Undesirable benefactors: Awards from merchants, Muscovite historians of antiquities, and characteristics of symbolic capital in mid-nineteenth century Russia

Résumé 0

The article studies St. Petersburg merchants’ attempt at joining Moscow University’s Society of History and Antiquities of Russia during the last years of Nicholas I’s reign. The Society’s secretary, Osip Maksimovich Bodianskii, discussed the prospects of this membership with antiquarian and merchant patron Ivan Petrovich Sakharov, and the two men formulated different visions of the Society’s development in Russia. The issues at hand in their discussion, such as the social status of antiquities historians, a possible division of work among them, and material incentives for their activities, are analyzed within the framework of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital. The study shows serious, insurmountable obstacles to the conversion of the merchants’ economic capital into the symbolic capital conferred by membership in a prestigious academic society.