“You Are Living so Finely in the Past…” (S. P. Shevyrev’s Poetic Letter to I. D. Belyaev, 1844–1845)

Abstract

This article provides a publication and an analysis of the text of the poetic letter that S. P. Shevyrev dedicated to I. D. Belyaev, a young historian who began his academic career in the journal “Moskvityanin” in the early 1840s. The letter was a response to Belyaev’s review of the book by P. M. Stroev, “Excursions of the Lords, Tsars, and Grand Dukes Mikhail Fyodorovich, Alexei Mikhailovich and Fyodor Alekseevich, Autocrats of All Rus”, published in 1844. Belyaev’s disapproval of the book was due to his disagreement on methodological issues. The article examines Belyaev’s works published in the "Moskvityanin” in 1842–1845, as well as his relations with M. P. Pogodin and S. P. Shevyrev. The poetic letter portrays a scholar immersed in academic research. This image anticipates the later memoirists’ accounts of him as an “ascetic scholar”.