научное наследие А.И. Плигузова

Исторический ежегодник "Modern Greek Studies Yearbook", издаваемый Университетом Миннесоты (США), опубликовал статью "Научное наследие Андрея Ивановича Плигузова (1956-2011)". Ниже приводится полный текст публикации.

MODERN GREEK STUDIES YEARBOOK VOL. 26/27, 2010/11, pp. 307-320.

THE SCHOLARLY LEGACY OF ANDREI IVANOVICH PLIGUZOV (1956–2011)

by 

   Georg B. Michels, University of California, Riverside 

with 

   David Goldfrank, Georgetwn University

ANDREI IVANOVICH PLIGUZOV, who died in Moscow on 26 March 2011, will be remembered as one of the great archival scholars of Russian church history. His career spanned two continents and two scholarly traditions. Following the legacy of his teacher, Alexander A. Zimin, and the great church historians of the late nineteenth century—such as P. M. Stroev, E. E. Golubinskii, S. A. Belokurov, and S. I. Smirnov—Andrei devoted himself to the discovery, description, and analysis of medieval manuscripts and worked tirelessly on the reconstruction of the lost archives of the Metropolitan See of Moscow, and the sees of Novgorod, Rostov, and other medieval eparchies. After his move to the United States in early 1990, Andrei continued his passionate intellectual engagement in seminars at Harvard University, the George Kennan Institute, and conference panels at the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS). His thought-provoking commentaries—for the most part presented in English—won him the attention and respect of scholars in a wide range of fields, while the generous spirit with which he shared his vast knowledge won him admiration and friendship¹.

Andrei saw his main task as continuing the work of the Imperial Archeographic Commission. This commission represented the best tradition of Russian critical church scholarship, a tradition that was largely destroyed in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Andrei only partially succeeded in this endeavor, because his professional life was interrupted by illness and his early death. Nevertheless, his prodigious publication output, which comprises twenty authored, edited, co-edited, and translated books and countless articles, stands as a testimony to the scope and significance of his scholarly contributions².

However, Andrei was much more than an excellent scholar. At the peak of his career, before his tragic illness, he was a charismatic man of astounding rhetorical skill. He dazzled audiences with the eloquence of his academic presentations or his polished responses to other scholars’ work. Western colleagues who were fortunate enough to witness him in action in the late 1980s in Moscow (during the first years of perestroika and glasnost’) will never forget the intensity and incisiveness with which he spoke. He did so frequently in seminars at the Institute of History and the Institute’s Sector of Source Studies (Sektor Istochnikovedeniia), but one of the most memorable occasions occurred in December 1988 during a reception in honor of Edward L. Keenan that was hosted by Ambassador Jack F. Matlock at the American Embassy. After Keenan’s lecture on the forged letters of Ivan IV, Andrei rose to his feet and delivered extemporaneously and without notes a lengthy and brilliantly insightful response.

Andrei’s most important contribution to scholarship is his annotated critical edition of documents from medieval church archives in the series Russkii feodal’nyi arkhiv XIV–pervoi treti XVI veka, vols. 1-4 (Moscow: Institut Istorii SSSR AN SSSR, 1986–88), vol. 5 (Moscow: Tipografiia Roskomarkhiva, 1992); abridged version based on vols. 1-3 (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskikh kul’tur, 2008) (hereafter RFA). Andrei was the initiator, principal contributor, and editor-in-chief of this series, published in collaboration with his colleagues G. V. Semenchenko, L. F. Kuz’mina, and A. V. Kuz’min. In the introduction, Andrei delineated the project’s main goal, which was to search through fifteenth-, sixteenth-, and seventeenth-century sborniki (manuscript miscellanies) for papers that had been housed in the chancellery of the Russian Metropolitans after the transplantation of the Kievan See to Moscow in the early fourteenth century. Among the papers Andrei identified for study were church administrative records, such as legal acts, council decisions, appointment charters, and land grants. The correspondences of Russian church hierarchs with each other, as well as with Moscow princes, the rulers of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the patriarchs of Constantinople, were singled out for special attention. As Andrei put it, these sources “constitute a most precious documentary fond [tsenneishii dokumental’nyi fond] that sheds light on all aspects of Russian church history” (RFA 2008: 30).

Andrei was well aware of the two analytical challenges he faced with this project: first, the scarcity of surviving evidence, and second, the loss of almost all original manuscripts. Lengthy periods of time during which the Metropolitan See remained unoccupied led to significant losses; fire and civil wars also did damage to archival holdings. During some periods, in fact, the archive was completely empty. For example, when Metropolitan Photios Monembasiotes (1409–1431) arrived at the Kremlin in 1410 to assume his office, he noticed that all the papers that had been issued by his predecessors had disappeared. His scribes could not find a single document, even though the church chancellery had produced a good deal of paperwork during the preceding decades.

How, then, could historians trace the surviving fragments of this largely lost archive? Andrei drew inspiration from other scholars who had tried to tackle the problem in the past. Most important among these scholars were the prerevolutionary historians A. S. Pavlov, V. N. Beshenevich, and P. M. Stroev, as well as Soviet historians L. V. Cherepnin, B. L. Fonkich, and B. M. Kloss. Based on their findings, Andrei carefully defined the analytical focus and boundaries of the project: he chose manuscript no. 562 of the Synodal Collection (hereafter, Sinod. 562), the earliest surviving miscellany containing the metropolitanate’s epistolary, “formulary” codex (formuliarnik) for unparalleled textual scrutiny.

