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
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.
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