scholarly journals Slavic Scholar and Educator Pyotr Bezsonov (1827-1898): A Life and Legacy

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 134
Author(s):  
Alexander Kaplin ◽  
Olha Honcharova ◽  
Valentyna Hlushych ◽  
Halyna Marykivska ◽  
Viktoriia Budianska ◽  
...  

Nowadays the name of Pyotr Bezsonov, the acknowledged in pre-revolutionary Russia scholar, is known to but a narrow circle of researchers as some myths and stereotypes about him have proved difficult to overwhelm. Yet, he traced in the history of Slavic studies as an assiduous collector of ancient Russian and Slavic literature works and explorer of Bulgarian, Belarusian and Serbian folklore, folk songs in particular, a scrutinizer of the Slavic languages and dialects, a talented pedagogue and editor. Based on the genuine sources, such as letters, documents and memoirs, as well as nineteenth century publications, which have become the bibliographic rarities, this article aims to present the revised biography of the scholar through revealing the hitherto unknown or underestimated facts of his life and research activity; also, to highlight his achievements in the field of Slavic history, literatures and linguistics; finally, to determine the place deserved by Bezsonov in Russian and European culture as a whole. The special attention is given to the Kharkiv period, related to the years of his professorship at Kharkiv University.   Received: 17 February 2021 / Accepted: 9 April 2021 / Published: 10 May 2021

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 226-235
Author(s):  
Marina M. Valentsova ◽  
Elena S. Uzeneva

The essay was written to mark the 25th anniversary of the Slavic Institute named after Jan Stanislav SAS (Bratislava). The Institute was founded to conduct interdisciplinary research on the relationships of the Slovak language and culture with other Slavic languages and cultures, as well as to study the Slovak-Latin, Slovak-Hungarian, and Slovak-German cultural and linguistic interactions in ancient times and the Middle Ages. The article introduces the main milestones in the formation and development of the Institute, its employees, the directions of their scientific work, and their significant publications. The main areas of research of the Slavic Institute (initially the Slavic Cabinet) cover linguistics (lexicography, history of language), history, folklore, cultural studies, musicology, and textology. Much attention is paid to the annotated translation of foreign religious texts into Slovak. A valuable contribution of the Institute to Slavic Studies is the creation of a database of Cyrillic and Latin handwritten and printed texts related to the Byzantine-Slavic tradition in Slovakia.


1975 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-333 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. M. S. Priestly

Summary The first family-tree diagram in August Schleicher’s (1821–68) published work appeared in 1853, seven years after his first printed discussion of the family-tree concept. In 1853 there also appeared Čteni o srovnavaci mluvnici slovanské by the Czech scholar František Ladislav Čelakovský (1799–1852); this book also contained a family-tree diagram. Since Čelakovský and Schleicher were contemporaries in Prague for over two years, their interrelationship is of interest: was this rivalry of collaboration? At first sight, a coincidence seems improbable. In the available work on and by Schleicher, Čelakovský is never mentioned; in the writings on and by Čelakovský, Schleicher’s name is never linked to his. However, the two had very many common interests. Apart from being colleagues at Charles University, they shared the same friends and enemies, were both interested in music and botany, and so on. Moreover, both were working on Slavic Historical Linguistics during the period in question. On the other hand, their personalities were such that the possibility of a mutual antipathy must not be excluded. Given the background to Čelakovský’s life and work, including the legends of the common origin of the Slavs and the obviously close interrelationships of the Slavic languages; the burgeoning of interest in Slavic history and linguistics, and in Panslavicism; the popularity of genealogy; and the developments in classificatory techniques along natural scientific lines, it is argued that Čela-kovský’s depiction of a family-tree for the Slavic languages could be quite naturally expected from him at this point in time, without any influence from Schleicher. On the other hand, Schleicher’s first family-tree diagrams were the next logical step in his own development. Moreover, the actual form of the diagrams in question suggests that they may indeed have been developed independently. This puzzle in the history of linguistics remains unsolved: collaboration, rivalry, and coincidence are all possible.


Author(s):  
Gavan McCarthy

This paper presents a case study that demonstrates how a long term research activity, with the intention to create a scholarly edition of scientific correspondence, can be liberated from its print paradigm strictures to join the twenty first century world of interconnected knowledge. The Von Mueller Correspondence Project has produced a corpus of over 15,600 digitally transcribed letters and related materials focused on the period 1840 to 1896. These are complemented by materials in a range of forms that refer to Mueller dating from 1814 to 1931. Mueller was a prolific correspondent and established links with hundreds of fellow botanists and biologists across the globe; most of these, and certainly the most notable, will be registered in the History of Science Society Isis Cumulative Bibliography as Authority Records with links to publications about them and is some cases publications by them. The long-term plan is to systemically interlink the Von Mueller Correspondence Project digital corpus and the Isis Cumulative Bibliography and develop the synergies that will drive digital humanities analysis and future scholarly endeavour. That is the vision but what is the reality? At what stage is the project now? How did it get this far? What steps remain? How does the story of this project help us better understand the imperatives of digital scholarship – its strengths and its challenges?


