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E.V. Abroskina (Moscow) – N.D. Flittner’s Berlin Internships in 1909–1914: Student Daily Living and Professional Formation

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Abstract

The article discusses the Berlin internships of Natalia Davidovna Flittner (1879–1957), the Russian Egyptologist, in the period from 1909 to 1914. The main sources for the article were previously unknown parts of her “Memoirs”, which until recently were in the private collection of A.T. Shakhtakhtinskaya. Thanks to new archival acquisitions, the author of the article was able to reconstruct and describe what existed at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries educational tradition – Berlin internships for orientalists. Using a microhistorical approach, the author analyses student daily living and the learning process of members of St. Petersburg Egyptologist B.A. Turaev’s Society: I.M. Volkov, A.L. Kotseyovsky, V.V. Struve. Being a member of such trips, N.D. Flittner described in detail how student life and classes were organized, giving detailed psychological characteristics of her professors – A. Erman, K.F. Lehmann- Haupt, G. Möller and others. Throughout the training, an important process was also the building of horizontal connections between students, which made it possible to talk about a single research school, the school of Adolf Ermann. It included both Russian scientists (B.A. Turaev, I.M. Volkov, A.L. Kotseyovsky, V.V. Struve) and scholars from all over the world (P.J. Boylan, S. York Stevenson, A. Hertz). A significant part of the article discusses the infl uence of the political context both on the process of studying in Berlin and on the writing of the “Memoirs”. The author analyses two temporalities existing in the text of the ego-document: one belongs to the pre-war period in Berlin, the other to the period of the siege of Leningrad, when N.D. Flittner began organizing her own diary entries and creating the text of “Memoirs”.

Keywords

Egyptology, N.D. Flittner, B.A. Turaev, I.M. Volkov, A. Ehrman, Berlin internships.

Evgeniya V. Abroskina

Institute of World History, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia

State Hermitage Muse um, Saint Petersburg, Russia

E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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