A look at the contents of Russkii feodal’nyi arkhiv reveals the vast scope of this project: each of the 157 texts in Sinod. 562 underwent meticulous philological, linguistic, and palaeographical analyses. The texts are carefully compared with identical or similar texts in other surviving manuscripts from a variety of archives all over Russia, and then all textual variants recorded in painstaking detail. The authors reveal the complex transmission and editing processes through which medieval church documents survived to the present day. As Andrei put it, “codicological and textological studies . . . allow us accurately to date and attribute many charters . . . [and determine how] they were dispersed over central secular and ecclesiastical archives, as well as a large number of local repositories, where they were newly systematized by secretaries and clerks who included them in formulary codices” belonging to diocesan bishops (for example, of the Krutitsy, Novgorod, and Perm eparchies) and monastic communities (such as the Novospasskii, Volokolamskii, and Kirillo-Beloozerskii monasteries)³. Andrei was fascinated by this invisible landscape of textual transmission; to him, it revealed “the political and confessional priorities [progammy] of the Russian church leadership” and these church leaders’ place in the formation of the Muscovite state (RFA, 2008: 36).

In addition to his analyses of specific texts, Andrei contributed several other source editions and research articles to the original issue of Russkii feodal’nyi arkhiv⁴. They include the publication of the oldest manuscript compilation of iarlyki (immunity charters) by the Mongol khans, with a critical discussion of earlier attempts by other scholars to date the charters; a thorough description and partial publication of another important formulary codex from the Metropolitanate’s archive (GIM, Uvarov 512) that miraculously survived in Old Believer milieux; the republication of some of the earliest documents from the archive of the St. Sophia Cathedral Diocesan Archive in Novgorod, where he reveals the flaws of nineteenth-century editions of medieval church acts; a critical assessment of proceedings of the Church Council of 1503 that concludes that the council never took place, and that the proceedings resulted from a forgery fabricated during the 1550s; and a text history and genealogy of a kopiinaia kniga (copy book) of church charters assembled at the Metropolitan See of Moscow during the early 1470s and comprised of manuscript fragments stemming from quite different time periods⁵.

Clearly, the metier in which Andrei excelled as few others have was istochnikovedenie, a Russian tradition of critical source study that has no equivalent in Anglo-American scholarship, but is similar to the German and Central European practice of Quellenkunde⁶. Another untranslatable term that describes his approach to historical study is arkheografiia, a practice embodied in the Soviet journal Arkheograficheskii ezhegodnik that might best be described as the search for, and meticulous reconstruction of, forgotten archival legacies (usually resulting in publications of documents based on the principles of textual criticism). The best Soviet scholars of church and religion contributed to this tradition, among them Aleksandr A. Zimin and Ia. S. Lur’e, who studied the manuscript corpus attributed to Iosif Volotskii; N. V. Sinitsyna and D. M. Bulanin, who worked on Maksim Grek’s textual legacy; and, perhaps most notably, V. I. Malyshev, who spent his entire life searching for the manuscripts of the seventeenth-century founding fathers of Old Belief (especially Avvakum)⁷.

Andrei was trained in the tradition of arkheografiia by Nikolai N. Pokrovskii in the 1970s in his native Novosibirsk. His first articles included essays about the manuscripts and archives of the Old Believers, a topic that would remain of tremendous importance to him throughout his lifetime (in fact, Andrei’s last publication was devoted to the Old Believers)⁸. He also wrote several articles about the widely dispersed manuscripts of a neglected branch of Old Belief, the so-called D’iakonovshchina, a group of Bezpopovtsy who established themselves in the forest of Nizhnii Novgorod before spreading to Siberia during the eighteenth century⁹.

Influenced by Pokrovskii’s own interest in eighteenth-century Old Belief, Andrei tracked down rare manuscripts in various Russian libraries or participated as a member of arkheograficheskie ekspeditsii (archeographic expeditions) that traveled to remote Siberian towns and villages. Some of the manuscripts Andrei discovered contained the autographs of Semen Denisov and other founders of the famous Vyg Community¹⁰.

In his studies of Old Believers, Andrei consciously followed in the footsteps of the great nineteenth- and early twentieth-century collectors of Old Belief manuscripts, in particular El’pidifor V. Barsov, Petr S. Smirnov, and Vasilii G. Druzhinin¹¹. In fact, the E. V. Barsov Collection in Moscow’s Lenin Library (now the Russian State Library) and the V. G. Druzhinin Collection in the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg) became two of Andrei’s favorite haunts. He knew these voluminous collections as few others did. During the late 1980s, when foreign scholars were not permitted access to the Barsov collection, Andrei generously offered his help in locating materials. It was stunning to see his immediate recall of relevant manuscript numbers and sometimes even the exact folio pages.

