Department of Classical Languages and Literature of the LIPLH: Creation and Organization of the Educational Process

Abstract

The article is based on the records of the Leningrad Institute of Philosophy, Linguistics and History (LIPLH), which are kept in the Central State Archive of Literature and Arts of St. Petersburg, as well as unpublished memoir notes by the first head of the Department of Classical Languages, O. M. Freudenberg. Chronological framework of the research — 1932–1937 — the time of the existence of the Department as part of LIPLH. The Department of Classical Languages and Literatures, re-founded in 1932, became a uniting link between the pre-revolutionary generation of philologists and the young generation formed in the 1920s. Here merged traditional methods and approaches to the teaching of ancient languages and Marxist innovations, such as focus on ‘practicality’, and a combination arose of the earlier individual forms of research with the new collective ones (publication of general works). The article argues that the appointment of O. M. Freudenberg as the head of the department was quite expected, for she was a singularly appropriate figure for the communist establishment. The author also comes to the conclusion that the full interruption of the traditions of learning and teaching of classical languages in Leningrad in the late 1920s — early 1930s never happened, and that the department has become a successor to similar institutions that functioned earlier in the frame of the ‘cycle’ of ancient history at the Faculty of Linguistics and Material Culture of the LSU, as well as at the Research Institute for Comparative History of Literatures and Languages of the West and East of the LSU, and at the State Institute of Speech Culture. The author also draws the conclusion that the opening/closing of the departments in the 1930s was not only a consequence of the activities of government structures but also of the internal conflicts of the scholarly community.