Vasilii Vasilevskii

Vasil’evskii, Vasilii Grigor’evich

 

Born Jan. 21 (Feb. 2), 1838; died May 13 (25), 1899, in Florence. Russian historian. Member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1890; corresponding member, 1876). One of the outstanding representatives of bourgeois-gentry Byzantiology.

As the first to use documentary material, Vasil’evskii studied the domestic, predominantly agrarian, history and the fiscal system of Byzantium (Materials for the Domestic History of the Byzantine State, 1879-80). He pointed out the wide propagation of free peasants’ communes in the Byzantine village in the eighth and ninth centuries and correctly connected this circumstance with the colonization of the Balkan peninsula by Slavic settlers (The Legislation of the Iconoclasts, 1878; On the Synodic Library Copy of the Code of the Emperors Leo and Constantine … , 1879). However, his conservative political persuasion and his idealistic positivistic methodology meant that he viewed agrarian history as isolated from class warfare. Vasil’evskii idealized the monarchic state, saw it as the defender of the peasantry and the communes, and regarded feudalism as some aggregate of purely juridic categories. The great merit of Vasil’evskii’s work consists of his researches in Russian-Byzantine relations in the tenth to 12th centuries. He introduced many innovations into the study of historic sources and discovered in the cultural documents much valuable information on civilization and customs. He edited a number of historic sources with ample commentaries. He was the initiator and one of the editors of the publication Vizantiiskii vremennik (1894).

WORKS

Trudy, vols. 1-4. St. Petersburg-Leningrad, 1908-30.

REFERENCES

Uspenskii, F. I. “Akademik V. G. Vasil’evskii.” Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia, 1899, no. 10.
Grekov, B. D. “Istoriia drevnikh slavian i Rusi v rabotakh V. G. Vasil’evkogo.” Vestnik drevnei istorii, 1939, no. 1(6).
Zhebelev, S. A. “V. G. Vasil’evskii i izuchenie vizantiiskikh drevnostei.” Vestnik drevnei istorii, 1939, no. 1(6).
Udal’tsova, Z. V. “Vizantinovedenie.” Ocherki istorii istoricheskoinauki v SSSR, [vol.] 2. Moscow, 1960.
Shvedova, O. I. Istoriki SSSR: Ukazatel’ pechatnykh spiskov ikh trudov. Moscow, 1941. Page 34.

Z. V. UDAL’TSOVA