No one in either American or Western European academe could match Andrei’s enormous knowledge of medieval Russian manuscripts. After he moved to the United States in 1990, many Western scholars sought him out for advice. Andrei never hesitated to share his knowledge. In fact, he usually shared so much information and had so many suggestions that one could easily feel overwhelmed and even a bit intimidated. He was available for discussion wherever one managed to track him down. For example, one might see him from afar in the stacks of Harvard University’s Widener or Pusey Libraries and try to run after him. One usually could not catch up with him, because he was a very fast walker. But then one could track him down among the Slavic call numbers. The published descriptions of the principal Russian manuscript collections (in the vicinity of the Old Widener call number Slav 251) were usually a safe bet. There, one would find Andrei leafing through the pages of enormous portfolios, so deeply immersed that one had to tap him on the shoulder to get his attention¹².

While in America, Andrei tried to organize (together with his frequent Moscow collaborator Natal’ia A. Kobiak) the publication of a revised and updated edition of Druzhinin’s pivotal description of Old Believer manuscripts¹³. Unfortunately, he was unable to carry out this project, but he wrote a brilliant essay about the parameters and needs of such a republication project that remains of great interest to scholars of Old Belief¹⁴.

Andrei strongly believed in the primacy of original historical research. He rejected grand theory and deduction, viewing interpretive models and analogies based on the study of European history as detrimental to understanding the complexities and contradictions of the Russian past. In fact, Andrei did not think there were many parallels between Russia and Western Europe: “The most characteristic problem [of studying Russia] is the tendency to blur distinctions between the Western European and Russian Middle Ages, and thereby smoothing over all the zigzags of Russian history.”¹⁵

Andrei also believed that there were important distinctions between Ukrainian, Western Rus’ian (Western Rus’), and Muscovite histories. He called on historians working inside the Russian Federation to read the works of eminent Ukrainian historians, such as M. Hrushevskyi and Omel’ian Pritsak. But he was not confident that his voice would be heard. He observed with frustration that modern (nyneshnie) Russian historians of the Orthodox Church “cannot admit that next to the history of the Muscovite Metropolitan See [called Kievskaia i vseia Rusi] existed the histories of the Lithuanian Metropolitan See [which also called itself Kievskaia i vseia Rusi] and the Galich Metropolitan See.”¹⁶

Another issue Andrei considered of crucial importance for historians of Russia was the questioning of longstanding legends and mythologies. He returned to this theme again and again in his conversations, paper presentations, and writings. For example, when historians of the Russian Federation rediscovered the topic of church history during the Gorbachev period, Andrei warned that most books published since the late 1980s had been written either for popular consumption or for religious edification. His essays in the Orthodox journal Pravoslavnaia obshchina, a rare forum for critical approaches to the Russian Orthodox Church’s past, called on church historians to challenge the assumptions and ideas of both Soviet and prerevolutionary church scholarship¹⁷. He also presented his thoughts on this subject in two lectures he gave at the University of Chicago in November 1991. There, he observed the following:

One after the other historical books appear devoted to church themes—for example, Sergei of Radonezh and the canonization of saints. But unfortunately, the new publications give the impression that everything is already much too familiar. I have read it many times. . . . Before 1917 church ascetics [podvizhniki] were seen as holy men and popular heroes, then they were portrayed as feudal lords and clericalists [klerikali], and now they are again seen as holy men and popular heroes¹⁸.

Andrei acknowledged that prerevolutionary Russian historians, and especially Soviet historians, had to lend lip service to the dominant nationalist and Marxist discourses of their time. However, he believed that the collapse of the Soviet Union provided an unprecedented opportunity to discover new ways of viewing the Russian ecclesiastical past. In particular, he called on historians to address topics that had been neglected by earlier generations of scholars, topics that included the modification of Byzantine models of church organization in medieval Rus’ (why, for example, the number of bishoprics had remained so small in the Russian lands); a careful analysis of the textual discrepancies between Greek originals and Church Slavonic translations (especially canonical texts); the composition and inner functioning of church councils; power struggles among church hierarchs and their association with political factions (including family ties of the Russian church elite with the Kievan and Muscovite courts); an investigation of medieval heresies that takes the religious concerns of dissenters seriously; and a careful examination of popular monasticism and unofficial hermitages (pustyni) that proliferated in Russian provinces during the Middle Ages and the early modern period¹⁹.

Andrei was convinced that much of the material of medieval Russian church history remains unknown and/or incompletely understood to this day. He thus viewed the study of history as a process of discovery and critical examination of texts. His goal was to find as many pieces of the puzzle as possible— that is, the textual history of the medieval Russian church—and make them available to future generations of scholars. Andrei perceived that his voluminous Russkii feodal’nyi arkhiv was merely the first step toward accomplishing this goal:

We consider it the first phase in the preparation of a fundamental publication project, namely, the edition of the basic corpus of the church administrative documents and epistles of Russian hierarchs from the fourteenth to the first third of the sixteenth centuries. Such a publication is indispensable, without it a new step [novyi shag] in the study of Russian church history is inconceivable [nemyslim]²⁰.

Andrei was an idealist who believed that such an ambitious and comprehensive research and publication project could be realized within his own lifetime. And perhaps it could have been, if he had lived past the age of fifty four. Even after the onset of his illness, he continued working with unflagging energy and enthusiasm. The 2005 publication of the invaluable Sochineniia: Kniga glagolemaia Fotios, a collection of writings by Metropolitan Photios (Fotii), was an important contribution toward his monumental vision²¹.

