"MASS CULTURE" BESIEGES SCIENCE, OR CAUTIOUSLY: EVROLINTS PUBLISHING HOUSE (KIEV-MOSCOW) ¹

(c) 2004

Specialists in the field of Oriental studies, Slavic studies, Russian and European history, looking at the book ruins of recent years (2000-2003), will be happy to see that two new colleagues have appeared in their ranks-S. A. Shumov and A. R. Andreev, people, presumably, of the broadest erudition and incredible productivity, because their interests, like book products, they cover all the listed areas of knowledge.

Not having such a broad outlook, we tried to get acquainted with their publications only on Oriental studies. And we were faced with a more than extensive, almost comprehensive list of books published under the name of these authors over the past three and a half years. Here is a possibly incomplete list of them: "History of Japan" (two editions); "History of China"; "History of Afghanistan"; "Afghanistan"; "History of Iran"; "History of Turkey"; "History of the Middle East"; "Syria: history, people, Culture"; "Iraq: history, people, culture"; " Wahhabis. Documentary research". There are also books on Central Asia and jihad.

As in big science, this book production consists of entire series: "History and country", or more attractively - "Returned Heritage: monuments of military thought". Some publications are supported by the authority of the Russian Historical Society, as well as the Public Council of the Evrolints Publishing House, which, in addition to these two "erudites", includes V. Gritskov, O. Ivanov, V. Krivosheev, D. Palvinsky, A. and V. Turusov. Sometimes names that are equally unknown in Oriental studies are added to them: the head of the publishing project, V. V. Ilsky, one of the authors, N. V. Karelieva, and the editor, I. A. Nastenko. However, an orientalist by education and a politician by profession are still involved in the work. This is V. V. Zhirinovsky, who prefaced A. E. Snesarev's work "Afghanistan" (a series of "Returned Heritage") and one of the editions of the book "Iraq"with his short prefaces with action-packed political texts.

Who are S. A. Shumov and A. R. Andreev? The annotations report that Shumov, born in 1953 in Ukraine (education is not specified), is Andreev's co-author in writing several books. In turn, Andreev, born in 1957 in Siberia, graduated from the Moscow Historical and Archival Institute ²; advertised as the author of "twenty documentary historical studies". As it turns out, Andreev made his first appearance in the field of Oriental studies in 1997 with the book "History of the Crimea", which was published in the publishing house of the Interregional Center for Industry Information of Gosatomnadzor, far from the humanities. The" creative tandem "of Andreev and Shumov was formed when the book "Prince" was published in the same publishing house.

¹ This publishing company is a part of Monolith-Eurolintz-Traditsiya, or Eurolintz-Russkaya Panorama, simply Russkaya Panorama, or Kraft-Traditsiya - Eurolintz, or simply Kraft. Unlike Eurolinets, all of them are registered in Moscow.

² Therefore, it is necessary to understand the specifics of scientific genres and the rules of bibliographic references, to know how the work of the compiler differs from the research, and the research-from compilation and plagiarism. Editors of all the listed publishers put the author's name and the names of the authors in the headers and footers. Any orientalist who reads the names of Shumov and Andreev in the footers of Academician V. V. Barthold's famous work "Muslim Culture" will find this cynical. Meanwhile, in these publications, this practice is the rule. What is it: the decline of publishing culture or the conscious intent of Shumov and Andreev, designed for the uninformed reader?

page 211

Vasily Mikhailovich Dolgorukov-Krymsky. Documentary description. Historical chronicle of the XVIII century" (Moscow, 1997). Shumov did not accidentally put his right to copy next to Andreev: he financed this publication, which was very patriotically dedicated to the 275th anniversary of the General-anshef and other Prince Dolgorukov.

If the first work of Andreev outlines the characteristic features of the style of his work, then the second defines working methods: the reader is offered a short reference text under the favorite title "Chronicle" ³, where the information of these references is repeatedly repeated in further narratives-extracts from the Russian Biographical Dictionary (1905), various encyclopedias and other works. This is, as it were, the author's part of the book, since Shumov and Andreev express their thoughts through other people's texts (starting with "Prince Dolgorukov-Krymsky" they prudently refer to the original source). The main part of the book about Dolgorukov is a large appendix with the publication of documents that are interesting, but taken from second-hand sources: references are made to the Main Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, long ago renamed the Archive of Foreign Policy of Russia (now the Russian Empire), with subsequent changes in the inventories and ciphers of stored documents. In Shumov and Andreev's further publishing output, these appendices are transformed into independent publications of so-called anthologies.

