A. E. Presniakov: A Note on His Library at Columbia and His Contributions to the History of Russia

ABSTRACT

This paper recounts the details of the purchase of the historian E. A. Presniakov’s Russian library by the Columbia University Library in 1930 and gives a general description of its components and significance. It uses the library as the basis for a general assessment of the breadth and depth of Presniakov historical contributions, concluding that the originality of insight and interpretation place him among a number of great prerevolutionary historians. The lateness of his professional development, culminating after the Bolshevik seizure of power and during the vicissitudes of the 1920s, and then his early death by cancer have deprived him of that recognition. This paper describes and assesses his major works on medieval Russia, the Lithuanian-Russian state and Ukraine, as well as his late writings on nineteenth century monarchs.

KEYWORDS:

• Scientific realism
• autocracy
• samoderzhavie
• princely law
• nationality
• great prince
• tsarstvo
• princely law
• escheat

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ New York Times, March 9, 1931.

² “Library Now Ranks with Three in Richest Collections of Russian History,” Columbia Daily Spectator (New York, NY), March 10, 1931, 1.

³ Edward Kasinec first viewed the original collection inventory in Low Library Archives in the late 1960s, while then a graduate student at Columbia. He then strove in vain to have some of the autographed and early imprints transferred from the Butler stacks to the Rare Books and Manuscript Library.

⁴ Simeon J. Bolan served as an intermediary between Columbia University’s influential Librarian, Charles C. Williamson (served l926-l940) and the Soviet agency Mezhdunarodnaia Kniga, which dealt with sales of books abroad.

⁵ P. G. Rogoznyi, “Russkiii istorik Aleksandr Presniakov i ego neizvestnyi portrait,” Peterburgskii Istoricheskii Zhurnal no. 1 (2014), 256.

⁶ N. L. Rubinshtein, Russkaia Istoriografiia (Moscow: Ogiz, 1941), 502–04, 525–34.

⁷ V.S. Brachev, Russkii Istorik A. E. Presniakov (1870–1929) (St. Petersburg: Stomm, 2002), 21–22.

⁸ Rubinshtein, Russkaia Istoriografiia, 495.

⁹ V. G. Vovina-Lebedeva, Shkoly issledovaniia russkikh letopisei XIX vv (St.Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanina, 2011), 199.

¹⁰ A. E. Presniakov, Lektsii po russkoi istorii, vol. 2 (Moscow: Sotsialno-ekonomicheske izdatel’stvo Gos. Sotsialno-ekonomicheske izdatel’stvo.,1938–1939).

¹¹ A. E. Presniakov, Lektsii po russkoi istorii, vol. 2, part 1: Zapadnaia rus’ i Litovsko-Russkoe Gosudarstvo (Moscow: Gos. Sotsialno-ekonomicheske izdatel’stvo, 1939), 6–7.

¹² Brachev, Russkii Istorik A. E. Presniakov, 6, and passim. For example, an important American collection on Russian historiography, The Historiography of Imperial Russia: The Profession and Writing of History in a Multinational State, ed. Thomas Sanders (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999) did not not devote a chapter to Presniakov, but only a few lines in a chapter about the Petersburg school.

¹³ Rogoznyi, “Russkiii istorik Aleksandr Presniakov,” 253–4.

¹⁴ Presniakov, Obrazovanie Velikorusskogo Gosudarstva, 408–09; Presniakov, Moskovskoe Tsarstvo, 26.

¹⁵ Presniakov, Obrazovanie Velikorusskogo Gosudarstva, 409.

¹⁶ Ibid., 458.

¹⁷ A. E. Presniakov, Moskovskoe Tsarstvo (Petrograd: Ogni, 1918), 1–2.

¹⁸ Presniakov, Moskovskoe Tsarstvo, 29.

¹⁹ Ibid., 134.

²⁰ Ibid., 14–15.

²¹ A. E. Presniakov, “Historical Research in Russia during the Revolutionary Crisis,” American Historical Review 28, no. 3 (January,1923): 248.

²² Presniakov, “Historical Research in Russia,” 248–52.

²³ Ibid., 251–52.

²⁴ Ibid., 253–56.

²⁵ Ibid., 256–57.

²⁶ Brachev, 54. See also the thoughtful remarks by Alfred J. Rieber in his Introduction to the English translation of Presniakov’s Formation of the Great Russian State; A Study of Russian History in the Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Centuries (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), xx-xxiv.

²⁷ Brachev, Russkii Istorik A. E. Presniakov, 55.

²⁸ Ibid., 60–62.

²⁹ Ibid., 59, 62–64.

³⁰ Boris Anan’ich and Viktor Paneiach, “The Saint Petersburg School of History and Its Fate” in Historiography of Imperial Russia: The Profession and Writing of History in a Multinational State, ed. Thomas Sanders (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1999), 154–56; Rogoznyi, “Russkiii istorik Aleksandr Presniakov,” 257.

³¹ Brachev, 67–69.

³² A. E. Presniakov, Aleksandr I (St. Petersburg: Brokgauz-Efron, 1924).

³³ Presniakov, Aleksandr I, 10–14.

³⁴ Ibid., 16–18.

³⁵ A. E. Presniakov, Apogei Samoderzhaviia: Nikolai I (Leningrad: Brokgauz-Efron, 1925), 3.

³⁶ Presniakov, Apogei Samoderzhaviia, 4.

³⁷ Ibid., 46–47, 57–58.

³⁸ A. A. Chernobaev, Istoriki Rossii: Ikonografiia, vol. 4 (Moscow: Sobranie, 2008).

³⁹ Rogoznyi, 255–256.