Рукописна та книжкова спадщина України (Jan 2023)
Book as reconstruction of author’s life: “Technical French-Russian Dictionary” by Apollon Mevius (to 200th anniversary of author’s birth)
Abstract
The purpose of the work: to carry out a source analysis of the “Technical French Russian Dictionary” of the mining engineer Apollon Mevius through the prism of the author’s biography. For forty years, from the first to the second edition of the dictionary, its author gained invaluable experience and implemented numerous projects that found their reproduction both in the book and in the entire Ukrainian industrial history of the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The research me thodology is based on a set of historical methods (historical-comparative, synchro nous, diachronic), as well as methods of biographical and source analysis (critical method, historical and linguistic elements of text interpretation, analysis and interpretation of biographical material). Scientific news. For the first time in Ukrainian historiography, a historical-source analysis of the “Technical French-Russian Dictionary” by the mining engineer Apollon Mevius was carried out. It is shown how the events from the author`s life are marked on the contents of the dictionary. Attention is focused on the fact that the book is a kind of “dictionary reproduction” of the era of capitalist transformations of the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries, a time of fundamental changes in the economy, economic innovations, industrial changes and technical discoveries. Conclusions. “Technical French-Russian Dictionary” is a unique phenomenon in itself, as is its author - Apollon Fedorovych Mevius. The adjectives “technical” and “French” are a definition of the main orientation of the economic formation of the Ukrainian lands at that time in the direction of accelerated industrial development and the active involvement of Western European investments and innovations. The name and surname of the author testify to the combination of many national cultures in one person, and therefore the understanding of pan-European processes. Mevius’ worldview was based on high ideals of “pro gress”, “development”, “mission of industry”. Noble ideas carried out by the “first Ukrainian professor of metallurgy” Apollon Mevius resulted in a folio dictionary, on which more than one generation of domestic engineers was formed.