The extraordinary activity of Shumov and Andreev within the Eurolintz publishing house and related companies has been on the rise since 2000. At first, they modestly present themselves as "compilers of anthologies" of Oriental literature, but very soon they claim to be unknown in scientific practice as "authors-compilers", and, finally, without any ambiguity, as the authorship of numerous "documentary studies". However, the collections of works of publicists and scientists - Japanese scholars, Sinologists, Turkologists, published by Shumov and Andreev, it is difficult to call anthologies. As you know, an anthology is a collection of works that are the most representative in any field of creativity. Meanwhile, in the publications under consideration, the selection of works is very arbitrary and sometimes just random. Judging by the annotations attached to the publications, our co-authors, to put it mildly, are poorly oriented in Russian historiography in the East. For them, "well-known Russian historians" are equally such scientists as academician V. V. Barthold and I. M. Reisner, as well as popularizing publicists V. A. Gurko-Kryazhin, F. N. Belyavsky, and even completely unknown in the circle of pre-revolutionary scientists-orientalists E. F. Volkova ("Iraq", "Wahhabis", "History of Afghanistan"). In addition, the titles of these "anthologies" are " History of Japan "(Moscow, 2003, 2nd additional ed.), " History of China. Spiritual Culture of China "(Moscow, 2003), "History of Turkey" (Moscow, 2003) - do not correspond to their content. They do not contain a consistent presentation of the subject united by a common concept. They consist of scientific and journalistic works on the history, ethnography, and culture of these countries.

Preference in these editions is given to early and outdated works. In the abstract to the History of Turkey, Shumov and Andreev report with some accusatory pathos that the book" for the first time after a break of more than a century, the works of historians of the XIX century are published", as if such publications were interrupted by the evil will of academic science, which replaced Oriental journalism in the last quarter of the XIX century. Of course, the reissue of old authors, calling for their new reading, can only be welcomed, but provided that the standards accepted in science are observed: such a reissue is accompanied by a historiographical introduction and comments that correct, supplement and explain the information provided from a modern point of view, so that the reader can correctly read the text.

³ In subsequent editions, these will be "Turkish" (touchingly dedicated to "Fatima, the great-grandmother of one of the authors"), "Syrian" and "Afghan" chronicles. All of them consist of three-quarters of the texts of the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, the reference book " Countries of the Near and Middle East "(Moscow, 1944) and the second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Shumov and Andreev are not bothered by discrepancies in the dates of events and spelling of proper and geographical names in published extracts. They do not consider it necessary to refer to the corresponding volumes of encyclopedias and the years of their publication, believing that it is enough to put the year of the beginning of publication, but here too there is a problem: they persist in referring the reader to the publication of the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Reference Book of 1880, while this famous reference book was published ten years later - in 1890; they are only four years wrong about the beginning of the publication of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (instead of 1949, it is 1945).

page 212

navigate the suggested literature. However, all this is absent in the publications under consideration, and therefore they only contribute to the persistence of historical myths that have long been rejected by science.

An elementary rule of scientific republication is the presence of a correct bibliographic apparatus. Meanwhile, when publishing translated works, Shumov and Andreev do not disclose the name of the translator, and do not specify the place of publication. For example: Kooya Nakamura. History of Japan. Kh. (Kharkov, Harbin, maybe Helsinki?), 1938. An exception is made for Sadik-i-Kashkari's "Code of Decency in the East", translated for some reason from the Turkic (read Turkish) by N. Lykoshin ("History of the Middle East", Moscow, 2002).

Shumov and Andreev do not just forget to give the correct bibliographic references, they sometimes mystify the reader. So, in the book "Syria. History, people, Culture " (Moscow, 2003) it is twice reported that the texts are printed according to the first edition, but, strange to say, the texts contain editorial notes made when they were reprinted by the compilers of the collection "Syria, Lebanon and Palestine in travel descriptions, consular and military reviews of the first half of the XIX century" (Moscow: Main Editorial Office of Eastern Literature, 1991). And in extracts from K. M. Bazili's book "Syria and Palestine under the Turkish government in historical and political relations", Shumov and Andreev, although they refer to the Odessa edition of the book in 1862, reproduce the text not only with amendments, but also with notes made in the reprint of this work in the Publishing House of Oriental Literature 100 years later (Moscow, 1962). And this is already plagiarism. Needless to say, the book does not mention any contemporary publications from which the texts are borrowed.

