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Война, революция и египтология: переписка Эд. Навилля и В. С. Голенищева в 1916-1921 гг.
The article discusses the correspondence between the Swiss Egyptologist Eduard Naville and the outstanding Russian Egyptologist Vladimir Golenishchev, the collector of antiquities that laid the cornerstone for the Egyptian department of A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. This correspondence is preserved at Vladimir Golenishchev Archives, Paris. In 1910s both Naville and Golenishchev were considered to represent the senior generation of the European Egyptology still keeping the traditions of its “heroic age” in the middle of the 19th century, when the French Egyptological school played the first fiddle. However, in 1880s the German Egyptology, specifically its Berlin school (A. Erman, K. Sethe etc.), took the unchallenged leadership: it developed the theory of the Ancient Egyptian language, and its methodology was followed by the scholars entering the research from 1890s onwards (among them Golenishchev’s close friend, the British Egyptologist Alan H. Gardiner. Naville and Golenishchev strongly opposed a number of positions forwarded by the Berlin school, especially the treatment of the Egyptian linguistic phenomena from the viewpoint of Semitology. In the letters discussed Naville actually proposed to Golenishchev to launch a campaign against the Berlin school taking the advantage of the imminent breakdown of Germany in World War I and the general indignation of the Entente nations against Germans. Golenishchev took this idea especially heartedly in the late 1918, when his own interests were badly injured by the war and the revolution started in Russia. However, ultimately the alleged campaign against the Berlin school did not start and anyway hardly had a prospect of success. The scholars’ correspondence also discussed the specific episodes of war and revolutionary developments in Russia.