FEDOTOV, GEORGE P

FEDOTOV, GEORGE P., Russian church historian, educator (1886–1 September 1951). A Marxist student who emigrated to Germany in 1906 to study history, he returned in 1908 to graduate from the University of St. Petersburg in the historico-philological department. He taught the history of the Middle Ages as privat-docent at St. Petersburg and in Saratov. Disenchanted with the Left, he departed Russia in 1925 to settle in Paris, where in the same year he began teaching church history at St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute (q.v.). In 1931 he published Saints of Ancient Russia, X-XVII (in Russian), utilizing his extensive grasp of hagiography, in which he expressed particular veneration for Paisii Velichkovsky and Seraphim of Sarov (qq.v.). From 1930 to 1939 he was coeditor of the Russian language journal Novii Grad (New City). On 27 September 1935 he was among the founding members-including Mother Maria (Skobtsova), Nicholas Berdiaev, Sergius Bulgakov (qq.v.)-of Orthodox Action, the Russian emigre Christian social-action organization. Arriving in the United States in 1941, he became professor of church history at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary (q.v.), New York. Metropolitan Theophilus requested that he and Professor Peter P. Zouboff compose a memorandum to reorganize the seminary as a graduate school for theological studies. This plan was formulated by them and adopted at the Seventh All-American Sobor in 1946. His collected works in English (latest publication, 1988) include St. Filipp, Metropolitan of Moscow, A Treasury of Russian Spirituality, The Russian Religious Mind (2 vols.), and Peter Abelard. His works are characterized by an intelligent selection of materials representative of the history of intellect and spirituality, and good, thorough scholarship.