Vasily Osipovich Klyuchevsky (28 January 1841 – 25 May 1911) was a leading Russian Imperial historian of the late imperial period. He also addressed the contemporary Russian economy in his writings.

Biography

A village priest's son, Klyuchevsky studied at Moscow University under Sergey Solovyov, to whose chair he succeeded in 1879. His first important publications were an article on economic activities of the Solovetsky Monastery (1867) and a thesis on medieval Russian hagiography (1871). Kluchevsky was one of the first Russian historians to shift attention away from political and social issues to geographical and economical forces. He was particularly interested in the process of Russian colonisation of Siberia and the Far East. In 1882, he published his landmark study of the Boyar Duma, whereby he asserted his view of a state as a result of collaboration of diverse classes of society. In 1889, Klyuchevsky was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences. Although his lectures were highly popular with the students of Moscow University, only a few of his works were intended for publication, e.g., a handful of biographies of "representative men", including Andrei Kurbsky, Afanasy Ordin-Nashchokin, Feodor Rtishchev, Vasily Galitzine, and Nikolay Novikov. Klyuchevsky wrote his lectures on Russian history in the 1880s, and they were published in the 1900s and 1910s. He formulated the traditional view of East Slavic history, defining it as one of the Russian state and "nationality", composed of two branches: the "Great Russian" (Russian) and "Little Russian" (Ukrainian). He believed that there had been a single Rus' nationality in Kievan times, that the Great Rus'ian branch formed between the mid-fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and then a gathering of parts of the "Russian nationality" under one "all-Russian authority" took place up to the mid-nineteenth century. The last decade of his life was spent preparing the printed version of his lectures. He also became interested in politics, and joined the Constitutional Democratic Party. Maxim Gorky records the following dictum by Leo Tolstoy: "Karamzin wrote for the tsar, Solovyov wrote lengthily and tediously, and Klyuchevsky wrote for his own pleasure."

Commemoration

English translations