A. Ju. Andreev / S. I. Posochov: Universitet v Rossijskoj imperii XVIII – pervoj poloviny XIX veka. [Die Universität im Russländischen Reich vom 18. bis zur Mitte des 19. Jh.]. Moskva: Rosspėn, 2012. 671 S. = Ubi universitas, ibi Europa. ISBN: 978-5-8243-1765-7.Inostrannye professora rossijskich universitetov (vtoraja polovina XVIII – pervaja tret’ XIX veka). Biografičeskij slovar’. [Ausländische Professoren an russländischen Universitäten (zweite Hälfte des 18. bis erste Hälfte des 19. Jh.]. Pod obščej redakciej A. Ju. Andreeva. Sostavitel' A. M. Feofanov. Moskva: Rosspėn, 2011. 207 S. ISBN: 978-5-8243-1581-3.

A. Ju. Andreev / S. I. Posochov: Universitet v Rossijskoj imperii XVIII – pervoj poloviny XIX veka. [Die Universität im Russländischen Reich vom 18. bis zur Mitte des 19. Jh.]. Moskva: Rosspėn, 2012. 671 S. = Ubi universitas, ibi Europa. ISBN: 978-5-8243-1765-7.

Inostrannye professora rossijskich universitetov (vtoraja polovina XVIII – pervaja tret’ XIX veka). Biografičeskij slovar’. [Ausländische Professoren an russländischen Universitäten (zweite Hälfte des 18. bis erste Hälfte des 19. Jh.]. Pod obščej redakciej A. Ju. Andreeva. Sostavitel’ A. M. Feofanov. Moskva: Rosspėn, 2011. 207 S. ISBN: 978-5-8243-1581-3.

The editors and collaborators of these two interconnected books, both published by the German Historical Institute in Moscow as part of an international scholarly project, under the title “Ubi universitas, ibi Europa”, worked in three research groups: at Moscow University, Kazan’ University, and Khar’kov University. They sought to investigate the idea of the transfer of the university idea from Europe into Russia. At a series of six conferences from 2007 to 2010, the collaborators analyzed this phenomenon, in addition to the people who were the agents of this transfer, specifically foreign, primarily German, scholars, until the 1830s when young, European-trained Russians began to replace them in the same role, but more profoundly connected to Russian society. The research groups investigated these processes as clearly articulated in the introduction to “Universitet v Rossiiskoi imperii XVIII – pervoi poloviny XIX veka”. They specifically are analyzing exactly how the transfer and adaptation of the university idea into the Russian Empire and its universities happened during the 150 years from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. Based on wide-ranging and voluminous reading of the secondary literature and Russian archives, they investigate through this process of transfer to what degree Russia’s universities fit into the larger tendencies of European universities, how they functioned and how its constituents (students, faculty) experienced life at the university. This analysis is one attempt to answer part of a larger historical question to ascertain how “an inhabitant of the Russian Empire – even if this is the monarch himself – became acquainted with ideas of a foreign provenance”. (p. 12) They additionally seek to answer how the university corporation developed and how it was different from and similar to its counterparts in Western Europe. (p. 15) They succeed in these endeavors.

According to the editors of these two books, from even before the founding of Moscow University in 1755, Russian institutions of higher education began to receive the transfer of the university idea from Europe, from both the northwestern and the southwestern vectors. The northwestern vector meant the influences of the conduits of European education of foreign professors coming from the Protestant German states to St. Petersburg and northwestern Russia and the southwestern vector denoted the influence of foreign professors from the Austrian Empire into the Orthodox academies in Ukraine. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century institutions of higher learning had opened in the southern parts of Russia and then under Peter the Great.

Essential to the establishment of a university system in the Russian Empire were Alexander I’s reforms to create a unified system in 1802–1804. The beginning of the nineteenth century was a critical era in the development of an inchoate civil society in its universities. The editors observe that the development of Russian universities were largely similar to the experiences in the West because of the influences coming from both the southwest and northwest vectors, but one of the main issues that was distinctive to the Russian university was the fact that what took centuries to develop in European universities, such as the emergence of autonomy and a corporate identity, was telescoped in Russia over a much shorter period of time. Moreover, the government itself endowed Russian universities with autonomy at the beginning of the early nineteenth century as a critical component of the Alexandrine reforms, creating the so-called “scholars’ republic” (p. 207). Therefore, autonomy originally came from without the university, not from within the professorate. Such a situation later led to confrontations with the government under Nicholas I, especially after the university statute of 1835, in which the government tried to eviscerate this autonomy. They additionally assert that university faculty in Russia faced the contradictory nature of the duality of their profession; they were simultaneously members of a self-governing corporation and state bureaucrats, with latent contradictions in the two roles. This duality emerged in the empire from the northwest vector beginning in the mid-eighteenth century through the early part of Alexander I’s reign.

The editors illustrate that the great changes of the 1830s, when a new generation of Russian-born, European-trained faculty returned to the empire, were instrumental in adding a third role for the calling of the professor. The Russian government sent several cohorts of Russian students to European universities, primarily in the German states, to become university faculty in Russia. These students created a fundamental change in the roles of professors, by acting as agents of transfer of the university idea, complementing the arrival of foreign scholars over the previous decades. Based on their studies in Europe, the young Russians became “bearers of knowledge, researchers, and leaders of educated society”. (p. 426) In the process, they, as agents of change, facilitated and expedited the development of a civil society in Russia and completely altered the role of the professor.

Most of this historical framework is not really novel. It is deeply embedded in the existing literature. Nevertheless, these two books provide a useful, expansive background to these main topics, offering a sweeping vision of how the universities changed in these years and the interplay between change and continuity in Russia in this era.

The two books complement each other well, with the collective editors and researchers of “Universitet v Rossiiskoi imperii XVIII – pervoi poloviny XIX veka” offering a discerning perspective of the transfer of the university idea to Russia in different periods and through the two vectors, with lengthy commentary on the foreign scholars as transmitters of the university idea. The editors of the second book, “Inostrannye professora rossiiskykh universitetov” provide a useful alphabetized biographical dictionary of the more than 100 foreign scholars who taught at Russian universities in the critical eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century when the new Russian university system was built and a new university culture and ethos emerged. Each entry offers a brief biographical sketch with a list of the individual scholar’s academic works, and extremely importantly for researchers, the archival citations from where the editors culled the information, in addition to published sources.

The two books will prove invaluable to anyone researching the influence of foreign scholars on Russian universities and local societies surrounding the universities in this era. These books also offer a wealth of sources for the researcher of Russia’s universities, and provide an excellent interpretive model, grounded in extensive research. This monograph and the biographical dictionary are important resources for scholars of Russian universities, scholars analyzing in what ways Russian intellectual and university life was autochthonous and yet still a part of larger European trends in these decades.

Curtis Richardson, Maryville, MO