Preliminary Programme

In 1752, the huge collection of 22 thousand books – Library of Daniel Salthenius, a professor of the University of Königsberg – was sold to Józef Jablonowski, a Polish nobleman. Nowadays this gathering is a part of Vernadskyi National Library of Ukraine. On the point of ideology, the books influenced the owners –Salthenius was a famous Pietist, and Jablonowski played an important role in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a statesman and supporter of arts and sciences.
Daniel Salthenius possessed the largest private library in Prussia at his time, which included 300 Bibles, 1500 books of biblical exegesis and over 7500 volumes on Church, political and literary history. His works were on religion. His writings - De articulis Smalcaldicis (1729) and Historia canonis sacrique textus… (1734) - are based on the historical evidence concerning the biblical canon and disputed with Catholics. His learning made him one of the outstanding persons of the time.
Józef Jablonowski in the period of the 1740-50s worked on the national history of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and published L’Empire des Sarmates (1742; new editions in 1748, 1755, 1758) and books on heraldic. In the 1760s, he wrote the books on the medieval history of Poland, Prussia, Bohemia, and role of Adalbert of Prague, with the new sources from the Salthenius’ Library. His works as the ground for state policy, ideology for international relations are not discussed yet.
One of the biggest private libraries in the 18th century in Central Europe gave the possibility to create own history and ideology. For professor Salthenius it was a history of the Church, supporting Pietism. For nobleman Jablonowski it was a history of the nation and he developed the idea of Sarmatism. (Show less)

The paper examines the book assemblage possessed by the Ukrainian and Austrian dynasty of the Counts Rozumovsky/Razumovsky (late added “von Wigstein”). Both the genealogy of the collection and the way it was utilized to maintain “family memory” are to be explored. “Family memory” is considered a complex of memoirs on family history which members of a family shared with their offsprings. Books from a family collection served the purpose of memory transfer by making the family history “visible”, “perceivable” and “readable”.
In particular, the Rozumovskys’/Razumovskys’ book assemblage started to form in the mid-18th century, when the founders of the dynasty, brothers Oleksii (1709–1771) and Kyrylo (1728–1803) Rozumovskys, gained the superior positions: Oleksii became a secret husband of the empress Elisabeth of Russia, while Kyrylo, after two years spent for studies in Western Europe, headed the Ukrainian autonomous Cossack state. There is no evidence about Oleksii’s library, but it was more likely inherited by Kyrylo together with the other possessions of the elder brother. In his late correspondence, Kyrylo mentioned own library and a librarian who took care of it. The brothers’ assemblage certainly contained lavishly illustrated baroque panegyrics composed in 1744-1745 by a hieromonk Mykhailo Kozachynsky in Ukrainian, Polish and Latin, and dedicated to the Rozumovskys and the empress Elisabeth of Russia.
Passion for collecting books manifested itself in the next generations of the family. Kyrylo’s son Oleksii, the minister of the people’s education in the Russian empire under the reign of Alexander I, gathered the biggest library of natural science literature in that time Russian empire. Oleksii’s son Petro (a grandson of Kyrylo) assembled a huge library in Odesa, which was later sold at auction. Kyrylo’s younger son Hryhorii (Gregor), a renowned scientist, became a founder of the Austrian line of the dynasty. He gathered own and inherited his brother Andrii’s, a prominent European diplomat of the Napoleonic era, collection of books and documents. On the verge of the 20th century, this Razumovskys’ library was replenished and catalogued by Hryhorii’s grandson Camillo. It was housed in their manor Schönstein in the present-day Czech Republic.
After World War II, the family was expelled from their Czech estate by the Czechoslovakia Communist authorities; therefore, a significant part of the Schönstein collection was lost. The survived remnants are now kept by the Razumovskys in their Vienna estate. Among the other relics, there are two copies of the above-mentioned panegyrics, which apparently come from the 18th century Oleksii and Kyrylo’s collection and remain vivid testimonies of the family history. (Show less)

Political events of recent years have shown very clearly how important for Ukrainian society the Church is. History of the Church is an inexhaustible source of facts for building political arguments. The fight for the preservation of the Orthodox identity after the Union of Brest (1596), along with the necessity to represent the Orthodox way of salvation in anti-catholic polemics evoked among Ukrainian Orthodox intellectuals the vivid interest towards reminding the historical heritage. But what kind of authorities, texts, and ideas were considered by Orthodox clergy of that time like the own intellectual heritage?
The paper will focus on the study of the reading practices of Kyiv Church intellectuals. The main research questions in this context are:
• In what ways did the Catholic and Protestant authors supplant traditional orthodox authorities?
• What role could Byzantine authors still play within the set timeframe?
• How and when did joining the Moscow Patriarchate influence the intellectual landmarks of the leading monasteries and religious centers of the Kyiv metropolis?
• How active was Russian spiritual literature read?
Thus, the paper deals with the reconstructing of the reading practices of the ecclesiastical elite and the content of the libraries aiming to determine the intellectual orientation of the Kyiv clerics. In addition to the textological methods and the work with the library catalogs, methods of book science (analysis of marginalia, bookmarks, etc.) are applied to the books that have survived. (Show less)