Page:The Russian Review Volume 1.djvu/295

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M. M. KOVALEVSKY
263

a beautiful tradition, was fully appreciated during the latest period of intensive life at the university, beginning with 1900 and up to the wrecking of the university in 1911; it left deep traces of influences, perhaps not clear as yet, but full of significance to the historian."

And yet, even at this time, mere academic activity did not satisfy Kovalevsky. He was essentially a man of social life, in the scientific meaning of this term, a man eager to take an active part in public life. Early in 1879 he began to edit, together with Professor V. Th. Miller, a monthly magazine called the Critical Review, devoted to scientific criticism. The magazine lasted only two years, and was discontinued in 1880, when Kovalevsky was sent by his university abroad to do additional research in his field. This Review carried Kovalevsky's ideas far beyond the walls of the university, for the magazine was eagerly read in all intellectual centers of the country.

During this period, too, Kovalevsky was active in assisting the late V. A. Goltsev in the organization of the first Russian Zemstvo Councils. An ardent supporter of constitutionalism and self-government, he did much at this time to help formulate a movement in favor of constitutionalism.

The latter part of the period of Kovalevsky's professorship at the University of Moscow coincided with one of the blackest periods in the political life of Russia. It was the time of a severe political reaction that set in after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. For a few years the universities of Russia escaped the heavy hand of repression, but their turn came, too. The statutes of 1884 gave the Minister of Education, Delianov, free rein in the treatment of the higher schools of the country, and, in 1887, Kovalevsky found himself dismissed from the university without any explanation as to cause, while his chair of comparative government was abolished altogether.

After this Kovalevsky could not remain in Russia. He went abroad again, this time for two decades. During this period he lived part of the time in his villa at Beaulieu, near Nice, where a greater part of his collection of books, numbering over twenty thousand volumes and now bequeathed to the Universities of Moscow and of Kharkov, is still kept. It was in this villa that Kovalevsky wrote many of his books, working over the research material accumulated during his younger years, and supplementing his data with new material, which he obtained in his "excursions" to the archive repositories of Italy, Spain, and other countries of Europe. Part of his time was devoted to lecturing in London, Stockholm, and other cities of Europe, as well as in the United States. He also devoted much time and attention to the "Russian Higher School" at Paris, which was intended to provide higher educational opportunities to Russian youth, unable, for some reason or other, to enjoy such opportunities in their native land.

During the twenty years of his exile, Kovalevsky was really acting in the capacity of Russia's unofficial ambassador to the cultured West. The death of Turgeniev left this envious posi-