For Immanuel Kant's Anniversary: History of a Forgotten Paper

Abstract

The paper is aimed at studying and decoding the manuscript entitled ‘Paper by S. V. On the 100th anniversary of the death of Immanuel Kant. 1904’, written by an unknown author and unpublished before. This manuscript is stored in the State Archive of the Russian Federation in the B. V. Nikolsky Fund. A brief analysis of the contents of the manuscript indicates the ‘anniversary’ character of the text. Its particular attention is paid to reviewing Immanuel Kant’s intellectual merits, considering jurisprudence in particular. Taking I. Kant as the founder of the theory of the rule of law, the author turns to Russian legislation of the 19th century, giving examples of practical implementation of Kant’s ideas. Besides analyzing the content of the manuscript, the article provides background information about the personalities mentioned in it (R. von Mohl, I. E. Andreevsky), their works, and events. The article also made a successful attempt to identify the author of the manuscript. He turned out to be legal historian Sergei Vladimirovich Vedrov (1855–1909). A transcript of the full text of the manuscript under study is provided as an Appendix to the article.