Vladimir Stepanovich Ikonnikov

Born Dec. 9 (21), 1841, in Kiev; died there Nov. 26, 1923. Russian historian. Academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1914).

Ikonnikov graduated from the University of Kiev in 1865 and became a professor there in 1871. His works dealt with the history of the ideology and culture of Russia (Maxim the Greek, parts 1–2, 1865–66). He examined political history through personal biographies and characterizations of political figures—for example, Russian Public Figures of the 16th Century (1866) and Count N. S. Mordvinov (1873).

However, Ikonnikov’s basic scientific interests lay in the area of Russian historiography. He was the author of numerous articles on various historians (N. M. Karamzin, K. N. Bestuzhev-Riumin, L. A. Shletser, and I. N. Boltin) and the monograph The Skeptical School of Russian Historiography and Its Opponents (1871). His fundamental work, The Essay on Russian Historiography (vol. 1 [parts 1–2] and vol. 2 [parts 1–2], 1891–1908), contains considerable factual material on the history of annal writing and of the discovery, collection, publication, and analysis of various sources; it is an important reference work to this day. Ikonnikov restricted himself to the creation of a systematic digest, as complete as possible, of the bibliography of historical literature arranged according to the subjects and themes of historical science; he made no attempt to uncover the laws of internal development and growth of the science itself.