«Loser» textbook: A. I. Nemirovskii and the teaching of the history of the Ancient world in the Soviet school

Abstract

The article tells about a textbook on the history of the Ancient world, written by A. I. Nemirovskii in the early 1960s. This textbook participated in a competition for secondary schools, but lost to F. P. Korovkin’s textbook, which was released in a multimillion circulation. Nevertheless, A. I. Nemirovskii’s textbook was published in 1962 with a circulation of 300 thousand copies as a textbook for evening schools. Due to the fact that the author’s manuscript has survived, a comparative analysis of the initial text and that which was published in 1962 is possible. A. I. Nemirovskii made considerable efforts to make his textbook attractive to the reader, for example, he himself selected one and a half hundred illustrations, which were replaced during publication with standard illustrations prepared by the publishing house. Comparison with a textbook for schools published at the same time by F. P. Korovkin, shows that the degree of unification of the narrative in Soviet historiography was high, especially in the field of teaching history, and some original moments belonging to the pen of A. I. Nemirovskii were almost completely leveled out during editing. Despite the originality of the figure of the author himself, in his textbook one cannot notice the desire to go beyond the unified narrative of Soviet historiography developed by that time.

Keywords

• ancient history
• soviet textbooks
• school teaching of history