Lamanskii, Vladimir Ivanovich

Lamanskii, Vladimir Ivanovich 

Born June 26 (July 8), 1833, in St. Petersburg; died there Nov. 19 (Dec. 2), 1914. Russian historian, Slavicist, creator and major representative of a reactionary school in Slavic studies that pursued ideas of Slavophilism and Pan-Slavism; academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1900).

A member of the dvorianstvo (nobility or gentry), Lamanskii graduated from St. Petersburg University in 1854. He was a pupil of I. I. Sreznevskii and became a professor at St. Petersburg University. Lamanskii’s master’s thesis, “On the Slavs in Asia Minor, in Africa, and in Spain” (1859), was based on methods inadmissible in scholarly work: Lamanskii took liberties interpreting names, proposed arbitrary hypotheses and subsequently used them as axioms, and so forth. Lamanskii’s doctoral thesis, “On a Historical Study of the Greco-Slavic World in Europe” (1871) is of interest even today from the factual viewpoint. His principal works were on the history of the Slavs, philology, paleography, and ethnography. The multivolume publication Russia: A Complete Geographic Description of Our Fatherland (1899–1914) came out under the general direction of P. P. Semenov-Tian-Shanskii and Lamanskii.

REFERENCES

Shakhmatov, A. A. “V. I. Lamanskii: Nekrolog.” Izvestiia AN, series 6, 1914, vol. 8, no. 18.
Materialy dlia biograficheskogo slovaria deistvitel’nykh chlenov AN, part 1. Petrograd, 1915. (Contains a list of Lamanskii’s works.)