Unfortunately, most of Andrei’s descriptions and analyses of unknown sources or neglected versions of known sources remain widely scattered in journal articles and book chapters²². Often, he published these sources—or at least their most telling sections—in appendices. Among these contributions are text-critical editions of the Ustavy of the Kievan grand princes Vladimir and Iaroslav (based on a manuscript from the Vatican Library)²³; epistles and formularies of Kievan church leaders (such as the Epistle of Metropolitan Iona to Kievan Prince Aleksandr)²⁴; the formularies of Metropolitan Isidor (1437– 41); the Testament of Metropolitan Photios with a survey of all surviving manuscripts²⁵; the Russian version of a letter by the patriarchs of Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Antioch rejecting the Union of Florence (1439); and “various materials most likely copied from the archive of the Rostov and Iaroslavl’ archbishopric,” housed in the collections of the Russian State Library (RGB) and the State Historical Museum (GIM)²⁶.

Andrei’s most significant monograph, Polemika v russkoi tserkvi pervoi treti XVI stoletiia (Moscow: Indrik, 2002), reflects his ethos as a historian. The book offers a critical reexamination of the manuscripts traditionally associated with the so-called nestiazhateli (non-possessors) of the early sixteenth century. It is based on careful inspections of all available manuscript copies (including hitherto unknown copies), detailed reconstructions of textual history (with stemmata), convoys, and sources, as well as paleographical and linguistic analyses.

This monograph focuses on the writings of Vassian Patrikeev, usually viewed as the founding father and principal thinker of the “non-possessors.” Andrei argues that two of Patrikeev’s allegedly most important works, the “Reply of the Kirillov Elders” and the “Dispute with Iosif of Volotsk,” were never penned by him at all. Rather, they were secondary compilations written after Patrikeev’s death and erroneously attributed to him by later scribes. The monk Artemii, who was condemned for heresy by a church council in 1554, was the likely author. He belonged to the second generation of “non-possessors,” whose writings were directed against the Russian Orthodox Church’s growing secular powers and, in particular, against ecclesiastical landownership.

The figure of Patrikeev as revealed in Andrei’s study was not the ideologist whom Soviet historians lauded for advocating the confiscation of church lands and “express[ing] the interests of all layers of Russian society.” Andrei found such apriori interpretations “mechanistic and far removed from the actual historical situation” (44). Rather, in Andrei’s view, Patrikeev was a religious thinker who called for a spiritual renewal rooted in early Christian ideals of apostolic succession and poverty, ideals comparable to those of the early Franciscans and Dominicans in Western Christianity.

Andrei argues convincingly that Patrikeev’s most important contribution was his redaction of the Kormchaia Kniga (Pilot Book), a highly unusual edition based on Bulgarian (Old Slavonic), Serbian, and Byzantine compilations of the Greek Nomocanon²⁷. Patrikeev called on the kniazi tserkvi (princes of the church) to act in accordance with Orthodox canonical teachings, and he polemicized against the moral corruption of the upper clergy, the clergy’s participation in intrigues and power struggles, and its greed for wealth (as exemplified by the purchase of episcopal appointments).

With regards to Patrikeev’s alleged call for the confiscation of church lands, Andrei demonstrates conclusively that this call was issued by radical “non-possessors” such as the monk Artemii. Patrikeev was not opposed to landownership per se (even though he had moral reservations about the ownership of serfs). Rather, he appealed to bishops and monastic elders to voluntarily turn over the administration of their worldly possessions to stewards. He certainly did not write in support of the Kremlin’s right to seize church lands. And his teachings did not provide the ideology for the rising class of pomeshchiki (service nobles) who—according to the standard Soviet view— urged the Kremlin to secularize church lands²⁸. Andrei believed that such interpretations, which continue to influence Russian scholarship today, were derived from false analogies with the centralizing policies of Western European nation states.

Conversations with Aleksandr A. Zimin and acquaintance with the work of Donald Ostrowski, especially his writings on the Church Council of 1503, provided impulses for Andrei’s study of Patrikeev²⁹. Andrei did not overstate his own accomplishment when he claimed that his book offers “a new understanding of the Russian ‘non-possessor movement’ that is free of historiographical legends” (178). The book challenges the accepted wisdom of a long tradition of scholarship first formulated in the works of M. N. Karamzin, N. G. Ustrialov, and K. I. Nevostruev, and then assimilated by Soviet historians such as N. A. Kazakova, Ia. S. Lur’e, and Aleksandr A. Zimin. It is thus all the more noteworthy that Andrei expressed his gratitude to Zimin for having “helped me to articulate my own position more succinctly” (16). Andrei maintained the highest respect for his teacher and mentor who, while forced to adopt the Soviet paradigm in his own publications, nevertheless privately encouraged Andrei to question the ruling dogmas of Russian and Soviet historiography.

