A Beginning of Dialogue or an End of History?

Abstract

At the beginning of his article the author postulates a general decline of culture nowadays which manifests itself in many kinds of arts, and also in the “art of History”. To the author’s dismay, the latter has been reduced to what can be called, according to Iu. I. Semenov, “istoriology”. Many historians now forget what history is, what an essence of scholar’s work is, what a scholar’s novelty is, and so on. To exemplify this tendency, the article concerns with the book recently published in Moscow. This monograph written by T. V. Chernikova consists of two books devoted to so called Europeanization of Russia. The first book focuses on the 15-16th centuries, and the second book — on the 17th century. This work is severely criticized in this review. The author shows that T. V. Chernikova does not explain the meaning of the word “Europeanization” and the essence of this notion. The author objects to the historiography and the sources in these books. However, the major criticism is concerned with the fact that historiography is not connected with the following text. The text itself based on a very limited range of scholarship and sources abounds in a large number of inaccuracies, errors and nonsense. Even this limited range of historiography the author of the books uses very originally. She simply retells some books or articles — sometimes she refers to them, sometimes — not! There is no academic novelty in the reviewed books, and their author does not understand what is “a historian’s craft” is. These books do not contribute to the scholarship at all.