Suchergebnisse

Tamara Kondratieva et Claudio-Sergio Ingerflom, "Bez Lsaria zemlia vdova". Syncretism in the Vremennik of Ivan Timofeev.
The Vremennik of Ivan Timofeev stands out against the sources of the Time of Troubles because of its efforts at conceptualizing. One term occurs throughout the narrative: "the earth". It refers both to Russia and to the other meaning it has in Russian culture : "Mother - damp earth" associated with, indeed identified to, the "native" mother and the Mother of God. The dynastic rupture, the civil war and the foreign intervention that followed have the same cause: before dying the last Riurikovich had not left in the womb of earth the embryo that was entitled to reign. The tsar is therefore the husband and the son of the same wife-mother. The non-fulfilment of the incest appears as a break of the natural order. To stress his idea, Timofeev resorts to a "parable": a rhetorical device destined to express the "truth". With the accession of Mikhail Romanov, accompanied by his mother, the widowhood of the earth is ended. The new tsar is then legitimate. Timofeev's work shows that the dvoeverie - intermingled paganism and Christianity - extended to the society as a whole, cannot be ignored by the historian of Russian politics.

This article is devoted to the activities of the Section of Medieval History which was a structural department of the Institute of History at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Moscow State University (1921–1925) and later joined the Russian Association of Research Institutes of Social Sciences (RANION) (1925–1929). Relying on minutes of the section and records and reports of the Institute of History, the authors demonstrate that the staff of the section headed by D. M. Petrushevsky remained faithful to the high academic standards of the Russian pre-revolutionary school, which was formulated in the aims and tasks of the section and was reflected in the research problems, as well as the level and quality of publications and the reports made. The scholars and instructors of the section did not teach classes to students but were focused on their research and postgraduate work. There were only minor changes in the composition of the Section, which included seven members and five postgraduate students. At the same time, the Medieval History Section was one of the most productive in the Institute, actively publishing monographs, translations of medieval sources, articles, and reviews. The topics and content of the publications, papers, and discussions show that the section's research agenda was dominated by the socioeconomic issues of the early Middle Ages, the history of the medieval city, and debatable and topical issues of medieval studies. The authors of the article also pay attention to papers of graduate students not assigned to the Section, some of which had academic merit and were subsequently published. The academic discourse and research fields of the Section's historians testify to their neglect of topics and approaches relevant for Soviet Marxism.