Andrei’s other important monograph, Tekst-kentavr o sibirskikh samoedakh (Moscow-Newtonville: Izd. “Arkheograficheskii tsentr,” 1993), examines the earliest Russian encounters with the non-Orthodox populations of Siberia and the traces left by these encounters in medieval manuscripts. The starting point for Andrei’s analysis is a dorozhnik (itinerarium) recorded in Latin by the Habsburg diplomat Sigismund Herberstein about traders who crossed the Ural Mountains and discovered mysterious peoples living along the Arctic littoral³⁰. Andrei claims that this fantastic tale, which describes Siberian natives as noble savages, can be traced to Novgorodian merchants who made contact with Ugric- and Finnic-speaking peoples, such as the Khanty, Mansy, Nentsy, and Samoeds during the fourteenth century. The stories of these merchants were recorded by scribes of the newly established Perm bishopric and subsequently, during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, transformed into legends about cannibals, people without heads and with eyes in their chests, and invisible towns underneath the earth (50, 70). These legends provided the model for Herberstein’s itinerarium. Andrei identifies the literary topoi and stereotypes of the Perm church texts which are somewhat analogous to the cliches of Western traveler accounts to Africa and India. But he is principally concerned with reconstructing oral traditions. He argues that the Perm scribes, familiar with a rich repertoire of stories about the East, confronted the task of “translat[ing] a story from the language of folkloric tradition to the language of bookish legend” (44). After carefully peeling away the layers of Church Slavonic literary tradition, Andrei identifies fragments of eyewitness testimonies by the earliest Russian travelers. These accounts were “a reflection of real life [otrazhenie real’noi zhizni] and not licentia poetica” (45). They reveal specific historical details, such as place names and ethnic self-designations, which Andrei verifies through meticulous cartographic and linguistic analyses. Most interestingly, however, the Perm churchmen’s informants drew on the oral traditions of the natives themselves. For example, they were familiar with Nentsy and Mansy mythologies about people living in the sea and under the earth. They also knew native stories about the healing power of shamans, processions of the dead, and people who die in the winter and come miraculously back to life in the spring.

In this monograph Andrei addresses a topic that is still poorly explored by medieval historians, that is, the attitudes of the Russian Orthodox Church toward the non-natives of the expanding Muscovite state. Much has been written in recent years about the encounters of missionaries and colonizers with the native peoples of the Russian Empire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries³¹. However, significant work remains to be done on earlier encounters and the literary interpretations of these encounters by churchmen. Can a hybrid mixture of Church Slavonic literature, Russian travelers’ tales, and native oral traditions be observed in other regions of Muscovy? To what extent did the manuscript traditions and discourses elucidated by Andrei impact Muscovite missionaries and their plans to convert the natives of Siberia? And how did these medieval precedents influence—and perhaps even predetermine— later encounters between Russians and non-Russians during the Imperial period? These are some of the questions raised by this masterpiece of arkheograficheskii (archeographic) analysis and reconstruction.

Andrei’s enthusiasm was not limited to historical studies; he was also passionate about literature and poetry. During the 1980s, he was an active participant in the Samizdat movement and compiled underground publications of writings by Iosif Brodsky, Osip Mandelshtam, Daniil Kharms, and other banned writers. He usually wrote introductory essays for these literary publications and also provided ample commentaries—as he did in his later scholarly publications.

In 1992, during his sojourn in the United States, Andrei convinced two friends to drive him from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Vermont in the middle of winter because he wanted to visit the writers Alexander Solzhenitsyn and J. D. Salinger, whose work he greatly admired. While he failed to find Solzhenitsyn’s whereabouts, he managed to track down Salinger. Despite arriving unannounced at Salinger’s doorstep, Andrei was not in the least surprised when the famously reclusive Salinger opened the door to talk with him. Andrei later referred back to this remarkable encounter as one of the important moments of his life.

In 2003 Andrei published a collection of poems (Stekliannaia gora [New York: Alexandria, 2003]) that he had written at various stages of his life since 1974³². He dedicated this volume “as a tribute of respect to the memory of those who have already left us” (dan’iu uvazheniia k pamiati tekh, kto uzhe pokinul nas). For Andrei, deceased friends and mentors remained very much present in his life. He often spoke about them and the inspiration he drew from their examples.

Andrei’s mentors included a number of historians, especially Alexandr A. Zimin (1920–80), Alexandr Il’ich Klibanov (1910–1994), Viktor I. Buganov (1928–1996), and Omel’ian Pritsak (1919–2006). Each of them left a deep imprint on Andrei’s thinking, and each had a decisive impact on his life’s journey. Andrei’s encounter with Zimin during the late 1970s inspired him to leave a successful career in television and become a professional historian. Klibanov encouraged Andrei to see “the Christian and biblical culture” of the past and to look beyond the dogma of class warfare imposed by Soviet ideology³³. Buganov, whom Andrei described affectionately as his substitute father, took Andrei under his wing as an aspirant (graduate student) at the Institute of History’s Sektor Istochnikovedeniia. Buganov later became Andrei’s direct superior during his years as Senior Research Fellow (1988– 1999). Pritsak brought Andrei to Cambridge, Massachusetts—“he simply dragged me away by force to America,” as Andrei later recalled (Stekliannaia gora, 5). Pritsak had being impressed by Andrei’s scholarship and dynamic personality when they met in the summer of 1989 at the Institute of History. This chance encounter, and Andrei’s subsequent spur-of-the-moment decision to accept Pritsak’s invitation, had long-term consequences that Andrei could never have anticipated: he would live for nearly sixteen years (until 2006) in the United States.

