Book chapter
Александр Николаевич Савин: неизвестная жизнь известного историка
This article is devoted to the problem of relationship between the government and the academic staff of the Moscow University in Russia during the years from 1908 to 1911. The research is based on the diary of historian A.N.Savin. It is an attempt to reconstruct the attitude of the university staff to the government policy and to reveal the most complicated and painful questions in the university life. Among all - it is a problem of relationship and mutual understanding between the student and academic body, the intelligentsia question of moral authority. Those events in Russian academic life and the mass resignation of the professors from Moscow University seemed to be the first «purge» of the intellectuals in Russia in the XXth century.
In this article is made an attempt to reconstruct the attitude of the historian A.N.Savin to the situation in Russia in 1917 and after that, to analise his political views and ideas.
The early history of Russian universities is of great demand in contemporary historiography. In the last years it has been covered in numerous articles and monographs. A series of these publica- tions deal with the first decades of the most important of them, The Moscow State University. They shed light on previously hardly known aspects of its functioning, provide reference materials, trace biographies of its professors and administrators, and present collections of historical documents. Generalization and systematization of the vast body of materials in these publications allow not only to reconstruct the more detailed picture of the University’s history, but also to put new questions. In particular the question about “structures of contemporaneity” in which its professors lived. These structures are mapped in this paper in the course of reconstruction of a conflict between professor Philipp Heinrich Dilthey (1723–1781) and the University administration. The main questions are addressed to hierarchy of power relations in the University: What was the place of professors in this hierarchy? What rights and obligations they possessed? What were the reasons of their conflicts with University officials? How these conflicts developed and ended? How the powers between profes- sorial Conference, Director and Curator were allocated? And finally, in what way the interaction between the University and supreme state authorities was carried out?
The main objective of this article is to trace development and the details of the dialog between the two eminent russian historians M.Kovalevskij and A.Savin. This dialigue o the scholars ia one more evidence of the dinamic development of the different approaches to the analysis of historical sourses at the beggining of he XX c.