Leo S. Klejn (image courtesy of Damir Gibadullin-Klejn).
Until 2012 only two of Leo Klejn's monographs had been published in English translation, Metaarchaeology (2001) and Archaeological typology (1982), although as Klejn frequently points out, the translation of the latter is so poor that it is all but worthless (pers. comm.; see also Reference TaylorTaylor 1994: 727). (At the time of its translation Klejn was imprisoned on trumped-up charges, in the final crackdown upon the intelligentsia prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.) However, two new English translations of works by Klejn have recently been published, Soviet archaeology: trends, schools, and history (2012a) and Incorporeal heroes: the origins of Homeric images (2012b). These represent aspects of Klejn's work which have long been known to Russian readers but which have until now remained hidden from those who do not read Russian: that is to say, Klejn is a gifted writer, and he is interested in the historical interaction of human (all too human!) characters. The publication of a translation of Soviet archaeology perhaps reflects a belated realisation in the West that there was more to Soviet archaeology than Marxist ideology. That realisation is bound to be confirmed by this translation of Klejn's book and perhaps nurtured into a greater awareness of present day archaeological theories from the East.
In the case of Klejn, even with the recent publication of Soviet archaeology and Incorporeal heroes, there is much else of potential interest in his work still awaiting discovery in the West (excluding Archaeological typology, only 3 of Klejn's 23 books have been translated into English). Aside from archaeology, Klejn's analysis of the folklore of the Caucasus has enabled him to attempt to reconstruct the pre-Christian East Slavic religion. Other areas in which Klejn has published include musicology, sociology and social psychologythe latter being profoundly influenced by his experience of the Russian camps.
Klejn is now in his mid-eighties, but he works with the zeal of the young. There is a Chinese proverb advising us that it is good 'to die young as late as possible'. This is advice that Klejn seems keen to follow. Among other books, he has recently published his autobiography and a 600 000-word History of archaeological thought. One reason that he works so hard is to make up for lost time. From birth, circumstances were not all in his favour: yes, his parents were intellectuals, but they were also Jewish and from the higher ranks of pre-revolutionary society. This background, in the Soviet Union, made things difficult for Klejn and it was not until after turning 50 that he was able to publish his first monograph.
Klejn's accomplishments cover many areas and different disciplines, but this is partly owing to the unusual course of his life rather than to the belief that the boundaries between disciplines can be casually ignored. Indeed, this is one of Klejn's main concerns: he argues that the boundary between history and archaeology was ignored in the Soviet Union, to the detriment of both history and archaeology, and he is worried that it is increasingly ignored in the West too.
As an undergraduate, Klejn was unusual in that he studied simultaneously both philology and archaeology. He studied philology under the structuralist Vladimir Propp and archaeology under Mikhail Artamonov, the Director of the Hermitage Museum.
His first excavations were on the steppes to the north of the Black Sea, and these led to an interest in the origins of the Indo-Europeans. Already as an undergraduate he was interested in the problem of ethnogenesis and, in particular, the problem of archaeological evidence for this phenomenon. Klejn believes that, with caution (and with the help of linguists), it is a worthwhile exercise to advance questions and hypotheses about ethnogenesis; but he is more cautious than many of his Russian colleagues on this subject. He does not believe that an ethnos necessarily stands behind an archaeological culture, only that it may do in some circumstances (Reference KlejnKlejn 2012a: 69, also 10910).
As a theorist, Klejn continues to value the insights of Marxism for the ways in which it suggests how evidence might be interpreted. But Marxism, for Klejn, was always only one of the tools in the box, albeit a valuable one. Although Klejn, like all archaeologists in the Soviet Union, was obliged to pepper his work with references to Marx and Lenin, he always chafed against the overbearing influence of historical materialism upon archaeology in the Soviet Union. The worst aspect of this was epitomised, in his eyes, by Artsikhovsky's saying: 'archaeology is history armed with a spade'. Since the broad outlines of history were thought to be already known, it fell to archaeologists simply to fill in the gaps. That is not to say that Soviet archaeologists were necessarily humble in their ambitions. Indeed, sometimes their ambitions were grandiosesince the framework of history was thought to be already known, they could afford to be.
It was against this background that Klejn advanced his conception of the archaeologist as a detective or forensic scientist. This theory was first put forward in Archaeological sources (1978), and has been elaborated since in many different works. Indeed, Klejn has probably written more on the archaeologist-detective comparison than any other writer. In the West, the comparison was made by R.G. Collingwood; but Klejn was uninfluenced by Collingwood. His concern in making and exploring the archaeologist-detective comparison was to safeguard archaeology, as far as possible, from unwarranted political influence. Klejn argues that strictly speaking it is the archaeologist, not the historian, who is like the detective. Of course, the same person may be both an historian and an archaeologist; but conceptually there is a difference. The archaeologist, like the detective, is fundamentally concerned with answering the questions 'what?', 'where?', 'when?' and 'how?', whereas the historian is concerned with answering the question 'why?' Naturally, in the course of investigating a site, the archaeologist may ask 'why is this pot broken in this way?', just as the detective may ask 'why is there a bullet hole here?', but it is the historian (and the judge) who, having read the archaeologist's or the detective's report, asks, for example, 'why did this man commit murder?'
It is important that these two tasks are distinguished, for otherwise our answer to the question 'why?' is likely to dictate our answer to the question 'what?', as occurred in the Soviet Union (this is one of the main themes of Soviet archaeology). Klejn admits that the archaeologist does not come to a site with a blank mind but with all sorts of motivations from all sorts of sources, including from history and sociology but, nonetheless, the two disciplines are different and an awareness of that difference safeguards us against the dictatorship of 'why?' over 'what?'
