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Marinus A. Wes, Classics in Russia 1700-1855: Between Two Bronze Horsemen. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992. Pp. viii + 368. ISBN 90-04-09664-7. Gld165/US$94.29.
The author, a distinguished ancient historian and Wissenschaftshistoriker, is one of the very few western classical scholars who really controls Russian. I do not mean that he can read Russian books. He can also read unpublished eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian documents; that is, he controls and can exploit archival material. His book on early Rostovtzeff is not only of permanent value because of the unique information it therefore contains. It is written in English prose that often exceeds what one finds in native speakers.1 This book, an English translation with expanded documentation of an earlier (1991) Dutch original, is more Rezeptionsgeschichte than Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Not less important but a different field. It documents Russia's discovery of pagan Greece and Rome. What had happened in Western Europe during the Renaissance only occurred after 1700 in Russia. Through the discovery of ancient Greece and Rome, Russia, beginning with Imperator Peter the Great, first entered Gorbachev's 'Common House of Europe'. Wes presents the growth of the classical tradition in Russia as 'an aspect of the history of Russia's orientation to Western Europe in general' (p. 4). It is a journey from Byzantium to Athens and Rome. The story reminds us that classics is more than emending Manilius and as part of the intellectual and even political history of the West provides the best argument for its survival as an academic discipline in this banausic age. Omne ignotum pro magnifico. I am...