The note About the School by Nikolai Grinkevich and the texts supplementing it

Abstract

The text corpus of the Grinkevich Research and Translation Project About the School, which had an active phase in 2014-2019, is considered. The sources of 9 texts are: 2 – the Alaskan Russian Church archive in the Library of Congress, 3 – N. Russel’s brochure, 4 – San Francisco newspapers; the note On the School by N. Grinkevich is supplemented, confirming the facts reported in it, by 2 testimonies of Dr. Russel himself (including the history of the creation of the note), 3 parts dedicated to the school student of Belarusian-Tlingit origin N. Savchenko (letters from his father Demian), 2 newspaper publications revealing Grinkevich’s ambiguous role. The obvious reason for the change in public position of this psalm reader, later a member of the Ecclesiastical Consistory of Alaska in relation to the problems of the church school was the inertial adherence to routine rules and procedures, official subordination and the desire to maintain position, but it was the promulgation of his note by the revolutionaries that probably led to his dismissal, already as an archpriest, from the Diocese of the Aleutians and Alaska.