Nikolai Danilevsky (1822-1885)

The collection is dedicated to Nikolai Danilevsky, a Russian philosopher, sociologist, biologist, ideologist of Pan-Slavism, and author of the seminal work "Russia and Europe". The collection includes his works, correspondence, research, journalistic materials, abstracts of his dissertations, and video lectures.

In the 1840s, Danilevsky became interested in socialist ideas and joined the circle of Mikhail Petrashevsky. He was arrested for his involvement with the group and spent more than four months in prison in the Peter and Paul fortress. After being exiled to Vologda and then Samara, he remained under police surveillance until 1856, during which time he shifted his political views towards conservatism.

N. Danilevsky became known for his work "Russia and Europe: A Look at the Cultural and Political Relations of the Slavic World to the German-Roman World" (published in Zarya magazine in 1869 and later published in a separate edition in 1871, and then reprinted several times). In this book, Danilevsky rejected the commonly accepted idea of a unified world history as an evolutionary process of a single human race, and proposed a new concept of "cultural-historical types" instead. He identified 13 such types in total, 10 of which went through exceptional stages from "birth" to "blossoming" and then decline. Danilevsky paid special attention to Romano-Germanic (European) and Slavic cultures. His civilizational approach influenced the ideas of later scholars such as Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler.

An important part of the collection is taken up by Danilevsky's work in the fields of statistics, geography and ethnography. This includes "Report on the most well-established expedition to study fish and animal resources in the White and Arctic seas" and "Statistical studies on population distribution and movement in Russia in 1846". A special section presents the publications of Nikolai in the magazine Zarya, reflecting his views on the cultural and political relations between the Slavic and German-Roman worlds. The collection is complemented by N. N. Strakhov's letters to N. Danilevsky, reviews of his scientific activities by contemporaries, the text of P. N. Milyukov's public lecture "The Decomposition of Slavophilism: Danilevsky, Leontiev, and V. Solovyov", abstracts of modern research, and a video recording of the report "Apostle of Slavism: Nikolai Danilevsky, as well as his supporters and opponents».

When creating the collection, sources from the following institutions and holdings were used: the Russian State Library, the State Public Historical Library, the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Samara Regional Universal Scientific Library, the Ural Federal University, Herzen Russian State Pedagogical University, Krupskaya Moscow Regional State Scientific Library and the portals of Lomonosov Moscow State University and Tsiolkovsky Kaluga State University.