The First Korean Books in Hanmun in Russia

The aim of this study was to establish the origin of Korean books from the so-called “Brosset Collection” kept at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Asiatic Museum). The “Brosset Collection” is a conventional name for the books which are mentioned in the handwritten catalogue of the Asiatic Museum’s Far Eastern collection compiled by Academician Marie-Félicité Brosset (1802–1880). This catalogue lists nine identifiable Korean texts, eight of which are written entirely or partially in Hanmun.1 Judging by the date of their cataloguing (1840 and 1842), they are most likely the first Korean books to appear in Russia and are among the earliest surviving Korean-printed books held in European scholarly institutions. The study includes analysis of the various archival documents and marginalia in the books themselves. As a result, it was proven that most of these books form a single collection that originally came from the library of Baron Paul Schilling (1786–1837), who probably received them from the sinologist Nikita Iakovlevich Bichurin (Archimandrite Hyacinth; 1777–1853), head of the Ninth Russian Spiritual Mission in Beijing, and one book originated from the collection of Manchu studies scholar Stepan Vasil’evich Lipovtsov (1770–1841)