The Saint Petersburg Days of Classical Studies

Development of Classical philology and archaeology in Russia got a powerful impetus at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, which was given by a generation of scholars whose works contributed to the fact that the period became known as the golden age of Russian historical and philological studies. One of the brightest stars in the constellation of this Pleiad was Mikhail Ivanovich Rostovtsev (1870–1952). A professor at the St. Petersburg university, he became a full academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences at the age of 46, but in 1918 was forced to leave Petrograd forever. Actually, even before his emigration, he was already a renowned first-class scholar both at home and abroad. His senior colleague, academician Vasiliy V. Latyshev specified such features of M.I. Rostovtsev's personality as deep dedication to science, unusually broad scholarly interests, enthusiastic energy, gift of initiative, and ability to extremely intensive work. Rostovtsev's works promoted the brilliant scholar to the ranks of the founders of the socio-economic stream in the world's studies of Classical antiquity and made him a coryphaeus, one of the leading figures in archeology of the 20th century. These works were based on the entire spectrum of sources — narrative, papyrological, epigraphic, numismatic, and archaeological. From late 1890s M.I. Rostovtsev, whose research had been concentrated around Hellenistic and Roman antiquity of the Mediterranean, gradually turned to the problems of Classical and barbarian antiquities of the North Pontic area, which, according to Latyshev, constituted "a direct and natural duty of Russian science". In this field he had no equal. He created fundamentals of specifically historic, theoretical and methodological foundations for the study of materials basic for historical and archaeological investigations of the barbarized outskirts of the Classical Oecumene. Deepening the ideas of his teacher academician Nikodim Pavlovich Kondakov, Mikhail Rostovtsev put forward a cultural and historical concept of "Hellenic and Iranian" nature of the "North Pontic cultural synthesis", a certain historical and archaeological systematic interference and interrelationship of Greek and Barbarian cultures at littoral of Pontus Euxinus. The world science got from the Russian scholar methodological approach, which he had proposed to discover the fundamentals of the global historical process observed at the vast territories and cultural space of Eurasia during a millennium — from Archaic antiquity till Early Middle Ages. This discovery is a key contribution of Mikhail Rostovtsev to the world science of archaeology in the 20th century.

Several generations of domestic and foreign researchers became the successors of M.I. Rostovtsev's work. Among them are participants of the"Bosporus Phenomenon" International Conference, which in 2020 is dedicated to the 150th anniversary of his birth. In the current context of modern science, they implement and detail the research programme of the Northern Black Sea region, formulated by M.I. Rostovtsev a century ago.

©Irina V. Tunkina

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