On Aleksander Il’ich Kopanev’s centenary

On October 20, 2015 a special joint session of the Scientific council of SPbIH and Saint Petersburg branch of Archaeography commission of the RAS dated for the centenary of an outstanding historian, specialist in source studies and archaeographer Aleksander Il’ich Kopanev took place.
This session was divided into two parts: one with the scientific reports and another with memoirs and speeches.

On the agenda there were several reports. Yu. G. Alekseev (professor, SPbSU) in his talk “Aleksandr Il’ich Kopanev as a historian of Russian peasantry” paid special attention to the importance of A.I. Kopanev’s contribution to the study of Russian peasantry as legally free and self-dependent in its economic activity power. The works of A.I. Kopanev, based on large amount of factual material, were the development of studies conducted by his tutor I.I. Smirnov.

Z.V. Dmitrieva (leading research fellow, SPbIH RAS) in the report “About the first book of A.I. Kopanev “The history of landownership in Belozersk region in 15^th-16^th centuries” struggled to show the importance of this book for the development of domestic historiography as the first example of a monographic study of the feudal landownership in 15^th-16^th centuries carried out on the basis of both acts and documents of central and local governmental bodies and graphic representation of the landownership history presented in maps.

N.Yu. Bubnov (leading research fellow, Library of the RAS) dedicated his report “A.I. Kopanev and archaeography of the Old Believers’ legacy in the Russian North” to the description of A.I. Kopanev’s participation in five archeographical expeditions organized by Alexander Il’ich and conducted by the scholars of the Library of the Academy of Sciences in 1959-1968 which resulted in the enlargement of the library collection with manuscripts and ancient printed books of 15^th-19^th centuries.

V.A. Klisheva (research fellow, Library of the RAS) in her talk “Manuscripts of archaeographic expeditions of A.I. Kopanev stored at the Library of the RAS” presented the data on the quantity of books received by the library as a result of A.I. Kopanev’s archeographic expeditions. These items served as a basis for Belomorsk, Kargopol and Vyatka book collections. She claimed Alexander Il’ich Kopanev to have revived the traditions of founder of field archaeography V.I. Sreznevsky.

E.K. Piotrovskaya (leading research fellow, SPbIH RAS) presented the report “The manuscript with the texts of the first Russian saints from the N.P. Likhachev’s collection”, where she analyzed the 15^th century book including the materials on Slavic-Russian hagiography.

The talk presented by N.P. Kopaneva (senior research fellow, History dept., MAE RAS), consisting of family legends and genealogy of the Kopanevs’ kin, was also of interest.

The participants of this meeting got acquainted with the exhibition of documents from the personal archival fund of the scholar and his scientific works, which was installed by I.N. Shepyreva (librarian, Library of SPbIH RAS, dept. of the Library of the RAS) and N.V. Bashnin (research fellow, Scientific and historical archive of SPbIH RAS). Curator of this exhibition is the head of the library L.I. Pershina.