Seminarium Kondakovianum as a European Centre for the Crimean Studies (1920s)

An art historian and an expert in architectural objects restoration N. P. Kondakov emigrated to Czechoslovakia where a circle of emigrant historians shaped around him. This scholarly society developing from the Byzantologist N. P. Kondakov’s home circle in Prague was titled in Byzantine way, Seminarium Kondakovianum. After his death in February 1925, this small-in-number academic community with support from the Czechoslovak government developed into a foreign school of Byzantologists and Russian historians. Thus, there appeared a Russian institution with international statute in Prague. The study of intertwined western and eastern influences in Russian history became a typical motif of Russian scholarly thought in emigration. In this connection, the Crimea became an interesting object for the researches and historical generalizations by the Seminaium members. The paper introduces into the scholarship the materials from the archive of the Seminarium Kondakovianum (Kondakov Institute) now residing in the Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The analysis attracts the documents from N. P. Kondakov’s personal collection at the Literary Archives of Written National Monuments of the Slavonic Library in Prague. There are interesting unpublished manuscripts by the Seminarium members discovered by the author. There were three circles of Crimean researchers determined at the Seminarium’s works: historians living in Prague who studied the mediaeval history of the Crimea and the history of research (N. M. Beliaev, G. V. Vernadsky, A. P. Kalitinskii, D. А. Rasovskii, N. P. Toll’); a group of historians from the USSR attracted by G. V. Vernadsky to send their papers for discussion (D. V. Ainalov, S. А. Zhebelev, N. V. Izmailova, A. I. Markevich, and others); Russian emigrant historians living in other countries (M. I. Rostovtsev, alter on G. V. Vernadsky). G. V. Vernadsky was the chief organizer and the academic curator of the Seminarium. G. V. Vernadsky’s skillful practice on attraction to the Seminarium of leading Soviet experts in the Crimean studies allowed the annual to publish their works thus enlarging the sphere of the historians’ scholarly communications. The contacts (correspondence) with the Taurida Society for History, Archaeology, and Ethnography (Simferopol) and the State Museum of Chersonese (Sevastopol) were established. Hysteria made by the Soviet secret service and Communist party leaders around the “case of S. A. Zhebelev,” directly connected with the cooperation of Soviet and emigrant historians, resulted in the cease of the said contacts and book exchange. In 1931, the Seminarium was reshaped into N. P. Kondakov Institute with the change of the participants and the disappearance of the Crimea aspect from the agenda for sessions.