A Russian doctor in exile: Vladimir Aleksandrovich Levitsky (1883–1953)
Keywords:
V.A. Levitsky, Russian emigration, Russian doctors in emigration, the history of Russian surgeryAbstract
In domestic and foreign historiography, much attention has been paid to the phenomenon of Russian scientific emigration.
he work of many emigrants who left Russia after the revolutionary events of 1917 and the Civil War was associated with medicine. V.A. Levitsky was an outstanding surgeon and organizer of medical work among Russian émigrés in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (KSCS). After graduating in 1910 from the Imperial University of Moscow, he worked as a supernumerary ordinator of the surgical department of the Red Cross’s Iberian community in Moscow. In 1912, he took up the post of assistant professor at Professor V.I. Alexinsky’s Department of Surgical Pathology. He later became a well-known surgeon and a no less famous figure among Russian émigrés. During World War I, Levitsky was in charge of one of the Russian Red Cross Society’s hospitals and was on record as a colonel. In 1918, he was chosen as a teacher at Moscow University at the Department of Surgical Pathology and received the title of assistant to the propaedeutic-surgical clinic. In 1920, Levitsky emigrated to the KSCS, where he became a head surgeon, and from 1927, he was director of the hospital-sanatorium in Pančevo, which until the summer of 1945 served both Russian émigrés and the local population. It was in Yugoslavia that Levitsky fully revealed himself as a brilliant organizer of the medical care, and as a surgeon and a public figure.
sing the example of his activities in Yugoslavia, the authors of the article demonstrate the influence of Russian medical émigrés community on the formation of the KSCS’s health system, and subsequently Yugoslavia’s. The general problems of Russian emigration to KSCS are considered, the features of the Russian medical diaspora are described, as are the activities of the Russian hospital-sanatorium in Pancevo, in which Levitsky worked. Archival materials that have become available to researchers of the Russian diaspora since February 2017 are introduced into scientific discourse. The research was carried out on the basis of materials from the archives of the collections of the Solzhenitsyn House for the Russian Diaspora in Moscow.
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