SUMMARY:

In his article, Alexander Dmitriev explores the attempts of Russian thinkers and scholars to retain their collective identity as representatives of a “lost Russia” in exile. The conventional perspective on the interwar period is that this was the time when the German academic community lost its leading position in the world due to the strengthening of a nation- and state-centered orientation in institutional science and scholarship. Under these circumstances, the project to preserve “Russian scholarship in exile” could not eschew the isolationist turn. Dmitriev focuses on the history of various institutions (e.g. the Russian Scientific Institute in Berlin) as well as the ideological contexts of certain scholars’ and philosophers’ work (S. Frank, D. Chizhevskii, R. Jakobson). As with the German “Sonderweg” thesis, the “Russian idea” became the guiding principle Russian йmigrйs’ study of the humanities . The author analyzes the йmigrй idea of preservation and conservation of national science in a broad context of consolidation of national academic communities in different countries and in comparison with the emergence of self-sufficient and isolated Soviet science.