Moscow, Nauka Publishing House. 1970. 502 pp. The print run is 4000 copies. Price 1 rub. 88 kopecks.
Over the past 20-25 years, no field of source studies has developed so rapidly or generated so much controversy as diplomacy. Publication of the main set of Russian acts of the XIV-early XVI centuries.1 with particular acuteness set the task of understanding the significance of acts as sources of socio-economic and political history from a Marxist-Leninist perspective. L. V. Cherepnin managed to reveal the class and political meaning of acts, to find out their origin. He also has the first experience of diplomatic codicology 2 .
S. M. Kashtanov, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Senior researcher at the Institute of History of the USSR of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, discusses the theory, methodology and archeography of act source studies. S. M. Kashtanov repeats his earlier definition of acts as documents of a contractual nature, in which economic and political transactions are recorded in the form of legal norms, and considers it permissible a comprehensive method for studying acts. He defends the propositions put forward by him regarding diplomacy as an official source study, which are disputed by a number of Soviet and foreign authors .3 Thus, the American scientist E. Keenan defends the old idea of diplomacy as "the study of form, in its evolution, local variants, and cultural context." He considers the categories of diplomacy to be formal and in this regard criticizes the classification of documents proposed by S. M. Kashtanov, since this is a classification not of the documents themselves, but of certain relations, the regulation of which is reflected in them. According to Keenan, this is no longer diplomacy, but a historical interpretation. Not to reveal the driving forces of history, but to hide them, not to move from the source and through the source to real history - this is the objective meaning of E. Keenan's reasoning. S. M. Kashtanov proceeds from the fact that diplomacy is a special historical discipline, that is, a science with a specific subject of study and a specific method, which performs everything in relation to acts problems of general source studies. The main method of studying acts is formal analysis, although when studying the external and internal forms of acts, diplomacy uses the methods of other special historical disciplines (paleography, filigranology, textual analysis, etc.). For other types of sources, formal analysis is auxiliary.
The author improves the methodology of diplomatic research-a formal analysis that has long been used in both foreign and Soviet literature. Unlike his predecessors, who limited themselves to studying the most general scheme of constructing a form (classics of Western European diplomacy) or clauses (school of A. S. Lappo - Danilevsky), S. M. Kashtanov even examines the forms of individual letters. The division of the form into various "types" (conditional, abstract, concrete, individual) and the comparison of articles, turns and elements of these forms within varieties, groups and individual acts allowed him to establish the features of the latter and penetrate into the socio - economic life of the studied era. However, describing the method of studying acts, S. M. Kashtanov does not-
1 Their corpus is supplemented by S. M. Kashtanov, who in the V part of the reviewed book published about 80 newly found or known from defective lists of letters of the XIV-XVI centuries.
2 L. V. Cherepnin. Russian Feudal Archives, Moscow, 1949; Moscow, 1951.
3 See S. M. Kashtanov, A. A. Kurnosov. Some questions of the theory of source studies. "Historical Archive", 1962, N 4; "Materials of discussion in the editorial office". Ibid.; N. E. Nosov. "New" direction in assembly source studies. "Problems of source studies", Vol. X. 1962; A. A. Zimin. On the methodology of assembly source studies in works on the history of local government in Russia in the first half of the XVI century "Voprosy archivovedeniya", 1962, N 1; V. V. Farsobin. To determine the subject of source studies (Historiographical notes). "Source studies of the history of Soviet society". Issue II. Moscow, 1968, p. 402; E. L. Keenan. Recent Developments in Paleography and Diplomacy. "Kritika". Vol. VI. 1970, N 2, pp. 65-77. See also comments in reviews of S. M. Kashtanov's book " Socio-political History of Russia in the late XV-first half of the XVI century "(Moscow, 1967): V. V. Doroshenko, Z. K. Yanel ("History of the USSR", 1968, No. 5); B. N. Florya ("History of the USSR", 1969, No. 3); G. Alef ("American Historical Review", 1970, No. 5); J. Fennell ("Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Ost-Europas", 1968, N 2).
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I have sufficiently shown the difference between the textual structure of acts and narrative sources. At first glance, this difference is not so great. Comparing and studying the text of a certain list, then a group of lists, which would seem to be edited, corresponds to comparing a group of acts within a variety, then acts of a certain variety, and so on, that is, analyzing an individual form, concrete, abstract, and conditional. However, the textology of acts already at the level of specific forms includes an article-by-article comparison, the mobilization of a number of other sources.