Andrei expressed a mixture of happiness and sadness about living in the United States. On the one hand, he was grateful for the many fellowships and professional opportunities he was offered: he was a research fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University (1990–91); fellow at the Russian Research Center, Harvard University (1992–93); regional fellow at the George Kennan Institute of Advanced Russian Studies (1994–95); senior scholar in the European Division of the Library of Congress (1995–2000); and research assistant to the director of Dumbarton Oaks (2000–2006). He cherished his close working relationship with Edward L. Keenan, first at Harvard University and then at Dumbarton Oaks, when Keenan was the director.

But Andrei became increasingly lonely in the United States and never quite came to grips with the fact that he no longer had regular access to the Russian archives and libraries which had been his home for so many years. A large number of publication projects during his American sojourn focused on the collections of Harvard University and the Library of Congress. Though of great importance to American scholars, these projects never had the originality and profundity of his earlier archeographic research. The American publications comprised detailed descriptions of manuscript codices and scrolls; documents from the reigns of Elizabeth I, Peter III, Catherine II, and Paul I; an annotated list of 239 imperial decrees housed in the Library of Congress’s Law Collection; registers of papers belonging to Dmitrii A. Volkogonov and other important historical personages; and the introduction to an exhibition catalogue about Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Aleksandra³⁴. Andrei had hoped to resume his research in Russian archives and libraries upon his return to Moscow in the spring of 2006. But his worsening health as well as a dramatically changed scholarly and political landscape made Andrei’s last years very difficult.

Andrei was very concerned about the threats to critical scholarship inside present-day Russia. He predicted ominously that “the field of church history may find itself outside the boundaries of historical scholarship and remain only a field of national-romantic dreams [oblast’iu natsional’noromanticheskikh mechtanii].”³⁵ The only antidote against such a dangerous development, in his mind, was “to subject commonly accepted ideas to scrutiny” and to engage in the constant “deconstruction of the mythologized past” (dekonstruktsiia mifologizirovannogo proshlogo)³⁶. Andrei’s ideal of dispassionate scholarship is succinctly conveyed in the following quotation:

Historians must make a choice without forgetting the spiritual value of everything that tradition has preserved: to believe or not to believe [verit’ ili ne verit’] and work industriously on the reconstruction of genuine facts [nad rekonstruktsiei podlinnikh faktov]. Lev Tolstoi wrote that the past reveals itself more fully every year through the work of scholar-historians, just as the future [reveals itself]. In this paradox lies the profound meaning [ogromnyi smysl] of our occupations with History³⁷.

Andrei thus remained hopeful that serious history writing—especially on religion and church—would prevail in post-Soviet Russia and critically inform Russia’s future. His call for a deepening of knowledge by continuous archival research, rigorous questioning of established truths, and historical writing without ideological preconceptions remains the most important contribution of his rich scholarly legacy. Now that Andrei is among “those who have already left us,” let us keep his legacy alive in the hope that it will be embraced by future generations of Russian historians.

________________________________________________
NOTES

1. For an appreciation of Andrei by friends and colleagues, see his memorial blog at http://andrei-pliguzov.blogspot.com/ and the entry “Pliguzov, Andrei Ivanovich” in the Russian Wikipedia at http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/ which contains several cross links, including an interesting 19 August 2006 radio interview with Echo Moscow about Edward L. Keenan’s new book on the Igor Tale.

2. The focus of this essay is on Andrei’s two authored monographs and his opus magnum, that is, the six volumes of Russkii feodal’nyi arkhiv (hereafter, RFA) which capture the essence of Andrei’s work. The following books are not discussed in this essay: Smuta v Moskovskom gosudarstve: Rossiia nachala XVII stoletiia v zapiskakh sovremennikov (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1989) (with I. A. Tikhoniuk); Istoriko-kul’turnoe nasledie Russkogo Severa: Annotirovannaia bibliografiia, 1976–1986 (Moscow: Nauchno-issledovatel’skii institut kul’tury, 1989) (with N. R. Pavlova et al.); translations (with commentaries) of D. Fennell, The Crisis of Medieval Russia, 1200–1304 (Moscow: Progress, 1989) (with A. L. Khoroshkevich), and Sigismund Herberstein, Notes on Muscovy (with V. L. Ianin, A. V. Nazarenko, and A. L. Khoroshkevich); a republication (with commentaries) of V. O. Kliuchevskii, Drevnerusskie zhitiia sviatykh kak istoricheskii istochnik (Moscow: Nauka, 1988) (with V. L. Ianin); Die Grossen Lesemenaen des Metropoliten Makarij: Uspenskii Spisok: 1–11 marta (Freiburg: Weiher Verlag, 1998) (with E. Weiher); and “Gustynskaia letopis’,” Polnoe sobranie russkikh letopisei, vol. 40 (Moscow: Rossiiskaia Akademiia Nauk, Dmitrii Bulanin Co. Ltd., 2003) (with V. I. Buganov and B. A. Rybakov). A list of Andrei’s publications (updated by Roman Rakitov) can be found at http://pliguzov.20m.com. The location of this webpage may change in the future.

3. RFA (2008), 34-35.

4. Unfortunately, the 2008 abridged version omits Andrei’s commentaries and articles. This is a major drawback of the republication that scholars should take into account when consulting this edition.

