| Abstrakt: |
The family in which the eminent Russian historian Sergei Fedorovich Platonov was born and raised could well exemplify how the most competent persons from the peasantry, despite all obstacles and thanks to their abilities and industry, gradually not only filled the educated segment of Russian society but even became an ornament to it. According to family tradition, Platonov's ancestors were originally peasants from the Kaluga area. Evidently, they were given their freedom even during the period of serfdom, and they settled in Moscow. Not only were the parents of the future historian "native Muscovites" but all their kin "were concentrated in Moscow." Fedor Platonov, trained as a typographical engineer, was sent by the "government service" to the Ukrainian town of Chernigov, where he served as head of the provincial press. It was there, in Chernigov, that Sergei F. Platonov was born on 16 (28) April 1860. In 1869 Fedor Platonov was transferred to St. Petersburg, and nine-year-old Sergei Platonov also traveled to St. Petersburg, together with his whole family. From then on, his entire life was linked to St. Petersburg. During his childhood and adolescence, however, the future historian felt close spiritual ties with Moscow. In his declining years he wrote, "whenever I visited Moscow during my childhood, in the home of my grandfather on the northern edge of the city … I felt as if it were my real home," even though the family homestead "was not there but in St. Petersburg." Recalling the "Great Russian element" that reigned in his family and with which he "was reared and imbued," and which, he believed, gave him the right to consider himself "a pure representative of the southern (Moscow) branch of the Great Russian tribe," Platonov concluded: "Not only our origins but also our conscious devotion to Moscow, with its shrines, history, and way of life made my parents, and hence me as well, Great Russian patriots." Sergei Platonov was greatly influenced by his father, "an intelligent, able, and humane man who stood head and shoulders above those around him in terms of intelligence and morality." The father instilled a love for reading in his son and "gave him his first understanding of history and literature." Sergei Platonov "started to read Karamzin and Pushkin at around the age of eight or nine, and dearly loved to listen to his father's stories about happenings in his own youth, which took place in close contact with student circles [kruzhki] in Moscow." |
