On October 1, 2012, the famous British historian Eric Gobsbawm, a member of the British Academy (1976) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a holder of honorary scientific titles from universities around the world, died at the age of 95.

He was born on June 9, 1917 in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, where his father served in the British colonial administration. Erik's mother came from the family of a Jewish Viennese jeweller. After the end of World War I, the family returned to Vienna in the autumn of 1918. The post-war Austrian chaos that occurred during E. Gobsbaum's childhood years influenced his worldview and directed his cognitive interest to history. The cause of historical catastrophes is often an unexpected relationship of events that ultimately lead to the combination of circumstances that provoke a catastrophe. In the spring of 1931, after the death of his parents, fourteen-year-old Eric and his sister moved to Berlin, where his maternal grandfather lived. After Hitler came to power in the spring of 1933, the family emigrated to London. Yale University professor Timothy Snyder believes that it was the personal experience of the Great Depression and the rise to power of the Nazis that put Hobsbawm before the choice: to be politically with the Nazis or against them. It was this conscious choice that brought him to the left-wing camp.

In 1936, E. Hobsbawm won the competition and became a research fellow at King's College, Cambridge University. Leftist sentiments dominated there. By the way, the graduates of this alma mater were the "Cambridge Five" Britons who worked for Soviet intelligence. Although E. Gobsbawm did not take this dubious path, he consciously joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. Eric Hobsbawm married Muriel Seaman in 1943, but divorced her in 1951.

two children: Julia and Andy. My son founded one of the first news agencies on the Internet.

A turning point for E. Gobsbaum's ideological beliefs was 1956, when, under the influence of the debunking of the cult of personality, I. Gobsbaum was born. He finally understood the fallacy of the Soviet model of development. Since then, he has been leaning towards so-called "Eurocommunism" and has consistently criticized the actions of the USSR. Gobsbaum condemned the Soviet invasion of Hungary and was sympathetic to the Prague Spring. But he left the British Communist Party just before its dissolution in 1991, although he remained a Marxist. This led to his interest in social history.

In 1959, E. Gobsbaum published the monograph "simple rebels" based on Italian and Spanish archival materials. A study of archaic forms of social movements of the XIX and XX centuries". In this work, he showed the dependence of the formation of a revolutionary situation on religious ideas and subjective leadership. In the 1960s, E. Hobsbawm described the history of the working class as a history of worker culture, emphasizing the role of the working aristocracy, mass culture, and class rituals.

As a result, E. Gobsbaum urged not to exaggerate the monopoly revolutionary role of the proletariat alone. In 1968, he published an economic history of Great Britain - "production and empire: the formation of modern English society from 1750 to the present day". Opus magnum-the main work of his life concerned the "long nineteenth century". It was this historical period that became his professional specialty. In 1962, The French Revolution 1789-1848 was published. In 1975, the monograph "The bloody time of capitalism 1848-1875"was published. In 1987, another thorough monograph was published - "Imperial times 1875-1914". In Russian translations, the works were published under the titles: "The Age of Revolution", "The Age of Capital","the Age of Empire".

In the run-up to Thatcher's rise to power, Hobsbawm came to the conclusion that the working class no longer played a leading role in British history. In his opinion, social perception gradually but steadily becomes the reception of specific communities, groups, and individuals, as a result of which reality "disappears" in the crowd of competitive ways of perceiving the social world. However, E. Gobsbaum welcomed the " return of Central Europe "to European civilization after the end of the Cold War. However, he believed that ethnic nationalism as a surrogate, a substitute for Soviet class totalitarianism, which was very difficult to limit to the supranational structures of European integration, could become an obstacle to this.

The" short twentieth Century " was a time that E. Gobsbawm was a contemporary of. In 1994, his monograph "The age of extremes 1914-1991"was published. This work describes the total war, the revolution in Russia, the Great Depression, the decline of liberalism and the onset of dictatorships, the unification of anti-fascist forces in World War II, decolonization and the end of empires, the post-war economic recovery and the period of economic crises, the development of third world countries, the emergence and collapse of the socialist system. The author came to the conclusion that the collapse of communism was laid down in the project a priori. Separate chapters of the work are devoted to the cultural revolution, science, art, and the description of everyday history: from radio, which changed the lives of the poor to the impact of agricultural improvements on the world economy.

"We are very close to a historical crisis," wrote Gobsbawm, " and therefore our future will not be a continuation of the present one." In his opinion, the twenty-first century will require solutions that neither a clean market nor a puritanical liberal democracy can provide.,

Ani total state control. A combination of societal efficiency and individual freedom can be the right way to go.

E. Gobsbawm never wrote boringly and kept a fresh perception of reality until the last moment of his physical life. In 1997, his work "on history"was published. In 1999, the monograph "New Century"was published. In 2002, the book "interesting times"was published. Paradoxically, Gobsbaum attributed the collapse of the Marxist-Leninist state to a revival of interest in Marxism. On January 16, 2011, the British newspaper "Guardian" published the last interview with E. Hobsbawm. In his opinion, the Marxist characteristics of the current global economic crisis turned out to be more accurate than in relation to the events of 1848.The most difficult thing to keep in mind is the lifetime features of people who remain classics of historiography and are interesting not only for the list of works on the pages of textbooks. During his student years, he worked part-time as a cinematographer. In addition, E. Hobsbawm was a keen connoisseur of jazz music. He lived through the era of the mobile phone and the Internet, but they did not become for him a means of escape from the reality that hides the true loneliness of a person in the modern world. Eric Hobsbawm left behind his own idea of the era in which he lived and created.

A. Y. Martynov (Kiev)