5. “Kratkoe sobranie iarlykov ordynskikh khanov, dannykh russkim mitropolitam i dukhovenstvu,” RFA, 3:585-99; (with G. V. Semenchenko), “Neopublikovannye gramoty iz sbornika GIM, Uvar. 512,” RFA, 3:591-603; (with G. V. Semenchenko), “Dokumenty iz arkhiva Novgorodskogo Sofiiskogo doma i mitropolich’ei kazny, pomeshchennye v Avgustovskikh tomakh Velikikh Minei Chetiikh mitropolita Makariia,” RFA, 3:655-96; “Sobornyi otvet 1503 goda,” RFA, 4:749-813; and “Gipoteticheskii sbornik mitropolita Filippa,” RFA, 5:1029-33.

6. Cf. a recent publication by the Institute of Austrian History at the University of Vienna about the archival legacies of the Habsburg Monarchy, in Quellenkunde der Habsburgermonarchie (16.–18. Jahrhundert): Ein examplarisches Handbuch, ed. Josef Pauser, Martin Scheutz, and Thomas Winkelbauer (Vienna-Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2004).

7. Cf. A. A. Zimin and Ia. S. Lur’e, Poslaniia Iosifa Volotskogo (Leningrad: Izd. Akademii nauk SSSR, 1959); N. V. Sinitsyna, Maksim Grek v Rossii (Moscow: Nauka, 1977); D. M. Bulanin, Perevody i poslaniia Maksim Greka: Neizdannye teksty (Leningrad: Nauka, 1984); V. I. Malyshev, “Neizvestnye i maloizvestnye materialy o protopope Avvakume,” Trudy Otdela Drevnerusskoi Literatury 9 (1953): 387-404; and idem, Ust’- tsilemskie rukopisnye sborniki XVI-XX vv. (Syktyvkar, 1960).

8. “Alexander the Deacon in Search of the ‘Genuine Truth of God,’ ” in Russia’s Dissident Old Believers, 1650–1950, ed. Georg B. Michels and Robert L. Nichols, Minnesota Mediterranean and East European Monographs, no. 19 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, Modern Greek Studies, 2009), 233-76.

9. “Drevneishie knigi d’iakonovskogo soglasiia,” in Obshchestvennoe soznanie, knizhnost’, literatura perioda feodalizma, ed. D. S. Likhachev (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1990), 58-67; and “D’iakon Aleksandr v poiskakh ‘Istinnoi pravdy Bozhiei,’ ” in Staroobriadchestvo: Istoriia, kul’tura, sovremmenost’: Tezisy konferentsii, ed. O. P. Ershova et al. (Moscow: Muzei istorii i kul’tury staroobriadchestva, 1997), 70-72.

10. “Avtorskie sborniki osnovatelei Vygovskoi pustyni,” in Drevnerusskaia rukopisnaia kniga i ee bytovanie v Sibiri (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1982), 103-12; and “K izucheniiu ornamentiki rannikh rukopisei Vyga,” in Rukopisnaia traditsiia XVI–XIX vv. na Vostoke Rossii (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1983), 82-101.

11. See, for example, E. V. Barsov, “Opisanie rukopisei i knig, khraniashchiskhsia v Vygoleksinskoi biblioteke,” Letopis’ Zaniatii Arkheograficheskoi Kommissii 6 (St. Petersburg: Imp. Arkheograficheskaia Kommissiia, 1872–1875): 1-85; P. S. Smirnov, Vnutrennie voprosy v raskole v XVII veke (St. Petersburg: Pechatnia S. P. Iakovleva, 1898); and V. G. Druzhinin, Pomorskie paleografy nachala XVIII stoletiia (Petrograd: 9- ia Gos. Tipografiia, 1921).

12. Among these portfolios is the Spisok knig biblioteki V. G. Druzhinina (s. l., 1938?) [Slav 251.20F], a type-written inventory of Vasilii G. Druzhinin’s library confiscated by the NKVD (Russian secret police under Stalin) after Druzhinin’s death in 1936. Andrei wrote a moving article about the fate of the Druzhinin library and its sale to U.S. libraries by the Soviet authorities, in his “Biblioteka Vasiliia Grigor’evicha Druzhinina,” Otechestvennye arkhivy 5 (1994): 20-24.

13. V. G. Druzhinin, Pisaniia russkikh staroobriadtsev: Perechen’ spiskov, sostavlennyi po pechatnym opisaniiam rukopisnykh sobranii (St. Petersburg: Tip. M. A. Aleksandrova, 1912).

14. Andrei I. Pliguzov (with Natal’ia A. Kobiak), “O pereizdanii knigi V. G. Druzhinina ‘Pisaniia russkikh staroobriadtsev,’ ” in Staroobriadchestvo: Istoriia, Kul’tura, Sovremennost’: Materialy konferentsii (Moscow, 1997), 57-72.

15. “Notes on Edward L. Keenan as a Historian,” in Kamen’ Kraeugolen: Rhetoric of the Medieval Slavic World: Essays Presented to Edward L. Keenan on his Sixtieth Birthday by his Colleagues and Students, ed. Andrei I. Pliguzov, Nancy Shields Kollmann, Donald Ostrowski, and Daniel Rowland (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995) (=vol. 19 of Harvard Ukrainian Studies), xvi-xix, esp. xviii.

16. “Dve lektsii po istoriografii,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 25 (1998), no. 4: 387-408, esp. 405.

