Nikolai Adonts

Born Jan. 10 (22), 1871; died Jan. 27, 1942. Armenian bourgeois historian.

Adonts graduated from the University of St. Petersburg in 1899. He was a professor at that university beginning in 1916. In 1920 he went abroad and beginning in 1930 was a professor at the University of Brussels. Adonts’ most important work was his master’s dissertation in Russian entitled Armenia in the Age of Justinian (1908), where the question of the Nakharar social system as a local variant of feudalism was posed in Armenian historiography for the first time. In addition, it examines many problems in the historical geography of Armenia. His doctoral dissertation was entitled Dionysius Thrax and His Armenian Interpreters (1915). Adonts was the author of historiographical articles in which he investigated the works of the Armenian historians Moses Khorenatsi, Faustus Buzand, and Koriun.