Nikolay Gretsch and the power of discourse

Nikolay Ivanovich Gretsch started teaching early. He compiled textbooks, educational and methodological manuals throughout his life that afterwards became objects of various reviews. This diversity is explained not only by the history of the Russian language teaching or by the shift in scientific paradigms in the history of Russian linguistics, but also by the influence of the dominant discourse on public attitude to the scholar. The rejection of N. I. Gretsch's grammars in teaching was connected with the evolution of comparative historical linguistics, with new trends in developmental psychology, and with changes in literary tastes in the 1850-60s. An equally significant reason was superficial reading of Gretsch's grammatical works. It was due to ideological reasons. Until the early 1850s, the attitude towards Greek textbooks was mainly influenced by teachers, grammarians, philologists. But after the curricula were replaced in 1856, the interest in Gretsch's works began to decline. Galakhov's critical publications and Dobrolyubov's poems played a significant role in this process. This article characterizes the attitude toward Gretsch's textbooks before and after the updating and changing the curricula in 1856, and highlights the role of democratic journalism in forming a negative attitude toward Gretsch as a linguist. It is not until the mid-1950s that the interest in the fields that Gretsch was studying, as well as in the linguist himself, was restored. The article provides a complete list of European grammars used by N. I. Gretsch, and comments on the scientist's philological environment.