of the Republic with the Greeks, Slavs and Turks in the 16th century. Documents, extracts, notes and studies, 1884).The publication of State Secrets of Venice… took a decade and a half. It was based on the material collected by the scholar in the Venetian archives in 1868–1869 during his sec-ond voyage abroad, shorter than the first one (1862–1864), but more fruitful. Its main pur-pose was to complete doctoral dissertation, but its results turned out to be much broader. During his stay in Venice, Lamanskij published one of is most famous cycles of articles, The Unresolved Question, which his teacher and Dean of the Faculty of History and Philolog y, I.I. Sreznevskij suggested being submitted to the Faculty Council as a doctoral dissertation. On his return to Russia in 1870, Lamanskij start publishing doctoral dissertation in the journal “Zarja” (a book edition appeared in 1871) and to process the archival material he had brought with him.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/Studi_Slavis-15056
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