The Activity of P. Draganov in the Field of Slav History and his ‟Macedonian-Slav Collectionˮ (1894)

Abstract

The paper deals with the manysided activity of P. Draganov in the field of Slav history, who is known as the author of the “Macedonian-Slav Collection” (S.-Pb., 1894) and the founder of the Macedonian studies in Russia. Academician of MASA B. Ristovsky, who analysed the scientific heritage and the life road of this Bessarabian Bulgarian, dedicated a number of works to P. Draganov and called him “the most prominent predecessor” of K. Misirkov and D. Chupovsky.
Draganov, and despite his own selflessness, in his works was primarily a publicist. Undoubtedly, this was a sign of the time when Slavic studies had not yet had sufficiently clear ideas about the linguistic and ethno-cultural identity of a number of Slavic peoples, including Macedonians. Language, folklore and ethnographic material was for P. Draganov rather to confirm his beliefs, and not the source material for historical comparative analysis and textual research. Therefore, his works are abundant with expressions such as “moral supportˮ, “act of political truth”, “oppressed nation”, which is “sold to Serbs or Bulgarians“, “Bulgarian cultures“, and so on. He warns of Macedonia as a possible dangerous “element of a common fires on the Balkan Peninsula, if not throughout Europe”. In addition, many of Draganov’s statements are unverified or inaccurate, in particular, he obviously did not check his own records of his students’ contributions, reveals the non-typical forms of Macedonian word formation (excellent and infinitive), expresses the thesis of “multilingual and multi-ethnic” Macedonia, which, as a rule, foreigners asserted, were not familiar with the church system in existence in Turkey at that time, which determined ethnicity by belonging to a certain church and which, in turn, led to erroneous statistics and ethnographers data.