Biography of a Scholar in a Political Context: F. I. Schmit’s Unfinished Monograph on N. P. Kondakov

This study is an attempt at a historiographical analysis of a unique source — an unfinished monograph by the prominent pre-revolutionary and Soviet art historian F. I. Schmit (1877—1937) about his senior colleague N. P. Kondakov. Remaining an indisputable figure even after his emigration from Russia in 1920, N. P. Kondakov escaped the destiny of most of his friends and students who repeated the same fate: his activity was still evaluated positively both among the Russian Diaspora and in the USSR. F. I. Schmit’s work stands out sharply from this tradition, positioning the outstanding Russian Byzantine scholar and art historian as a hardened careerist who devoted his life to serving the autocracy. A careful study of the text itself and the circumstances of the creation of the monograph in 1933 allows us to conclude that F. I. Schmit, being in a desperate state of anticipation of imminent arrest, tried to prove his commitment to the new Marxist ideology and methodology as much as possible. However, in reality, having never mastered them, he only more clearly demonstrated his impotence to integrate into the nascent Soviet scholarship and young Soviet society, thereby bringing the tragic ending of his controversial biography closer.