ABSTRACT
The S1. Petersburg historical school evolved throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of its fullest expressions can be found in the work of Leningrad University Professor S.N. Valk (1887-1975), who underlined the importance of studying local conditions and characteristics of academic development at a given university in order to understand their shared destiny. Valk also linked the rise and development of the historical schools of St. Petersburg and Moscow to specific social and political conditions: in particular, St. Petersburg University, located in the capital city, was closer to the government and less involved in sociopolitical life than was Moscow University.l
It has been customary to attribute the founding of the S1. Petersburg historical scbool to M.S. Kutorga, while T.N. Granovskii is considered the founder of the Moscow school. Kutorga, a noted expert on sources who specialized in the history of ancient Greece, was a graduate of S1. Petersburg University and taught there from 1835 onward; from 1869 to 1874 he taught at Moscow University. 'Granovskii, also a graduate of the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg University, nonetheless pent his entire pedagogical and scientific career in association with Moscow University. It was there, in 1839, that Granovskii taught his first course on the history of the Middle Ages and Western Europe. A talented speaker, Granovskii became wellknown as an educator and public figure. Valk, however, believed that if Granovskii had taught at S1. Petersburg University, he would never have achieved the kind of public recognition that he enjoyed in Moscow.2 146
Although Kutorga was one of the sources of the St. Petersburg historical school, Valk noted that it was "the creative efforts of A.E. Presniakov that marked the bright flowering of its creation," saying that "nobody ever represented the basic features of its academic character better than he." Presniakov was interested in general questions of history and sociology from the earliest years of his academic activity, but his first work as a college student "in the traditions of the St. Petersburg school" was devoted to a source study of the "chronicle.,,3 Presniakov, naturally, considered himself a representative of the St. Petersburg historical school, and in the remarks he made just before his doctoral defense, he defined its characteristics precisely. The dominant feature of the school, as he characterized it, was "scientific realism as reflected primarily in the specific, direct treatment of the source and the fact-without regard to historiographical tradition": that is, reinstating the rights of sources and facts, according them more complete and immediate importance without subordinating their selection, analysis, and interpretation to a schema developed in advance and without the sociological dogmatism so damaging to any critical treatment of sources. In reference to works by the so-called juridical school (best represented by S.M. Solov' ev and V.O. Kliuchevskii), reflecting their investigation of the process by which the Russian state was formed in the fifteenth century, Presniakov noted: "the theoretical approach to the material ... turned the primary source data into illustrations of a predetermined schema--but not one that was derived from them-of the historical-psychological doctrine being advocated." As a result, these historians deliberately selected sources that were less reliable. In particular, they gave preference to later sources and refrained from using earlier sources-only because the former "better illustrated the proposed schema." "The dominance of theoretical interpretations ... has led to such a one-sided selection of data, which allows the elimination from consideration of everything that does not illustrate the preferred schema and fails to confirm its premises." This type of historical thinking, in Presniakov's opinion, developed "under the influence of German idealistic philosophy and represent[ed] a reflection ofHegelianism.,,4
Presniakov specifically contrasted the S1. Petersburg historical school with the Moscow school, which he equated with the "juridical school" and which, in particular, was distinguished by a greater amount of ideology and a propensity for systematization, as a consequence of which the material derived from sources did not play the kind of fundamental role that it should. The approaches to that material, therefore, suffered from an excessive tendency to theorize. Presniakov--and, following him, Valk as well-- attributed a considerable role in the formation of the St. Petersburg historical school to K.N. Bestuzhev-Riumin, V.G. Vasil' evskii, and S.F.
