Article

Name: Outline of Philological Personology Review of the Book: Sokolov B. V. One Hundred Great Philologists. Moscow: Veche, 2024. 368 p.: ill.

Authors: Igor S. Uryupin

Moscow State Pedagogical University, Moscow, Russian Federation

In the section Reviews

Abstract:

This review of the book “One Hundred Great Philologists” by Boris Vadimovich Sokolov (Moscow publishing house “Veche”, 2024) is another response to the author’s popular science writing. Sokolov, Russian historian and literary critic, has consistently been contributing to the project “One Hundred Great,” a well-established and popular series which has already become a trademark of the publishing house. In this book, which is an encyclopedic dictionary-reference, B. V. Sokolov, in accordance with the formal and substantive restrictions defined by the project, presented his vision of the history of world philology in figures and ideas. Moreover, the phenomenological field of philology itself, understanding the world in a word and through a word, includes various sciences that study the text in all its manifestations. The problem of philological personology, in which the researcher actively engages, is highly relevant to modern humanities. These fields are currently experiencing an “anthropological turn,” focusing the role of an individual, a person in the development of culture and civilization. This focus leads to an emphasis on subjectness and subjectivity in interpreting the empirical material the author selected to construct his vision of the “philological” world. The author differentiates and catalogs sources through the lens of his scholarly perspective. The result is a biographical dictionary of personalities whose ideas and theories, in the author’s view, have driven the development of philology from antiquity to the present. The publishing house’s editorial stance on selecting “one hundred great” figures has implicitly categorized all philologists chosen by B. V. Sokolov as “great”. This inevitably led to certain distortion, especially since the criteria for the “greatness” of a particular scientist were not determined. The dictionary also reveals some disproportion between linguists and literary scholars (with the latter significantly outnumbering the first), as well as between domestic and foreign researchers. However, Sokolov’s extensive work and the overall importance and utility of the book are undeniable.

Keywords: philology, philological personology, “One Hundred Great”, B. V. Sokolov

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