Biography as Archive: Writing the Lives of Scholars in Imperial Russia

This article examines biographies of scholars as a particular genre of biographical writing in imperial Russia. Taking as its starting point Nikolai Barsukov's monumental biography of Mikhail Pogodin, the article draws on a sample of biographies of scholars active in the fields of history, oriental studies, statistics, philosophy and literary criticism, and analyses them from the perspective of narrative structure, use of sources, views of the individual and critical perspective. What distinguishes these works, above and beyond a heavy reliance on direct quotation and a weakly expressed authorial voice, is the role they played in the articulation of disciplinary identity.