Abstract
After the revolution of 1917, the sphere of science and culture in the USSR suffered fundamental changes: universities, institutes, museums had to correlate their activities with specifi c objectives that came from government bodies, as well as with the ideological canon of “Marxism-Leninism” in understanding the world historical progress, which itself in the 1920s ‒ 1930s was still passing the stage of formation. The beginning of the 1930s in the history of the State Hermitage was marked by the beginning of the stage of “socialist reconstruction”, accordingly, previous scholarly discussions acquired a new ideological tone. In these discussions, the struggle for influence within the museum, a different understanding of the museum and exhibition activities, and ways to convey the necessary meaning of the exhibits to the visitors were intertwined. The main actors in the discussions regarding the understanding of ancient Oriental society in general and ancient Egypt in particular were V.V. Struve and I.M. Lurie. The authors publish four documents from 1931 from the Archive of the State Hermitage. These documents show that V.V. Struve acted more as a dogmatist, for whom the literal correspondence of the museum’s work program to the sociological categories developed by K. Marx was the most important point. I.M. Lurie and his colleagues in the struggle against Struve were ready to give up the purity of Marxist teachings and defended the possibility of relatively free use of the categorical apparatus. In museum practice, I.M. Lurie defended the primacy of exhibits, unlike V.V. Struve, who emphasized the paramount importance of labeling. Ultimately, having won the fight against the opponent, I.M. Lurie and his Hermitage colleagues throughout the 1930s used categorical apparatus quite outside his canonically Marxist version.
Keywords
Ancient World History, Ancient Orient, Ancient Egypt, slavery, feudalism, Asian mode of production, the State Hermitage, V.V. Struve, I.M. Lurie.
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