(BASED ON ANCIENT RUSSIAN MONUMENTS) It is difficult to overestimate the role of source study methods in historical knowledge. If" neither thoughts nor language form a special realm in themselves, "if" they are only manifestations of real life,"1 then the accuracy of establishing the objective facts of this real life is just as important to the historian as the accuracy of empirical research is to the natural scientist. That is why the well-known reproach of Karl Marx and Fr. Engels ' view of historiography that it "takes every epoch at its word, no matter what it says or imagines about itself"2 applies not only to the historical science of his day as a whole , but also to source studies. But what do we mean when we talk about the reliability of the source? The source not only contains a description of individual facts, it is also a product of a certain era, a "remnant of the past". Criticism of the source was familiar to historians from ancient times (from the Renaissance and even antiquity), but it was from the end of the XIX century. In historiography, the idea of the possibility of indirect use of sources, the inaccuracy and unreliability of which also reflect certain historical phenomena, arose and began to spread:" The triumph of historical criticism is to eavesdrop on what people of a certain time say about what they are silent about, " V. O. Klyuchevsky wrote in 1893 .3 In the 20th century, this way of using sources became quite common. The English historian R. J. Collingwood (1889-1943), rejecting archaic historiographical methods that he characterized as "scissors and glue" historiography, wrote that if a historian of the past read sources "on the assumption that there is nothing in them that they do not directly tell the reader", then the modern historian squeezes out of them "information that at first glance suggests something completely different, but in fact gives an answer to the question that he decided to put"4. A similar idea was expressed by his F ... Читать далее