2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Marcoline

In Les Visions de la nuit dans les campagnes (1851–1853), George Sand responded to the French government’s newly announced project of collecting the ‘popular’ or folk songs of France, with a critique of their methods of collection as perfunctory. Sand was adamant not only about a more rigorous approach to amassing the nation’s folk songs but also about the inclusion of the music with the lyrics, and her concise, insightful critique of archival methods came after nearly two decades of her own occupation with rendering music in her fiction and, more immediately, a decade focused on folk music in many of what are known as her ‘rustic’ novels. In particular, I bring to the fore in this article discussions in Sand’s expansive novel Consuelo; La Comtesse de Rudolstadt (1842–1844) which both insist upon the historical, cultural and personal significance of the preservation of folk music and navigate the tensions of preserving an art form that is fundamentally non-static and ephemeral, in order to articulate the value Sand places on musical sensibility, memory and heritage. I argue that Les Visions de la nuit dans les campagnes stands along with Sand’s fiction as an ardent defense against the loss of the musical heritage of provincial France in the hands of the state’s archivists. This article thus situates George Sand’s investment in the cultural production from the Berry region within the early history of nineteenth-century music ethnography in France, while maintaining Sand’s own understanding of her cultural production as poetic rather than scientific.


Author(s):  
Shelley Hales

Charles Garnier’s exhibition L’Histoire de l’habitation humaine, designed for the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, included reconstructions of Greek, Roman and, most originally, a Gallo-Roman house that represented Classical antiquity. The accounts of Garnier’s lost houses offer a means to explore the ways in which the physical resurrection of the domestic past became a powerful means of literal and metaphorical place-making for visitors to exhibitions in Britain and France throughout the nineteenth century. They provide an opportunity to articulate more closely the changing perceptions in European culture. These transpired in both the roles of these reconstructions and the nature of antiquity’s relationship to contemporary personal and national identity. The chapter also documents an ethnographic turn that allows scholars to look back at the century’s domestic reconstructions through a different (and perhaps less comfortable) lens.


Menotyra ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vida Bakutytė

The article analyses carefully selected and research-focused biographical facts and documents of two prominent musicians, Stanisław Moniuszko (1819–1872) and Wiktor Każyński (1812–1867), who lived and created in Vilnius in the middle of the nineteenth century. The research enables us to identify which one of them is the author of the manuscript titled “Material for Further Adaptations of Lithuanian Folk Songs” (Pol., “Materialy dalsze do obrabiania pieśni ludu litewskiego”). The publication highlights the importance of this document the title and content of which entail the activity of collecting Lithuanian folk songs that is so significant for the studies into the music history of Lithuania. New insights into the biographies, creative work, and correspondence of the two musicians provide an opportunity to verify the possibly erroneous statement established in historiography, according to which the authorship of this manuscript is attributed to Stanisław Moniuszko. Clarification of various circumstances associated with the origin of the above-mentioned document presented in the article leads to the conclusion that its authorship should be attributed to Wiktor Każyński, a composer and contemporary of Stanisław Moniuszko.


2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans-JüRgen Lechtreck

Two early nineteenth century texts treating the production and use of wax models of fruit reveal the history of these objects in the context of courtly decoration. Both sources emphasise the models' decorative qualities and their suitability for display, properties which were not simply by-products of the realism that the use of wax allowed. Thus, such models were not regarded merely as visual aids for educational purposes. The artists who created them sought to entice collectors of art and natural history objects, as well as teachers and scientists. Wax models of fruits are known to have been collected and displayed as early as the seventeenth century, although only one such collection is extant. Before the early nineteenth century models of fruits made from wax or other materials (glass, marble, faience) were considered worthy of display because contemporaries attached great importance to mastery of the cultivation and grafting of fruit trees. This skill could only be demonstrated by actually showing the fruits themselves. Therefore, wax models made before the early nineteenth century may also be regarded as attempts to preserve natural products beyond the point of decay.


2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Funk

In the history of botany, Adam Zalužanský (d. 1613), a Bohemian physician, apothecary, botanist and professor at the University of Prague, is a little-known personality. Linnaeus's first biographers, for example, only knew Zalužanský from hearsay and suspected he was a native of Poland. This ignorance still pervades botanical history. Zalužanský is mentioned only peripherally or not at all. As late as the nineteenth century, a researcher would be unaware that Zalužanský’s main work Methodi herbariae libri tres actually existed in two editions from two different publishers (1592, Prague; 1604, Frankfurt). This paper introduces the life and work of Zalužanský. Special attention is paid to the chapter “De sexu plantarum” of Zalužanský’s Methodus, in which, more than one hundred years before the well-known De sexu plantarum epistola of R. J. Camerarius, the sexuality of plants is suggested. Additionally, for the first time, an English translation of Zalužanský’s chapter on plant sexuality is provided.


2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-336
Author(s):  
PIOTR DASZKIEWICZ ◽  
MICHEL JEGU

ABSTRACT: This paper discusses some correspondence between Robert Schomburgk (1804–1865) and Adolphe Brongniart (1801–1876). Four letters survive, containing information about the history of Schomburgk's collection of fishes and plants from British Guiana, and his herbarium specimens from Dominican Republic and southeast Asia. A study of these letters has enabled us to confirm that Schomburgk supplied the collection of fishes from Guiana now in the Laboratoire d'Ichtyologie, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris. The letters of the German naturalist are an interesting source of information concerning the practice of sale and exchange of natural history collections in the nineteenth century in return for honours.


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