A Beginning of Dialogue or an End of History?

Abstract

At the beginning of his article the author postulates some drop of culture’s level during nowadays. One can find it in many kinds of the arts and also in the “art of History”. The author notices with an error the decline of this scholar, which the author according to Iu. I. Semenov suggests to name an “istoriology”. Many historians forget what is history now, what is an essence of scholar’s work, what is a scholar’s novelty and so on. As an example of such work he observes the book recently published in Moscow. This monograph written by T. V. Chernikova consists of two books and devoted to so called Europeanization of Russia. The first book is devoted to 15-16^th centuries and the second book is devoted to 17^th century. This work is severely criticized in this review. The critic shows that T. V. Chernikova does not explain the meaning of the word “Europeanization” and the essence of this notion. The critic has the claims to the reviews of the historiography and the sources in these books. And a main claim, that these reviews are not connected with the follow text. The text itself is based on a very limited stock of scientific literature. It abounds in many blunders, inexactitudes and nonsense. Even this limited reserve of historiography the author of the books uses very originally. She simply retells some books or articles – sometimes she tells about it, sometimes – not! There is not an obligatory scholar’s novelty in these books and their author does not understand what is “a historian’s handicraft”. These books are not the gifts to our scholar…

Keywords:

Culture, History, T. V. Chernikova, Europeanization, Russia of 15 – 17th centuries, the End of Istoriology