MIKHAIL KUFAEV'S BIBLIOLOGICAL SCHOOL IN RUSSIA.

The paper discusses the influence of the eminent scholar Mikhail Kufaev on the Russian book science. In his works, Kufaev paid particular attention to the philosophy of a book and to the philosophy and methodology of book science, to the history of a book, to bibliosociology, etc. Kufaev, when creating his theory of book science, used the main principles of the doctrine of the Baden school of philosophy. He considered book science to be one of the "ideographic" sciences which study individual phenomena and their historically unique traits as opposed to "nomothet-ic" sciences which study reality from the points of view of the universal phenomena expressed in the laws of their existence. Kufaev emphasized the unique and "ideal" nature of book's origin; he considered each book to be an issue of the activity of the creative self of a person. For him, a book is the thought and the word embodied by a visible sign. The studies of the "material" existence of a book in the "field of communication" and in the "process of communication" belong, in his opinion, to the domain of bibliosociology which treats the social importance of a book and establishes certain laws belonging, therefore, to nomothetic sciences. Kufaev's theory lies within the Western European tradition, and his interesting methodological and theoretical findings were typical also of other eminent Russian experts in book science, such as Nicolai Lisovsky and Alexandr Loviagin. However, the late 1920s and the early 1930s are marked by the beginning of ideolo-gizing the science in Russia; during the 1930s, Kufaev's works were condemned as bourgeous, idealistic, and formalistic. He could not lead a school of book science in the prime of his creative work in the 1920s, because the political and ideological situation in the USSR changed towards the end of the decade. Kufaev's works were strongly criticized; as a result, that he was unfairly neglected. But Kufaev's theoretical propositions have laid the foundations of current Russian book studies. Modern scholars consider his ideas to be topical in the present-day humanitarian science. In their woks, following Kufaev, they study bibliography and book science knowledge; they consider the ideas of an object at the empirical level of studies to be necessary but insufficient for its comprehensive study. Kufaev's followers and pupils rank among many modern bibliologists, so we can consider Mikhail Kufaev's book science school to be very popular in today's Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]