Russian higher educational institutions of Prague in the 1920–1930-s through the eyes of emigrants

Abstract

The article is devoted to the memoirs of Russian emigrants of the first wave (1920s — 1930s) as a source for the history of Prague’s institutions of emigrant higher education. The focus is on the unpublished “Memoires” of the jurist and philosopher E. V. Spektorskii stored in the archives of the Research Centre of Eastern Europe, University of Bremen (Germany) and fictionalized in G. Fedorov’s memoirs “Golden Prague”. Also memoirs by N. N. Alekseev, N. E. Andreev, V. V. Zenkovskii, B. N and N. O. Losskii, S. G. Pushkarev, and A. Golovina have been used in the article. The conclusion is that, despite all the highly informative level of the memoirs, they have a significant degree of subjectivity and thus cannot serve as the sole source for the reconstruction of the history of Russian emigré higher education. Refs 20.