In order to avoid inconsistency of the broadcast title of such collections with their content and to give them commercial appeal, Shumov and Andreev create a new genre, in which they act as "authors-compilers": they choose historical works and arrange them in chronological order, subject to ruthless reduction (see: "History of Afghanistan"), or offer the reader a fantastic periodization For example: "The ancient Middle East. Sumer, Babylon, Assyria, Persia" (Part I. "Stories of the Middle East"), " The Arab Middle East. VII-XX centuries". (Hours II; in Hours III the same story is considered, but already for individual countries). The terms "Near and Middle East" used in Russian literature are confused here with "Arab Middle East"and" Muslim world". Needless to say, the materials overlap and repeat themselves. A favorite "primary source" for such writing is the 1944 reference book "Countries of the Near and Middle East". Gaps in chronology and information about Lebanon, Israel, Sudan, and the states of Arabia (with the exception of Saudi Arabia) are filled in independently by the co-authors in short references that could easily be likened to the one that has a bibliographic reference en masse to the "Encyclopedic Reference Books of the Russian Empire, the USSR, and the Russian Federation" (S. A. Shumov, A. R. Andreev. History of the Middle East, Moscow, 2002, p. 5), if these references did not contain a huge number of factual inaccuracies and errors.

As a result of the "creative" search of Shumov and Andreev, the genre of "documentary historical research"is born. For the first time, this concept appears in the counter-title of "History of the Middle East", and then moves to the title "Iraq", which, apparently, Shumov and Andreev believe, allows them to be called authors with full right. However, the differences with the previous genre are small: the" documents " of such research are also the works of historians - Orientalists, publicists, journalists (documents in the proper sense of the word are only the Constitution of Iraq of 1925 and several international agreements). But the number of works from which the material is interpolated significantly increases. These are already dozens of authors. Shumov and Andreev do not stand on ceremony with their texts: they make notes, connect them with the texts of other authors (it is good if this is indicated in the bibliographic reference, but it happens that someone else's text is attributed to someone else) ⁴ . Here, the reader is no longer presented with a compilation, but with a kind of collage, since we are not talking about any single concept and there is no harmony in the presentation (endless repetitions, lack of consistency).-

⁴ Having snatched a paragraph from the New History of the Arab Countries by V. B. Lutsky, the co-authors attributed to him at the same time a text with inaccurate data and typos that belonged to no one knows who ("Iraq", p. 107).

page 213

of the presentation). Such work leaves an impression of historiographical absurdity. And all this is full of typos in names, dates, and terms. For the layman, it doesn't matter: Ezdigerd or Yezigerd, the year the British East India Company was founded in 1600 or 1700, the Ottoman Constitution of 1876 or 1886, the Serbedars or Serberdars, the siege of Baghdad or the siege of Iraq, and there is no end to the list.

As for the printing performance, the book products of Shumov and Andreev attract attention: their design is not devoid of taste, it is made on good paper, with many illustrations and maps (however, not always a good print). But here, too, there are some curiosities: the ancient history of the Middle East is accompanied by illustrations dating back to the Muslim era.

Summing up, it should be said that if the publication of texts from the "anthologies" can still serve as improvised material (with the obligatory reconciliation with the previous edition) for university teachers and senior students of Oriental departments who are familiar with the historiography of the East, then they can mislead non-specialists. All other products are, in fact, waste paper, which can only discredit the names of those, sometimes remarkable, scientists whose materials are used in it.

For the sake of commercial interests of publishers, these books, designed for unassuming taste, create a false impression of the current level of Russian Oriental studies. It is not by chance that texts from Oriental studies of the last two or three decades are an extremely rare exception. Apparently, self-respecting living scientists (if they were asked to participate in such publishing "projects") would hardly give their consent, and the dead, as we know, "do not have shame". Shumov and Andreev have undoubtedly heard a lot about copyrights5, although they obviously have a fantastically wrong idea of the principles ^of research work.

⁵ When publishing an excerpt from the work of Major General V. V. Kolesnikov "Special Forces of the GRU: fifty years of history, twenty years of war" (Moscow, "Russian Panorama", 2001), Shumov and Andreev prudently noted that they were doing this with the permission of the publisher. Where can I get permission from the Nauka publishing house and others?..

Permanent link to this publication: