From “philosophy of history” to “historicism” in the studies of antiquity and the middle ages in Russia: T.N. Granovskii (1813-1855) and V.G. Vasilievskii (1838-1899)

This article is devoted to the problem of developing methods of historical research among Russian historians of the Middle Ages of the 19th century. Methods and materials. We used methods of studying historiography, developed by Russian scholars recently, as well as the ideographic method of historical inquiry. Analysis. In this article, an attempt is made to illustrate an important breakthrough in the views of Russian scholars of antiquity and the Middle Ages that occurred amid the 19th century. T.N. Granovskii and P.N. Kudriavtsev, whose formative years fell on the first half of the 19th century, started their studies of history with a belief that the knowledge of the concepts of the philosophy of history was critical for historical inquiry. But in the 1850s, T.N. Granovskii came to insist that any study of history must begin with the critical analysis, the “deconstruction” of the sources. V.G. Vasilievskii, a future scholar of Byzantium, established his studies in the 1860s on a thorough analysis of the monographs on Roman history that sought to deconstruct the myths of its early period.