Aleksandr Nikitenko's Private Library as a "Chronicle of Russian Literature"

The article aims to actualize the heritage of Aleksandr Nikitenko, which is the synthesis of his diary and his private library as the laboratory of mental life, and to analyze the way Nikitenko considered Russian chronicles, as well as the degree of their influence on the professor's cultural and historical views. In the history of literature of the pre-revolutionary and Soviet times, Nikitenko was regarded mainly as the author of his diary, which for many years had been considered as the vital source of data of the Russian literature of the 1820s-1870s. At the same time, Nikitenko's research and official activities remained unfairly underestimated by the scholars of the past as being ordinary and unremarkable. Today, there appear studies that highly evaluate Nikitenko's activities in terms of the cultural-historical and aesthetic-literary context of the 19th century. For Nikitenko, the library became the basis on which he built his idea of the world aesthetic and philosophical thought. He formed his professional ideas under the conditions of the creation of Russian literary criticism, changes in the censorship regime, and the sharp change in the political position of the Russian government. Nikitenko compiled his private library while he was developing as a professor of literature at Saint Petersburg University, a critic of Russian literature, and a censor. The article proves that Nikitenko regarded the keeping of the diary and the compiling of the library through the concept of the chronicle. In the study, this concept is presented as a kind of a communicative model, which Nikitenko applied consciously to define himself as the chronicler of Russian literature. The study is based on the systematic method that combines library science and the history of literature for the analysis of various sections of the book collection, for the investigation of common elements in Nikitenko's diary and texts. Nikitenko's library contains publications of chronicles and historical documents, as well as research of historians, including that of his contemporaries whom Nikitenko knew personally. Nikitenko needed the chronicle material to create a new periodization of Russian literature, with its origins from chronicle sources. At that time, teaching was mostly based on Western doctrines, and the problem was to form a coherent idea of the course of Russian literary history. Nikitenko was one of the first to solve the issue of periodization in a historical way. He did not deal specifically with chronicles as a historian; he focused his interest on the ways historical figures were presented in literature, on the images of Nestor the Chronicler, Ivan the Terrible, and others. Collecting chronicles in his library, he used them as sources to investigate verbal expressions of the ideas and mental life of the Russian person rather than facts of the past. Nikitenko was developing his own concept of considering the history of Russian literature, which was delivered in the periodization he proposed, as well as in his articles and university lectures.

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