Journal
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O.A. Shcheglova, Doctor of History
Igra v biser v epohu peremen
Though the authors of the present collection have not even attempted to explain either in an introductory word or at least in an annotation what they mean under “symbolic Indoeuropean history”, the book is worth reading and discussing. It is not occasional that both the collection and the periodical series to follow are called “Stratum”. The word here is not used in its “geomorphological” sense. Rather, it offers a cultural stratum, a union of like-minded persons: almost every of the authors comes from St.-Petersburg. Among them are such famous scholars as Vyacheslav Ivanov and widely known professional archaeologists like Leo Klein, Mark Shchukin, D. Machinski, as well as their disciples who founded a center of modern humanitarian education – the High Anthropological School in Kishinev. Despite of a wide time span (from the Palaeolithic to the late Middle Ages), all the articles share a common subject – culture of the population which inhabited the territories of the modern Russia and neighbouring countries in different historical epochs. A series of articles is dedicated to the subjects connected with the culture and beliefs of the earliest Indoeuropeans. Igor Manzura publishes and interprets a very interesting burial complex of V millennium BC found on Low Danube in modern Moldova, in his interpretation trying to relate myth with archaeological records. The same approach is shared by D. Machinski in his article about sacral centers in Caucasus and Altai in the late IV – middle I millenniums BC. The image of Scythia drawn by D. Machinski in this and his other works is useful not so much as a result of scientific research, but rather as a tool to help us determine the place of our epoch and our country in a dramatically changing world. This idea is developed by Mark Tkachuk in his article with a provoking title: “Non-Russian Idea: An Experience of Patriotic Hermeneutics”. The feature of this collection is an article by Mark Shchukin “Birth of the Slavs”. The article does not offer a new concept, it rather tries to weave the existing hypotheses on the issue into a single patchwork. Linked to this article is a special paper by Oleg Sharov on the life and death of Hermanarih, the king of the Goths. A few articles are dedicated to already “historical”, early Slavs. One of them is a very challenging article by Sergei Earlich “Worship to the Wizards”. The author shares an opinion that during the Slavs’ stay in the Balkans, they were joined by the Vlakhs – romanized Celts; it is these Vlakhs or Volokhs who were in fact Wizards. According to structuralist approach, periods of the Wizards’ domain alternated with the domain of the warriors. The author selected a mass of statements by various authors illustrating linguistic and cultural borrowings from the Celts, authentic and alleged, and brought examples from the records which illustrated an exceptional position held by the Wizards with the Slavs and Rus’. Many of these facts are undoubted, but have nothing to do with the offered hypothesis. Quite apparent is the magic influence exercised by Mircea Eliade on the Moldovan authors represented in the journal. This influence can be observed in the article by Roman Rabinovich on general structural elements in the beliefs of the early medieval peoples: totemic representations of the early Slavs on the sacred wolf-forebear. Its name preserved in many names of the Slavic tribes. Sometimes treasures can tell about things which are not mentioned in chronicles and cannot be even imagined by researchers. Based on such findings, the article by Nikolai Russev tells about economic and historical consequences of one of the greatest catastrophes in the history of the mankind – outbreak of the plague which devastated Europe and the Mediterranean in the middle XIV century.
Clio (St.-Petersburg). 2000. N 2 (11). p. 288-290.
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