Russian and German Classical Scholarship at the Turn of the 20th Century as Seen by B.V. Warneke
Tunkina Irina V.
The memoirs of Boris Vasilyevich Warneke (1874–1944), Classical Philologist, Latinist and Historian of Classical and Russian theatre, Professor of Kazan’ University and of the Novorossian University in Odessa, cover the period from the middle of the 1880s till the summer of 1914. The author describes his difficult childhood, which he spent as a supernumerary playing roles of children on the stage of Moscow operetta theatre. Then he attended a gymnasium in Moscow and St. Petersburg Historical-Philological Institute, then taught at the Nicolas gymnasium at Tsarskoe Selo and at St. Petersburg and Kazan’ universities. A whole chapter is devoted to his impressions of the lectures he heard and seminars he took part in at the universities in Germany and Austria-Hungary. The memoirs take the reader into the world of pre-revolutionary humanities in the fl ourishing period of Russian historical and philological school at the late 19th – early 20th centuries. The author describes his teachers, colleagues and friends, touches the problems of attestation of scholars at pre-revolutionary universities and compares the system of Classical education in Germany and Russia; in this matter Warneke supports the Russian system. Among the vivid scholars’ portraits, drawn by Warneke, one can meet Russian Classicists of different generations: F.E. Korsch, A.N. Schwarz, I.V. Tsevetaev, F.F. Sokolov, P.V. Nikitin, I.V. Pomyalovsky, V.V. Latyshev, L. Müller, F.F. Zelinsky (T. Zieliński), N.M. Krasheninnikov, S.A. Zhebelev, M.I. Rostovtzeff, I.I. Kholodnyak, A.I. Sobolevsky and others, as well as German and Austrian Classicists Fr. Leo, Ed. Schwarz, K. Diltey (Göttingen), F. Studnitschka, E. Bethe and Schreiber (Leipzig), O. Rossbach (Köningsberg), E. Reisch (Vienna) and others.