A two-volume book Scythia – Russia (Ivan Limbach’s Publishing House, 2018 – 616 pp., ill.) by Dmitry Alexeyevich Machinsky, a historian and archaeologist who was on the staff of the State Hermitage for many years.
Dmitry Alexeyevich Machinsky (1937–2012) was a prominent scholar in his home country, an interpreter of Russian history and literature. All of his many-sided activities were subordinated to one main task – the study of the historical context of the separation of the Slavic community, the characteristics of the formation of the ethno-socium called Rus’ and the processes that led to the formation of the first Russian state.
His field of research was all the most striking phenomena in Russian pre-history: from the Maikop Culture and the artefacts found in the Minusinsk Basin (4th–3rd millennia BC), including the Scythian era, the early colonial period when the Greeks settled the northern Black Sea region and Greco-Scythian contacts up to barbarian Europe in the early centuries AD. Machinsky regarded these processes as the sprouting of the future “tree of Russia”.
Machinsky intended to gather his most significant scholarly papers together in a book. That intention has now been realized in this two-volume publication. The introduction is by Victoria Talgatovna Musbakhova, a Candidate of Philological Sciences, who notes not only Machinsky’s considerable contribution to history and literature, but also the uniqueness of his personality, which “as many observed, was a living link between the Iron Age that was his era and [Russia’s] Silver Age, where his physical and spiritual roots lay.”
Machinsky was commemorated by the round table “Pontifices Maximi” held in the State Hermitage on 19 and 20 October 2017. The conference was timed to mark the 80th anniversary of the scholar’s birth.
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