Martin Dimnik (1979 – 2014)

Nicholas Zharkikh

Shortened text of the section. Full text in ukrainian version.

Canadian historian Martin Dimnik (1941 – 2020) was born in Ljubljana (modern Slovenia). After earning a doctorate (1976), he taught at the University of Toronto and worked for a long time at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto.

M. D. was a historian of one topic – the majority of his works are devoted to the history of ancient Rus’ of the 1st half 13th century, and especially for the Chernihiv principality. His first article was published in 1979, the last in 2014 (maybe I missed something). Sometimes they say about people who write one book all their life – this is quite close to M. D. It is natural that later publications partially repeat the previous ones, with some clarifications.

Conclusions

Martin Dimnik definitely has the first place among all the authors who wrote about the Chernihiv principality. His books are the most valuable of everything written on this topic – both in terms of volume and thoroughness of treatment of the topic. He has a number of successful reconstructions of the course of events.

The merit of M. Dimnik is all the greater because he did not belong to the Chernihiv region either by his birth or place of education and work. He fell in love with this land from a distance and was able to visit it only after the fall of the evil empire (USSR).

But the region did not love its historian. None of the numerous universities of Chernihiv region invited Dimnik to teach history. Local historians, unable to write the history of the Chernihiv principality on their own, did not even bother to translate his books. (Nowadays, after writing my work, I consider these translations to be outdated. Their time has passed.)

Paying full respect to M. Dimnik, it should be noted that his works were written in pre-scientific level. The uncritical use of late texts on a par with primary sources, complete trust in the fantasies of Tatishchev, Zotov and Baumgarten cannot be acceptable in modern science.

Another unfortunate discovery concerns the methodology of historical research. Once upon a time, in the 1990s, Ukrainian historians expressed the hope that progress in the study of history would be conditioned by the familiarization of our scientists with the new achievements of world historical science. Such hopes were expressed due to ignorance of these achievements.

Now, after reading the books of the Canadian researcher, which are actually part of these achievements of world science, I see that in terms of research methods, not a single step was taken in them compared to how Volodymyr Antonovych taught his students 140 years ago and how they wrote their diploma theses of his students in 1881. We still have the same healthy positivism in Dimnik that we saw in Golubovsky and Bagalij, we have the use of some sources printed after 1881, but there is nothing new in terms of methods.