Background
Alexander Alexandrovich Vasiliev was born on October 5, 1867, in St. Petersburg, Russia. He was the son of Alexander Stepanovich Vasiliev, an army officer, and Olga Alexandrovna Chelpanova Vasiliev.
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Alexander Alexandrovich Vasiliev was born on October 5, 1867, in St. Petersburg, Russia. He was the son of Alexander Stepanovich Vasiliev, an army officer, and Olga Alexandrovna Chelpanova Vasiliev.
Vasiliev pursued brilliant of traditional studies at the First Classical Gymnasium of St. Petersburg, from which he graduated with a gold medal in 1887.
At St. Petersburg University a chance remark of his professor of Arabic, V. R. Rozen, sent him to the Byzantinist V. G. Vasilievsky, thus determining his career.
Vasiliev's classical and oriental training, as well as his studies in Europe, North Africa, and the Near East on a fellowship (1897 - 1900), culminated in his master's (1900) and doctoral (1902) theses, The Political Relation of Byzantium and the Arabs in the Amorian and the Macedonian Dynasty.
These works subsequently became known to Western scholars through the translations and revisions of H. Gregoire, M. Canard, and others, and were published as Byzance et les arabes (1935 - 1968).
Before completing his studies, Vasiliev returned to teach Latin, and then history, at the First Classical Gymnasium. From 1904 to 1912, he was a professor of modern history at the University of Dorpat and from 1912 to 1922, he was a professor of medieval history and dean of the Women's Pedagogic Institute in St. Petersburg. In 1912, he was a lecturer, and from 1917 to 1925 professor, at the University of St. Petersburg. In 1918, he became a member of the newly founded Academy for the History of Material Culture and served as president in 1920-1922; and in 1919, he was elected a corresponding member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences. At the outbreak of World War I, he was in Paris but returned to Russia.
A chance meeting with M. I. Rostovtzeff and the increasingly problematic situation of Byzantine studies in the Soviet Union led him to accept an offer to replace Rostovtzeff at the University of Wisconsin. The move to the United States in 1925 enhanced his scholarly reputation. He remained at Wisconsin until 1939. In 1935-1936, he lectured at Columbia University and in 1942, he was Haskell Lecturer at Oberlin College. He was at the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies from 1944 to 1953, as senior scholar and scholar emeritus. The spontaneous encomiums of his colleagues at the opening session of the Ninth International Congress of Byzantine Studies, held at Thessalonica just before his death, turned it into "Vasiliev's apotheosis. " In the United States, where his specialty was virtually unknown before his arrival, Vasiliev became the intellectual and professional patriarch of most American Byzantinists.
In April 1927, he introduced scholars to the rich but unfamiliar field with the publication of "Byzantine Studies in Russia" in the American Historical Review. His enormous enthusiasm and energy, which made him "to the end the most vivid personality in the group, " impelled the expansion of Byzantine studies in America and abroad. His fundamental four-part History of the Byzantine Empire, first published in Russia (1917 - 1925), was revised and translated into English (1928 - 1929) and again in 1952.
He died in Washington, D. C. , occurred five hundred years to the day after the fall of Byzantium.
Vasiliev's interdisciplinary approach combined minute analysis of manuscripts with a scholarship from archaeology, numismatics, epigraphy, hagiography, secular literature, and law, in addition to his own primary concentration on political history. He also recognized the importance of the Christian and Muslim Near East and was familiar with Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Ethiopic as well as classical and Slavic languages.
He revised standard interpretations in "Emperor Michael III in Apocryphal Literature" (1946), and in January 1936, he acknowledged the dominant role of the Georgian queen Tamara in "The Foundation of the Empire of Trebizond, " the pioneer work on the neglected Paleologue period.
a corresponding member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences
In the unfinished manuscript of his autobiography, Vasiliev defined himself clearsightedly: "My past has consisted of four essential elements: my teaching and scholarly activities, music, travels and my personal intimate life. " On his seventy-third birthday, he ironically noted "Old Fogy is not only alive but still loves life as he did many years ago. "
Those who witnessed his leap from the prow of a beached ship to visit a Macedonian monastery, only a month before his death, can testify that he never lost either his love of learning or his love of life.
Vasiliev pursued his lifelong passion for music, which he considered his "real love much more than the history of Byzantium. " He also published musical compositions and scholarly articles and traveled extensively as a delegate from the Women's Pedagogic Institute to Algiers (1905), Melbourne (1906), and the Congress of Americanists in Buenos Aires (1910).
Vasiliev was never married.
