Byzantium or Democracy?

The notion of “Byzantium” has for centuries been associated with autocracy, totalitarianism, and suppression of freedom. It thus became the favored model for the Russian autocracy. In the nineteenth-century, Russian scholars working under Tsarist regimes were, either explicitly or tacitly, condoning and even supporting the ruling autocracy. After the Revolution of 1917, however, many of these effectively complicit intellectuals left Russia for Western democracies. This book shows how this experience affected the lives of intellectuals who fled and transformed their scholarship. Archival materials and writings from the time reveal how scholarship can move from aspiration to reality, as it did for the Russian émigrés until the crash of 1929 and the rise of Nazism in Germany. But how is this relevant today? Because it shows how scholarship and science must be understood as part of history, and because it illustrates the power of hope. As studied and presented by émigrés from Tsarist totalitarianism, “Byzantium” came to be a multinational screen onto which scholars projected not only frustrations but also dreams.

• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Russian Émigré Byzantinists
• Nikodim Kondakov, the Institutum Kondakovianum, and the “Russian Action”
  Kondakov’s Legacy in Prague: the Seminarium Kondakovianum
  André Grabar, from Kiev to Paris
• Chapter 2. Byzantium and Democracy
• The Seminarium Kondakovianum and Interwar Czechoslovakia
  André Grabar, Byzantium, and France
• Chapter 3. Byzantium in Crisis
• Grabar and the War
  The Institutum Kondakovianum and the German Occupation
  The Institutum Kondakovianum and Communism
• Conclusion

• Copertina ad alta risoluzione