“The Romantic of Textual Criticism” Konstantin Ivanovich Khalabayev

Abstract

The article is devoted to the reconstruction of the biography of Konstantin Ivanovich Khalabaev (1885–1941), the founder of Soviet textology as an academic science. The scholar did not leave a single scientific article or monograph, there is not a single biographical note about him, and even the years of the textologist’s life were unknown. A student of the Pavel Galagan College in Kyiv, a graduate of the Romano-Germanic Department of St. Petersburg University, after 1917, when the legacy of the classics of Russian literature passed to the state, Khalabaev headed the work on the textological preparation of new editions of Russian writers in the People’s Commissariat of Education. Thanks to his collaboration with Boris Tomashevsky and Boris Eichenbaum, he managed to publish many editions of Russian classics at an unprecedented scientific level for that time, including collected works by Dostoevsky, Lermontov, Pushkin, Turgenev, and Tolstoy. The article presents hitherto unknown archival materials about the life and work of Khalabaev, which allow us to understand the significance of this scholar in the history of Russian philological science.

Keywords

• scientific biography
• history of philological science
• textual criticism
• editions of classics
• konstantin khalabaev
• boris tomashevsky
• boris eichenbaum