Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/219

 founded a critical school in Petrograd and applied its principles particularly to the study of Byzantine history and historiography: he elucidated the development of the Byzantine village-community and its decay, the tax-system of the Empire and its legislation, particularly in the times of the Iconoclasts, its relations to Russian affairs and barbarous tribes. Bubnov, one of his pupils, applied the critical method to the examination of mediaeval annals; others began to study Byzantine history, and Uspensky produced valuable works on its sources, on the religious movement and the village community in the Byzantine Empire, and endeavoured to give a general survey of its history; and this last task was undertaken also by Kulakovsky.

These investigations were, of course, closely connected with Slavonic studies, which made visible progress after the revival of letters and arts in Slavonic lands. Vostokov and Preiss contributed to this development and, with Grigorovitch, an original student of Slavonic languages and literature, exerted some influence on Sreznevsky: the latter collected a quantity of materials concerning the Slavonic languages, and Russian in particular—traditional beliefs, songs and writings, studying palaeographical peculiarities and explaining the meaning of many of them. The history of the Slavonic peoples, already studied by Bodyansky, was promoted by some former pupils of Sreznevsky: the most prominent of these—Lamansky, discussed the part that the "Slavonic world" had played in universal history, and had in his turn many pupils: one of them, Siegel, elaborated a comparative history of Slavonic laws; and Makushev investigated the history