Abstract
The scientific career of the archaeologist, art historian M.K. Karger (1903‒1976) largely refl ects the vicissitudes of the history of Russian science in 1920s ‒ 1970s. In the 1920s, Soviet science suffered the pressure of institutional and disciplinary reformatting. The founding of new scientific and higher education institutions, the dissolution or radical restructuring of previous ones, and reforms aimed at destroying the previous (pre-revolutionary) order of dissertations' defense brought chaos not only to the scientific policy of the early Soviet state, which weakened to some extent only in the mid-1930s, but also to the life and work of almost every scholar, especially at the beginning of their activity. The initial stage of the career of M.K. Karger, one of the leading Soviet historians of ancient Russian art, fell precisely on this stage in the history of Soviet scientific policy and the history of science. Karger’s scientific and social biography is important for the reconstruction and study of not only specific issues in the history of archaeology, but also for understanding of some more general processes in the sociology of science. In this regard, each new piece of evidence that sheds light on his life and work is important, especially given the fragmentation of archival evidence about Karger. Below is published a letter from F.I. Schmit to V.M. Friche, which not only allows us to clarify some facts from the biography of M.K. Karger in the late 1920s, but also raises the question of the ways in which competing (Moscow and Leningrad) scientific schools interacted.
Keywords
Archaeology, architecture, M.K. Karger, V.M. Friche, F.I. Schmit, historiography, scientific policy, scientific archives.