17. Pravoslavnaia obshchina 26 (1995), no. 2: 65-81, and 31 (1996), no. 1: 82-93.

18. “Dve lektsii po istoriografii,” 398.

19. For a complete list of unaddressed topics that Andrei considered important, see “Dve lektsii po istoriografii,” 406-8. Andrei repeatedly remarked that the East German scholar Fairy von Lilienfeld’s work on Nil Sorskii was an inspiration to him. Cf. Fairy von Lilienfeld, Nil Sorskij und seine Schriften (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1963), a book that Andrei described as brilliant (blestiashchaia) in Polemika v russkoi tserkvi pervoi treti XVI stoletiia (Moscow: Indrik, 2002), 38.

20. RFA, 3:551.

21. Andrei I. Pliguzov and Natal’ia A. Kobiak, eds., Fotii, mitropolit Kievskii i vseia Rusi: Sochineniia: Kniga glagolemaia Fotios (Moscow: Indrik, 2005).

22. His other important opus, Sources on the History of the Rus’ Metropolitanate: The Fourteenth-Early Sixteenth Centuries, is still awaiting publication by the Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University.

23. “O Vatikanskom spiske Ustavov Vladimira i Iaroslava,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 24 (1997), no. 3: 239-50.

24. “An Attempt at a Commentary: Two Proposed Texts for Future Publication,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 29 (2002), no. 1: 1-18.

25. (With G. V. Semenchenko), “Novgorodo-pskovskie otnosheniia vo vtoroi polovine 1430-kh godov i formuliarnik mitropolita Isidora,” in Problemy istorii Novgoroda: Novgorodskie zemli XV veka: Tezisy dokladov i soobshchenii nauchnogo simpoziuma (Novgorod, 1986), 10-14; and “Dukhovnaia gramota Mitropolita Fotiia: Tekstologicheskie zametki,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 24 (1997), no. 4: 373-93.

26. “Ot Florentiiskoi Unii k avtokefalii russkoi tserkvi,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 19 (1995): 513-30; and “Tikhon of Rostov, or Russian political games in 1489,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 22 (1995), no. 3: 309-20.

27. For an English synopsis of Andrei’s thoughts about Patrikeev’s compilation of the Kormchaia Kniga, see his “Canon Law as a Field for Ecclesiastical Debate: The Sixteenth- Century Kormchaia of Vassian Patrikeev,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 18 (1994), nos. 3-4: 191-209, esp. 192. On the Greek sources of Patrikeev’s Pilot Book, see ibid., 197-99, and Polemika, 144-45, 149-52, 166-70, 175-77.

28. On this theme, see also Andrei I. Pliguzov, “O razmerakh tserkovnogo zemlevladeniia v Rossii XVI veka,” Istoriia SSSR (1988), no. 2: 157-63.

29. Donald Ostrowski and Edward L. Keenan, eds., The Council of 1503: Source Studies and Questions of Ecclesiastical Landowning in Sixteenth-Century Muscovy: A Collection of Seminar Papers (Cambridge, Mass., 1977); and idem, “Church Polemics and Monastic Land Acquisition in Sixteenth-Century Muscovy,” The Slavonic and East European Review 64 (1986), no. 3: 355-79.

30. See also Andrei I. Pliguzov, “Pervye russkie opisaniia Sibirskoi zemli,” Voprosy istorii (1987), no. 5: 38-50.

31. See, for example, Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994); and Robert P. Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky, eds., Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001).

32. Andrei also wrote a small volume of literary anecdotes during his Samizdat years under the name of Daniil Kharms. Some of these anecdotes were erroneously published in the collected works of Kharms during the early 1990s . Cf. Andrei I. Pliguzov, V maske Kharmsa (New York: Izd. Alexandria, 2004).

33. Andrei I. Pliguzov, “Pamiati Aleksandra Il’icha Klibanova,” Arkhiv Russkoi istorii 4 (1994): 192-95.

34. See, for example, “Slavianskie rukopisnye materialy v bibliotekakh Garvardskogo universiteta,” Otechestvennye arkhivy 6 (1993): 36-45; (with W. R. Veder), “The Cyrillic Manuscript Codices of Harvard College Library,” Palata knigopisnaia 27-28 (1995): 27-34; “Early Russian Materials in the Library of Congress,” Russian American/ Russkii amerikanets 22 (2000): 87-89; “Observations on the Early Russian Collections of the Library of Congress,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 29 (2002), no. 4: 79-98; and (with V. N. Kozliakov) “Kollektsiia rukopisnykh stolbtsov i drugie russkie materialy v iuridicheskom otdele Biblioteki Kongressa SSHA,” in Arkheograficheskii ezhegodnik za 2003 god (Moscow, 2004), 203-19. On the other publications (including internet publications) that resulted from Andrei’s research in the Harvard library system and the Library of Congress, see the website http://pliguzov.20m.com/.

35. “Dve lektsii po istoriografii,” 406.

36. “Notes on Edward L. Keenan as a Historian,” xvi; and “Dve lektsii po istoriografii,” 396.

37. “Bitva na Kulikovskom pole v svidetel’stvakh sovremennikov i v pamiati potomkov,” in Zhivaia voda Nepriadvy, ed. Andrei I. Pliguzov (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 1988), 389-408, esp. 399-400.