The Role of Church Book Collections in Siberia in Preserving National Cultural Heritage

This article presents the results of the archaeographic work of the research team in church museums and libraries in Western Siberia (Novosibirsk Region, Altai Krai, Altai Republic, and Kemerovo and Tomsk regions) carried out between 2023 and 2024. The purpose of the study was to identify and study the array of handwritten and printed books of diocesan repositories in terms of the specifics and importance of the collections for the preservation and reactualisation of national cultural heritage. The tasks of the work included a description of the composition and features of the repertoire of the collections, characteristics of the origin and sources of their replenishment, identification of unique features of storage units of important cultural and historical significance. The novelty of the research stems from the insufficient study of such book collections, which have only recently become available to researchers (most books are stored in church museums and libraries that were opened in the 2000s). The authors characterise the temporal and genre repertoire of Cyrillic books stored in diocesan museums and libraries: out of the 483 books in the collection, 22 manuscripts date from the sixteenth to early twentieth centuries, a total of 14 editions are from the seventeenth century, 59 editions of the eighteenth century, 217 editions of the nineteenth century; 168 books are either unidentified editions of the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries or date from the beginning of the twentieth century. The article describes the share and reasons for the presence of Old Believer manuscripts and publications in the collections and examines the repertoire of publications of the printing house of Edinovertsy. The authors analyse the ownership and donation inscriptions and marks belonging to representatives of the clergy of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, reflecting the specifics of the existence of copies and readers’ interests. Based on the analysis of provenances, it was established that individual books belonged to church and monastery libraries lost because they were closed or destroyed in the 1920s and 1930s. Additionally, the authors describe the sources of replenishment of funds paying special attention to the role of individual representatives of the clergy (Rostislav, the Metropolitan of Tomsk and Asino, archpriest Alexander Pivovarov, archpriest Vladimir Biryukov). The work with the materials of the diocesan book collections made it possible to identify rare editions and those searched for or those lacking reference information and actualise the problems associated with the study of handwritten and early printed books in Siberia (the history of early Slavic printing, the interaction of Old Believers and official Orthodox booklore in publishing, the history of Cyrillic books in Siberia of the seventeenth-twentieth centuries).