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Obituaries (from BBBS 2002) Professor Sir Dimitri Obolensky, 1918-2002 Professor Sir Dimitri (=Dmitriy Dmitrievich) Obolenksy, who died on 23rd December at the age of 83, was a scholar of a type now rare: remote from careerism, collegially-disposed (treating all seekers after knowledge- including undergraduates and lay people- with great civility and respect), producing his meticulously crafted books or articles only when he felt ‘inner necessity’, yet never too proud to lend his talents to the popularization as well as the academic study of the topics that moved him, always alert to context, to indisciplinarity, to the totality of culture-- specifically, that of Eastern Europe. He was born on 1st April (New Style) 1918 in Petrograd, then torn by war and revolution, to an ancient aristocratic and priviliged family, whose members, over half a millennium, had risen high in Russian state service. He was ready to trace his ancestry back to St Vladimir, the ruler who christianised Russia in 988, and before him to the legendary Viking founder of the dynasty, Rurik; yet, fastidiously or modestly, avoided using the title ‘Prince’. His grandmother had been wooed by the future Tsar Nicholas II: though happy to relate this tale, he-- again fastidiously-- left it out of the volume of family memoirs that was his last work. He spent most of his first year of life at the Vorontsov Palace (built by an Anglophile forebear) at Alupka, near Yalta in Crimea; when he returned in the 1960s he supposedly had a touching encounter with an old retainer from those days (actually he maintained discreet contact with, and helped, other members of the former household during the Soviet period). His family was evacuated by the Royal Navy, and settled in comparative poverty in Paris, where he was educated at the Lycée Pasteur-- though he also had a couple of free years at an English prep school in Eastbourne. His cousin Alexander was the most famous Rugby footballer for England of the 1930s. He was one of the rare people who are authentically trilingual, equally at home in Russian, French, and English. But his Russian roots were his great strength and manifested themselves particularly in his enduring commitment to the Orthodox Church. He was a lay delegate to the Moscow Millennial Church Council of 1988. He got a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, and maintained himself precariously through undergraduate and postgraduate work on a series of grants and odd jobs. Intending to read moral sciences (i.e. philosophy), he was fortunately diverted into modern languages. The presiding presence in Slavonic studies was the formidable and inspirational Dame Elizabeth Hill, who pointed him in the direction of history, and, more specifically, the Bogomils. This apparently obscure Balkan sect of medieval dualistic heretics had far reaching significance, involving the Western Cathars or Albigensians, and with his book The Bogomils (1948), deriving from his thesis, he put them on the map of cultural history. He was awarded a Fellowship at Trinity in 1942, followed by a university lectureship. He was influenced by older scholars of broad imaginative scope such as Sir Steven Runciman and (in particular) Francis Dvornik, but he also forged friendships with Slavists of his own generation who saw medieval studies as one facet of a total cultural- historical picture: A. Vlasto, R. Auty and, most significantly, John Fennell. Their lives ran in parallel: they followed each other from Cambridge to Oxford in the late 1940s, where Fennell (whose post was in Russian language and literature) devoted himself more and more to medieval historical studies, while Obolensky (whose post was in Russian and Balkan medieval history) spent much time on cultural studies, including literature. Obolenksy married Elisabeth Lopukhin, from an émigré Russian family, in 1947; Fennell married her sister, Marina. They collaborated on publications, sadly though, a rift between them in later life brought much distress. Obolenksy was a mesmerizing university lecturer, with a fine voice, the gifts of an actor and rhetorician and a natural ability to shape his material; his readings of poetry (especially Pushkin) were famous. It is astonishing that he was not much employed for radio talks, unlike his friend and contemporary Isaiah Berlin. But he did not parade his talents; in company he was rather self-effacing, even shy (and a good listener). One of his lectures gave rise to a most significant early publication, an article (that could well have been a book) in Oxford Slavonic Papers(1950), ‘Russia’s Byzantine Heritage’. As an outline of key moments and their significance in Russian cultural history it has acquired classic status, and it points forward to his subsequent major investigations into Byzantine civilisation and its meaning for Eastern European identity. These were to culminate in the major work of his life, The Byzantine Commonwealth (1971). Before that, however, he undertook the apparently humble (but laborious, and to him most rewarding) task of editing the Penguin Book of Russian Verse(1962, etc.) an exemplary anthology better than anything of its kind in Russia, ranging from the 12th century to Soviet times. By the 1960s Obolenksy, (who took British citizenship in 1948) was becoming internationally known; he held many visiting lectureships and fellowships in the U.S.A.; he did not mind the drudgery of chairing or organizing conferences, including the major Congress of Byzantine Studies in Oxford in 1966. (At this he showed a film of H.M. The Queen’s coronation, with comments on Byzantine aspects of the ritual!). He was also, to his great pleasure, able to re-establish contact with his native land. In the ideological minefield of Soviet historical scholarship, his gifts of fairness and straightforwardness were valued and recognized; he himself particularly admired D.S. Likhachov, who had worked on topics related to his own (and many others of a general cultural nature) through the most difficult times. He was instrumental in bringing Likhachov and the poet Anna Akhmatova on visits to Oxford in the 1960s. Obolenksy’s concept of a ‘Byzantine Commonwealth’, a group of nations politically autonomous but with durable, if flexible cultural bonds, were developed with elegance and authority on a series of different levels. Characteristically, he related human actions to their physical setting in a long chapter on historical geography (the same enthusiasm informs his finest short work of textual commentary, on the Russo-Byzantine trade route as described in the tenth century of Constantine Porphyrogenitus). His approach, astonishing thirty years ago, has become generally accepted; his book, lucid and attractive but thoroughly documented, has changed western habits of thought about the nature, status and values of the Eastern European tradition. Subsequently, Obolensky published plenty, but nothing of the same scope. He edited the Cambridge Companion to Russian Studies, wrote a series of ‘Byzantine portraits’, and on the day of his 80th birthday completed Bread of Exile, an edition of memoir-pieces by his elder relatives with one by himself. He loved Greece, and spent much time there-- in later years in the company of his cousin-by-marriage Chloe Obolenksy, with whom he collaborated in editing an album of photographs of old Russia. Many honours came his way; a knighthood (1984), vice-presidency of the British Academy (1983-85), honorary degrees. He enjoyed the perks of fame and ceremonial generally, but retained an impish and self-deprecatory manner, and lived by himself, very simply, until illness took a hold in his last couple of years. His marriage was dissolved in 1989; there were no children. Robin Milner-Gulland (A different
version of this obituary was published in the Daily Telegraph) Obituaries from BBBS 2010: Obituaries from BBBS 2009: Obituaries from BBBS 2008: Obituaries from BBBS 2007: Obituaries from BBBS 2006: Obituaries from BBBS 2005: Obituaries from BBBS
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