Plyutto P.A. From the History of the Archival and Book Heritage of the Princes Yusupovs: through the Documents in the Rumyantsev Museum Archive from 1919–1920

Abstract: The article’s focus is on the transfer history of the princess Z. N. Yusupova’s archive, as well as on the most valuable part of the Yusupov book treasures, originally held in the “Arkhangelshoe” estate and then moved to the Rumyantsev Museum in 1919–1920. The research, based on the documents in the Rumyantsev Museum Archive (today – the Russian State Library Archive), provides insight into the unique circle of specialists-bibliographers in the Rumyantsev Museum who during the first post-Revolution years worked to rescue Russian archives and libraries. The minute study of the preservation history of the intellectual heritage of the princes Yusupovs leads to the necessity of bringing back to memory the unjustly forgotten figures in Russian bibliography: V. D. Golitsyn, V. O. Nilender, A. S. Petrovsky and others. Information regarding these people, who not only collected and preserved the archival and book treasures of Russia, but also multiplied them, can be drawn from sources that contain little known historical facts. A comparative analysis of all referenced sources allows to better understand how the post-Revolutionary “spirit of the time” and the genesis of the socio-cultural phenomenon of the “little person” of the Soviet epoch transformed from the pre-Revolutionary Russian intellectual.

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