Vladimir Kapitonovich Nikolsky

Vladimir Kapitonovich Nikolsky

Vladimir Kapitonovich Nikolsky (Russian: Владимир Капитонович Никольский; 20 September 1894, Yaroslavl – 17 October 1953, Moscow) was a Soviet historian, ethnologist, translator, religious scholar, Doctor of Historical Sciences (1943), and professor.

Biography

He was born into the family of an army podporuchik. At age 18, he entered Moscow University. In 1916 he graduated from the Faculty of History and Philology of Moscow University. He was a student of M. K. Lubavsky. He was left at the university to prepare for a professorship. From 1918 to 1925 he taught at the Faculty of Social Sciences; from 1925 to 1930 – at the Faculty of Ethnology; since 1934 – at the Faculty of History (head of the commission on the history of the pre-class society at the Department of the History of the Ancient World), professor of the Department of Ancient History of the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History. From 1942 to 1953 he was the head of the Department of Ancient History of the Moscow Regional Pedagogical Institute and professor of the Department of General History of the Moscow State Historical and Archival Institute.

His first published studies, begun in his student years, were devoted to the Zemsky Sobors in Russia in the 17th century. However, the main area of his scientific interests was the history of primitive society and the early forms of religion. Numerous articles and brochures are mainly of a popular scientific nature, devoted to the problems of anthropogenesis, the origin and early forms of religion.

In 1926 he was on a business trip to Europe, where he studied modern literature about early forms of religion in libraries. In the same year he published a large article in the magazine «Antireligioznik», devoted to various theories of the origin of religion, where he devoted considerable attention to criticism of the theory of urmonotheismus, and in 1929 he made a large report on this subject at the Communist Academy.

In the late 1920s to the early 1930s, under his editorship and with his preface, translations of the works of European scholars on the history of culture and primitive religion (Heinrich Cunow «The History of the Economy», Lucien Lévy-Bruhl «Supernatural in Primitive Thinking», Edward Burnett Tylor «Primitive Culture», James George Frazer «The Golden Bough»), were published at «Ateist» and «Sotsekgiz» publishing houses. In 1931, under his editorship, the first volume of the work «Religious Beliefs of the Peoples of the USSR» (Russian: «Религиозные верования народов СССР») was published. In 1943, he defended his doctoral dissertation on the theme of the «Primeval Community» (Russian: «Первобытная община»). In 1952 he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Nikolsky died after a short illness. He was buried at the Vvedenskoye Cemetery in Moscow.

References

• Никольский Владимир Капитонович
• Great Soviet Encyclopedia / Третье издание/ Том 18. Никко — Отолиты (1974)
• Советская историческая энциклопедия, Том 10. НАХИМСОН - ПЕРГАМ / Издательство: Государственное научное издательство "Советская энциклопедия" М. 1967 / 534 с. / С. 224
• Журнал "Советская этнография". 1954/ № 1 С. 170