In defense of the Festschrift: Unearthing “article graves”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33339/fuf.177070Keywords:
Festschriften, Scholarly communication, Uralic linguistics, Uralic studiesAbstract
As a genre of publication, the Festschrift (see §1 as to the definition of this concept and difficulties in delimiting it) has, in my experience, come into disrepute in recent years, in Finno-Ugric/Uralic Studies and beyond. Categorically excluded from many funding frameworks for scientific publications and treated as an anachronistic concept, there are a number of legitimate points of criticism to make against the entire genre, which will be discussed in §2. In spite of these, I have come to appreciate this genre of publication and believe it serves important functions in our discipline, as will be discussed in §3. Critically, I will present the recent online publication at https://lidivoka.univie.ac.at of an expandable compendium of Finno-Ugric Festschriften with their tables of contents within the LIDIVOKA “Linguistic Diversity in the Volga-Kama Region” bibliographical database which, with its currently (as of 15 October 2025) 10,870 entries, is among other things an endeavour to create an exhaustive bibliographical database of edited volumes in our discipline (§4). Subsequently, I will introduce an overview of what it currently covers in the domain of Festschriften and Festschrift-adjacent publications (§5) which is published as an online appendix. Finally, I will implore the reader to assist me in countering the “digital invisibility” of essential publications in our discipline (§6), and will voice some ideas as to how we can carry the concept of the Festschrift forward into the future in a more timely fashion (§7).
