“The collapse of the communist system in Russia has given Canadian and other Western researchers much greater access than ever before to valuable historical and literary archives,” says world-renowned Tolstoy expert Andrew Donskov. “For example, we are now learning a great deal more about Tolstoy and his relation to the Canadian Doukhobors.”
Donskov, who teaches in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, recently became the sixth recipient of the University of Ottawa’s Distinguished Professor Award, established in 1999. During his professional career spanning more than 30 years (the past 22 at the University of Ottawa), Donskov has worked to foster a greater understanding of Russian literature and culture, especially one of its most famous exponents, the writer Leo Tolstoy.
The award is accompanied by a research fund, which Donskov plans to spend on the completion of several projects in Canadian Slavic studies. Canadian connections in Russian literary and cultural history have been a focus of his recent research work, especially the close relation between Tolstoy and the 7,500 members of the Doukhobor religious sect Tolstoy helped emigrate en masse to Canada in 1899.
In line with his quest to make Slavic studies more accessible to Canadians, Donskov founded the Slavic Research Group as an independent research unit of the Faculty of Arts in 1998. His colleagues point to Donskov's success in establishing, through the Group, a solid international reputation in Slavic studies for the University.
In 1992 he became the only scholar from this side of the Atlantic to be appointed by the Russian Academy of Sciences and its editorial board as a participant in its new 100-volume edition of Tolstoy’s works. In 2002, he was elected Full Member of the Petrovskaja Academy of Arts and Sciences.
His achievements have not gone without recognition in Canada. The recipient of numerous SSHRC and international grants for his research projects on Russian literature, Donskov was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2001.
Former Vice-Rector Academic Bernard Philogène accompanied Donskov during a visit to Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1991, as part of consultations with the Russian Academy of Sciences. Philogène noted the eagerness with which their Russian hosts expressed their interest for future collaboration as indicative of the impact Donskov’s research had among Russian scholars.
One significant example of this impact has been the different Russian reactions to Donskov's views on the changing image of the Russian peasant in 19th-century Russian drama. His first monograph, published under this title by the Finnish Academy of Sciences in 1972, was widely praised for its significant departure from the hackneyed Soviet studies on this topic, which held up the Russian peasantry as a model for official socialist ideology. While Donskov's original views met with considerable opposition from the party-governed Soviet scholarship of the day, they are now widely accepted by scholars in Russia.
According to David Rampton, chair of the Department of English, Donskov’s early studies on Russian drama, made him “a central figure in Russian theatre studies” while his more recent publications on Tolstoy “changed the way critics talk about Tolstoy's œuvre generally.”
