Filling professorial positions in Russia in the early twentieth century (based on the epistolary correspondence of F. V Taranovsky)

The article presents the specific features of the competitive election of professors in pre-revolutionary Russia reconstructed on the basis of studying the letters of a famous Russian legal scholar F. V. Taranovsky. Investigating this issue is directly related to the problem of restoring a complete picture of the academic culture of that time. This determines the relevance of the stated topic caused by ongoing changes of legal, socio-economic, historical and cultural nature. The study is based on the analysis of a set of written sources, including letters, telegrams, and postcards sent by Taranovsky to the Dean of the Faculty of Law of Yuryev University, V. E. Grabar, from December 1907 to September 1909. The work is based on the principles of historicism and the value approach, highlighting individual phenomena of the past that are of primary importance for the current stage of development of society as a whole and historical knowledge in particular. The biographical method was mainly used for studying and describing the procedure of the faculty election of a candidate for a vacant professorial chair with its inherent specificity determined by the legislation of the Russian Empire, the established rules for reviewing and discussing the candidates, as well as the personal characteristics of the elected and the electing ones. The presented material and the conclusions drawn from the obtained results are an important contribution to studying one of the important aspects of the academic cultural tradition in prerevolutionary Russia and an important complement to the known biographies of some early-twentieth-century Russian professors.