Everything about George Vernadsky totally explained
George Vernadsky (
August 20 1887 –
June 20 1973),
Russian: Гео́ргий Влади́мирович Верна́дский) was a
Russian-
American historian and an author of numerous books on
Russian history.
European years
Born in
Moscow on
August 20,
1887, Vernadsky stemmed from a respectable family of the Ukrainian
intelligentsia. His father was
Vladimir Vernadsky, the first President of the
Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. He entered the
Moscow University (where his father was professor) in 1905 but, due to the disturbances of the
First Russian Revolution, had to spend the next two years in Germany, at the
Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg and the
University of Berlin, where he imbibed the doctrines of
Heinrich Rickert.
Back in Russia, Vernadsky resumed his course at the Moscow University, graduating with honors in 1910. His instructors included the historians
Vasily Klyuchevsky and
Robert Vipper. The young scholar declined to continue his career in the university after the 1910 Kasso affair and moved to
Saint Petersburg University where he taught for the next seven years, during which he was awarded the
Master's degree for his dissertation on the effects of
Freemasonry on the
Russian Enlightenment.
Politically close to the
kadet party (of which his father was one of the leaders), Vernadsky began his career as a supporter of liberal ideas, authoring the biographies of
Nikolai Novikov and
Pavel Milyukov. During the years of the
Russian Civil War (1917-1920), he lectured for a year in
Perm. He then taught in
Kiev and then followed the
White Army to
Simferopol, where he taught at the local university for two years.
After the fall of
Crimea to the
Bolsheviks in 1920, Vernadsky left his native country for
Constantinople, moving to
Athens later that year. At the suggestion of
Nikodim Kondakov, he settled in
Prague, teaching there from 1921 until 1925 at the Russian School of Law. There, in association with
Nikolai Trubetzkoy and P.N. Savitsky, he participated in formulating the
Eurasian Theory of Russian history. After Kondakov's death, Vernadsky was in charge of the Seminarium Kondakovianum, which dessiminated his view of Russian culture as the synthesis of Slavonic, Byzantine, and nomadic influences.
American years
In 1927,
Michael Rostovtzeff and
Frank Golder offered Vernadsky a position at
Yale University in the
United States. At Yale, he first served as a
research associate in
history (1927-1946), and then became a full
professor of Russian history in 1946. He served in that position until his retirement in 1956. He died in
New Haven on
June 20,
1973.
Vernadsky's first book in English was a widely read textbook on Russian history, first published in 1929 and republished six times during his lifetime. It was translated to numerous languages, including Hebrew and Japanese. In 1943, he embarked on his magnum opus,
A History of Russia, of which six volumes were eventually published, despite the death of his co-author, Professor Karpovich, in 1959.
The book demonstrated Vernadsky's novel approach to Russian history which is conceived by him as a continuous succession of empires, starting from the Scythian, Sarmatian, Hunnic, and Gothic; Vernadsky attempted to determine the laws of their expansion and collapse. His views emphasised the importance of Eurasian nomadic cultures for the cultural and economic progress of Russia, thus anticipating some of the tenets advanced by
Lev Gumilev.
Bibliography
- (1936) Political and Diplomatic History of Russia
- (1943–69) A History of Russia (Yale Press
) ISBN 0-300-00247-5
- (1947) Medieval Russian Laws (Translated by George Vernadsky)
- (1953) The Mongols and Russia
- (1959) The Origins of Russia
- (1973) Kievan Russia (Yale Press) ISBN 0-300-01647-6.
Further Information
Get more info on 'George Vernadsky'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://george_vernadsky.totallyexplained.com">George Vernadsky Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
