Overseas business trips of antiquity researchers: Content and models for building routes in the late 19th - early 20th centuries

This article examines the overseas business trips of domestic antiquity researchers in pre-revolutionary Russia at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries. For the professional development of a scholar of antiquity, the importance of foreign business trips was essential for a number of reasons. Firstly, during an overseas trip, future researchers received the opportunity to touch the materials of the epoch they were interested in while visiting museums, participating in archaeological excavations, and studying monuments. They could directly observe the places in which the historical events they were investigating took place and dive into the atmosphere and the spirit of these places. Secondly, contacts with the leading foreign professors from Germany, France, England, Italy were extremely important for young researchers. During such academic contacts, Russian researchers adopted new, advanced theories from foreign colleagues, and also mastered previously unknown methods of research and teaching work. This study was based on a wide range of sources, including sources of personal origin (letters, autobiographies), regulations governing the work of this institution, as well as obituaries of antiquity scholars who went to overseas business trips. As a result of the study, the author distinguished two models of building the routes for overseas business trips of antiquity researchers. The first model, which involved visiting leading European academic centers, was formed in the first half of the 19th century and was the most widespread until the 1880s. It was replaced by a “new” model, which suggested spending the entire period allotted for a business trip in the countries of classical antiquity rather than visiting advanced academic centers in Europe. Along with the change in the model of building routes, the content of such business trips changed significantly. If in the previous period the main occupation of antiquity scholars abroad was acquaintance with the achievements of foreign colleagues and studying with them, in the later period, it was participating in archaeological excavations, making independent archaeological discoveries, visiting local museums and monuments, conducting field work with representatives of European science in the form of equal cooperation. The emergence of a new model of building the routes for overseas business trips and its predominance at the time under consideration is due, first of all, to positive changes in our science. Achievements in the development of Russian classical studies by the end of the 19th century brought it to the level corresponding to European; therefore, there was no need to undergo additional postgraduate training with European professors. In this period of time, libraries of the capital's universities were better supplied with advanced scholarly literature, including latest foreign works.

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