Korsakov, Dmitrii Aleksandrovich

Born July 10 (22), 1843, in Moscow; died 1920. Russian historian. From the dvorianstvo (nobility or gentry); a nephew of K. O. Kavelin.

Korsakov graduated from the University of Kazan in 1864 and became a professor at this university in 1881. In his master’s dissertation, The Merians and Rostov Principality (1872), Korsakov gathered valuable material on the history of the RostovSuzdal’ Land from 862 to 1237. Korsakov was interested in the Rostov-Suzdal’ Land as the site of the formation of the “Great Russian tribe” and of the development of the principle of autocracy, which he considered to be the basis of the state system in Russia. In his doctoral dissertation, The Ascent of Empress Anna loannovna to the Throne (1880), Korsakov was one of the first to investigate the struggle of groupings within the dvoriantvo for power. He also wrote articles on 18th-century history, later gathered together in the collection From the Lives of Russian Figures of the 18th Century (1891), and also articles on a number of Russian historians, including K. D. Kavelin, N. I. Kostomarov, N. la. Aristov, and K. N. Bestuzhev-Riumin.