Abstract

The research is based on the analysis of the 1821 detailed description of the premises of the apartment of the Moscow University professor Heim, who had just passed away. From 1781 Heim, who maintained ties with Germany, rose to professor and then to rector of the Moscow University. His home environment provides material for reconstruction of the life of a “Russian German”, a representative of academic culture (with its academic everyday life). According to the inventory, the rector’s apartment near Mokhovaya Street contains four living rooms, a kitchen and a stable (on the lower floor). The room-by-room description of furniture, clothing, utensils and other household items, and information on the composition of the home library embody the anthropological characteristics of the professor’s subculture. The author of the article views a home item as a tangle of cultural practices, and the structure of the home and its contents as an embodiment of the professor’s way of life. The list of numerous kitchen utensils, a carriage, a droshky and several sets of harness in the stable indicate the complete autonomy of existence, and a large number of chairs and dining utensils allows us to speak about a certain degree of the publicity of the space. A set of clothes (casual and ceremonial), orders, letters of loan and idle money indicate a relatively high material and social status of Heim, demonstrate prosperity, the desire for domestic convenience of a “private man”. But the restrained style of apartment decoration, lots of desks, books, measuring instruments and stationery (attributes of routine academic writing) speak of the priority of the professor’s intellectual pursuits at home. The material of the inventory, considered against historical and cultural background, allows us to expand our views on understudied subculture of university professors as a specific layer of “middle-class people”, Russian intellectual elite of the late 18th and the early 19th centuries..