ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a provisional corpus of commemorative texts devoted to a selection of eminent literary historians and philologists who prompted a particularly large production of 'hagiographical' writing at the turn of the twentieth century. Biographical discourse was one of the most important textual forms through which Russian scholarship negotiated its identity as a professional practice at the turn of the twentieth century. It was in the biographies of its members that the academic community defined its stakes and values, and charted its symbolic structures and hierarchies. In Memory of the Academician Aleksandr Nikolaevich Veselovskii is typical of the commemorative volumes published in honour of great scholars at the turn of the century. The manner in which scholars interiorized commemorative biographical discourse in order to define their most intimate selfhood is evident in Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii's Reminiscences, written at his dacha in Odessa in 1918-20 and published posthumously by his wife in 1923.
