Igor P. Eremin in the letters of Varvara P. Adrianova-Peretz to Nikolay K. Gudziy

Abstract

The school of academician Vladimir Peretz became the basis of modern historical and philological studies of the Russian Middle Ages. Varvara Adrianova-Peretz and Nikolai Gudziy were his students in Kiev and Igor Eremin at Petrograd University. The paper considers the attitude of the older generation of V. N. Peretz’s students to the younger ones by considering the example of I. P. Eremin. The research material is the long-term correspondence of Adrianova-Peretz and Gudziy stored at the Institute of Russian Literature. The letters mainly concern scholarly issues, situation in the Pushkin House, and staff of the Department of Old Russian Literature. Eremin worked in the Department since 1934. In her letters written in the 1930s, Varvara Pavlovna talks about Eremin’s participation in collective works, expresses concern about his personal life and writes about his connections with the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Since 1947, when Adrianova-Peretz took over the management of the Department, her relationship with Eremin became quite complicated. While recognizing Eremin’s talent and efficiency, Varvara Pavlovna expressed her preference in organizing the work in the Department not to V. N. Peretz’s pupils (I. P. Eremin and M. O. Skripil) but to her own, D. S. Likhachev, who became the head of the Department in 1954 to work with his own students. Eremin’s activities limited to the Pushkin House were fully concentrated on Leningrad University where he established his own school in the tradition of V. N. Peretz, with L. Dmitriev, N. Demkova, and E. Romodanovskaya being its members.