Research and Teaching Activities of V. G. Solomin (1881–1918), Associate Professor of Canon Law at St. Petersburg Theological Academy

The article examines the research and teaching activities of the last teacher in the Department of Canon Law in the pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg Theological Academy, Vyacheslav Georgievich Solomin (he held the professorial chair from 1909 to 1918). Unfortunately, his name is little known even to specialists who, when it comes to canon law in the capital’s theological academy, mention the names of Bishop John (Sokolov), T. V. Barsov, and V. N. Beneshevich. At the same time, V. G. Solomin took a rather responsible approach to developing his own original lecture course on canon law. From the “Annual Reports on the State of the Academy” it is clear that Solomin spent four and a half years on the detailed development of all sections of his discipline. The author thus concludes that V. G. Solomin could have prepared and published his own textbook on canon law. The article also examines in detail the content of Solomin’s master’s thesis, “Projects of the Reform of Theological Education in Russia in Connection with the Issue of the Liquidation of Church Real Property (1763–1814)”, a total of 1800 typewritten pages. Unfortunately, the work itself was never published, and all available information about this study is known only from the surviving evaluation of Professor B. V. Titlinov. Without a doubt, V. G. Solomin could have become a major specialist in the field of canon law, if not for the closure of the Academy and his untimely death as a young specialist in 1918.