Correspondence of Cossack official Ilya Zhurman with relatives from Institute of Manuscript of V. I. Vernadskyi National Library of Ukraine

The goal of the research is to analyse unpublished letters of the military official Ilya Zhurman (1720-1783) to his parents were discovered in the fonds of the Institute of Manuscript of the V.I. Vernadskyi National Library of Ukraine, which are valuable sources of the social history of Cossack Officials, the history of everyday life and the manuscript culture of the Cossack Hetmanate of the first half of the 18th century; clarify the circumstances of the service, private contacts, and the life of a representative of the class of Cossack Officials; contextualization of the information of the letters, identification of the persons mentioned in them; reconstruction of unknown pages of the biography of the author and his family in the context of the sociopolitical history of the Cossack Hetmanate. The methodology consists in the application of basic approaches of internal (textological) and external (paleographic, sphragistic analysis) source analyse, contextualization of the subject of the letters in relation to the socio-political situation, family ties, private and public life of the participants. Academic novelty consists in the introduction into scientific circulation of a series of private letters of a representative of the community of the Cossack Officials (Military Chansellors) of the Cossack Hetmanate. The analysis of the epistolary made it possible to reconstruct the picture of the official and private life of a representative of the Cossack Officials (Starshyna) community, to analyze his social connections, relations with his parents, and details of his life. Letters are also important monuments of the Old-Ukrainian manuscript culture; their external and internal analyse shows many features of the education and chansellor culture of the Cossack Starshyna. Conclusions. The correspondence of Ilya Zhurman is a valuable source of the history of the private and public life of the Cossack Starshyna. The content of correspondence with parents reveals the emotional world of a young person who has just started an independent life and career. The text of the letters is full of details about the chansellor service, the history of the Hetmanate’s government and judicial institutions, the peculiarities of conducting court cases, the everyday life of the young clerk, his official and private contacts.