Her biographies tend to emphasize that she had inspired Lev Tolstoi’s Kitty Shcherbatskaia in “Anna Karenina,” but play down her role as the most formidable female scientist in Imperial Russia. To be fair, she always subjugated herself to her husband, Alexei, even for the 30 years following his death in which she organized the congresses, published the essays from them, developed the Caucasus Museum, and fought to open locally based museums of antiquities throughout the empire. She excavated and published extensively, and her first love were the Christian artefacts in the Caucasus. Professionalism in Russian archeology is unimaginable without her.
Congress Attended: 15th
Ignatii Stelletskii, after graduating from the Kiev Spiritual Academy, took a position at the Nazareth teaching seminary in Palestine. From here he made an unconventional jump to the Moscow Archive of the Ministry of Justice, where Samokvasov took him under his mentorship in excavating kurgans. Stelletskii combined the two with a paper on “The Scythian Invasion of Palestine,” read at the 14th Congress. Indeed, Palestine provided his main area of expertise, though he does not appear to have returned. He presented an equally controversial paper at the 15th Congress, on his latest interest, searches for the city’s “underground,” searches that he continued in other cities. During the Great War he found himself on the Caucasian front, from which Marr and Uspenskii and others were conducting excavations; he was appointed director of the archeological department of the governor-generalship of the occupied Ottoman territories. On a side note, Stelletskii became obsessed with the “missing” library of Ivan the Terrible, which he carried over into his Soviet years.
His father a celebrated painter and his mother the niece of prominent Slavophile Ivan Aksakov, Vladimir Konstantinovich became a numismatist and Orientalist, studying eastern languages, specializing in Arabic, at the Lazaervskii Institute. He held numerous positions of importance, the most important being custodian of the Armoury. At the IMAO, he held the post of secretary from 1888 and chair of the East Commission from 1911. He was also secretary of numerous Congresses, and sat on the organizing committee of all, beginning with the 7th in Iaroslavl, through the 16th in Pskov, which never came to pass.
Nikolai Pokrovskii pioneered in church architecture as a field in archeology. His Master’s on “The Origin of the Ancient Christian Basilica” established the basis for what would become a major archeological question, that is, how did church art and architecutre relate to liturgy. His interest in Orthodoxy meant that he also became a Byzantinist. Moreover, he was a founding member of the monarchist political party “The Russian Assembly” in 1900.
Linnichenko was that rare Ukrainian archeologist who eschewed separatism and even after 1917 maintained that Little Russia was a part of the larger Russian empire. He recognized their languages and cultures to be related, but not different. He also popularized archeology with articles in Kievskaia starina.
As early as the Second Congress, Ilovaiskii began his intellectual rampage against the calling of the Varangians. A fascinating character from Riazan, his teachers noticed his intelligence and persuaded his parents to allow him a classical education. He studied in Moscow with the great historians of the 1840s and ’50s. When in the 1860s Moscow University limited him to teaching general rather than Russian history, he resigned his post. He supported himself writing history and sparking controveries relevant to Great Russian nationalism. This might explain how one of his textbooks enjoyed reprinted 44 editions. His daughter Varvara married another prominent archeologist, Ivan Tsvetaev, who remarried after Varvara’s premature death from tuberculosis. His second wife gave birth to the poetess Marina. Ilovaiskii moved from moderate to radical conservatism after the 1905 Revolution, joining the Union of Russian People.
He sits here in the center, surrounded by students. Lappo-Danilevskii came to archeology by way of his intellectual desire to develop a theory of history, and he sought to combine all the social sciences in this endeavor; Albert Sorel was a model for him. For him, excavated material cultures did not simply provide primary sources, but means of understanding social and economic relations of societies historians could not themselves experience, and joined the International Sociological Institute. He included archives in the discipline of archeology and lectured at the Petersburg/Petrograd Institute of Archeology on how to read ancient diplomatic archives. Always an active public intellectual, he deplored the Bolshevik Revolution and died tragically in 1919, from blood poisoning in a botched operation after being hit by a tram in Petrograd.
Borozdin was a prolific publisher, an historian who who participated in archeological digs that enjoyed, in his mind, a value to history in general. That said, he was also particularly interested in prehistorical excavations. He participated in regional and international congresses, too. After 1917, he remained in the USSR, active and celebrated at the Institute of Oriental Studies and the Pedagogical Institute in Moscow. Arrested and exiled twice in the 1930s, from 1949 until his death he was chair of general history at Voronezh University.
Fon Shtern was a Pribaltika German, and wrote in both languages, who specialized in the Greek colony at Berezan. He acquired an international reputation when he exposed a falsification at the Louvre, from a paper given originally at the 10th Congress in Riga. The Russian Revolution returned him to Halle-Wittenberg Unversity in Germany, where he served as rector until his death. He was also a director of the Odessa Archeological Museum.
Coincidentally, the small town in which Antonovich was born, Makhnovka, had been the property of the Tyshkevich family (of Vilna archeological fame) in the 15th century. His parentage was unconventional: though he was registered as nobility, when in fact, he was the bastard son of a Hungarian emigrant revolutionary, but carried his mother’s married name; she had been the governess in the home of a wealthy Polish shlakht (nobleman), and married the male teacher, Bontifatie Antonovich. A Catholic who converted to Orthodoxy, he is considered today a founder of Ukrainian independence, but he’s more complicated than that because he appears to have supported Little Russia as a unique culture within the larger complex of the empire. His personal life was as nearly complicated as his mother’s; married, he nonetheless carried on an affair with a student, Katerina Melnik, from the 1880s until they married in 1902.