The second disadvantage of the proposed S. M. Kashtanov method of studying acts should be considered the lack of division of the dispositio, that is, the main part of the act. The division of the act into parts reflects a purely formal approach inherited from bourgeois science, so the smallest details of the initial and final protocols did not escape the attention of bourgeois scientists and did not remain without an appropriate name .4 The study of dispositio was not part of their goal and is not included to this day. Meanwhile, for a complete and comprehensive study of this part of the act, its formal dismemberment is necessary. Such attempts have already been made by A. A. Zimin5 . The allocation of patrimonial (or, more precisely, possessive) and immune parts in the chartered charter actually refers to the disposition. Although this division is thematic, it exactly corresponds to the article-by-article division of acts, especially non-Russian ones. The "patrimonial" or "possessive" part of the dispositio has undergone a certain evolution. The charters issued by the Grand Dukes of Lithuania and their viceroys at the end of the 14th and beginning of the 15th centuries indicated only the geographical coordinates of the transferred land. In the middle of the 15th century, the "owner's" part included the main land, at the end of the century-all the land that stretched to a certain settlement. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the enumeration of all kinds of land became a formula for the sake of a formula, and it would be at least frivolous to draw conclusions about the level of development of the economy on its basis.
In addition, the allocation of separate parts of the dispositio would make it possible to compare it more precisely with a similar part of the letters of sale and, on this basis, get more accurate information about the mobilization of land.
Relying on Lenin's theory of reflection, S. M. Kashtanov puts the problem of reflecting facts in a historical source as the main one. A source, including an act source, reflects, and inadequately, only certain aspects of the facts; different facts in the same source are reflected with varying degrees of incompleteness and inadequacy.
S. M. Kashtanov solves the problem of penetration through the external form of the act to its internal form, that is, "to the structure and stylistic features of the document text", and through the content of the act to its external and internal content by means of a formal analysis of the dispositions of issued certificates of the 30s-40s of the XVI century, the political reasons for issuing the subject of his research. In his Essays, he addresses the analysis of that part of the dispositio that was decisive for the letters of this type and contained exemption from taxes and duties (tribute, yamsky money, pososhny service, urban affairs, tamga, and some others). The author's specific conclusions expand our understanding of the socio-economic and political development of Russia at the time under review. The presence of different types of forms indicates the absence of unified economic and political traditions in the Russian state in the middle of the XVI century.
Speaking about diplomatic codicology, S. M. Kashtanov describes the tasks of this science as follows: the study of external (storage location, binding, format, number of sheets, watermarks of paper, location and handwriting of the main texts, etc.) and internal (the composition of the collection, features of the texts of copied acts in comparison with their originals, headings in lists, etc.). etc.) signs of collections of acts. This program of systematic study of external and internal features of the collection is more complete and consistent than that adopted in previous studies, including by S. M. Kashtanov himself. Applying it to the 1905 collection of the Pogodinsky collection, he showed that the collection, which contains a number of interesting documents, belongs to the collecting activity
4 S. M. Kashtanov suggests Russian equivalents for Latin names (which, in our opinion, is not necessary), but he uses either Russian or Latin names.
5 A. A. Zimin. Essays on the history of feudal land ownership and economy of the Moscow state. Candidate's thesis, Moscow, 1947, pp. 103-104.
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P. M. Stroev, who artificially compiled it not earlier than the second half of 1831 from pieces of the original books of the Trinity-Sergius Monastery. The establishment of this fact raises a more general problem of the origin of collections of acts of private collections of the XIX century. (Pogodinsky and Tolstoy), sheds light on the methods of work of Russian historians and archaeographers of the first half of the XIX century.
S. M. Kashtanov's book reveals the futility of bourgeois formal diplomacy. The author opposes those who directly "draw" information from the source without subjecting it to preliminary analysis. "Essays" show that a true historian can't help but be a source scientist, and a thoughtful source scientist can't help but be a historian.
The reviewed work, of course, does not exhaust all the possibilities of studying chartered letters even of the XVI century. Other types of acts of this period are waiting for their researchers. Especially interesting results about the evolution of land ownership and the social structure of society can be obtained from letters of sale. S. M. Kashtanov's attention was focused on the acts of the Central Russian region, called North-Eastern Russia; the Novgorod acts are drawn to them sporadically; the peculiarities of the Pskov and Western Russian acts are not characterized. Serious work is still to be done on the study of Belarusian and Ukrainian acts, most of which have not been published, but have not been found in the funds of the Lithuanian Metrica Foundation in Moscow and Warsaw and the Main Tribunal (Grand Duchy of Lithuania) in Vilnius. The vast fund of Western European, Byzantine and other acts needs to be rethought.
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