Historians of St. Petersburg theological academy (1869–1917): an attempt of a collective portrait
Abstract
The purpose of this article is to create a collective portrait of historians who worked at St. Petersburg Theological Academy between 1869 and 1917 and to compare it with data on historians who worked in secular educational and scientifi c institutions of St. Petersburg, with St. Petersburg University as a whole, with its Faculty of History and Philology, and with the Department of Russian History of the Faculty of History and Philology. The authors of the article analysed data on historians of St. Petersburg Theological Academy during the relevant period using a number of parameters, such as class origin, percentage of master dissertations and doctoral theses, the time between graduation and defending a dissertation, their publication activity, and time taken to obtain professorship, as well as some other parameters. The data was obtained from analysis of an array of sources (the portal Биографика СПбГУ, address-calendars of the Russian Empire for 1869?1917m electronic catalogues of the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg, State Russian Library in Moscow, State Public Historical Library in Moscow, etc.). The article shows a continuity of the academic school of St. Petersburg Theological Academy, a high degree of corporate closedness that distinguished the school of church history of St. Petersburg. Although the “church-historical science” was seen by the historians of St. Petersburg Theological Academy as a special branch of historical knowledge, and they themselves were looked at by contemporaries as “belonging to a special church world” , diff erent from the “secular” world, the resulting collective portrait of historians of St. Petersburg Theological Academy provides all evidence to state that in a professional sense, in building their career and pursuing their scientific concerns, they were very close to historians who worked in secular educational and scientific institutions. It should be noted that a signifi cant part of scholars of St. Petersburg Theological Academy published articles in secular scientifi c periodicals and provided advisory services to government bodies. In other words, as shown in the article, the corporation of church historians was quite integrated both in the scientific life of the professional historical community of the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and in the state milieu of the Empire.
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