Simeon Polockij's Library: A Catalogue

Anthony Hippisley and Evgenija Luk'janova, compilers. Simeon Polockij's Library: A Catalogue. Koln, Weimer, Wien: Bohlau Verlag, 2005. vii, 226 pp. 11 illustrations. Euro 34.90/SFr 60.40.Habent sua fata liberi says the Latin proverb. There is much truth in this statement. Books are written, circulated, bought, sold, forgotten, destroyed. If we are fortunate, books are preserved to document the development of a culture or the formation of a significant figure in the history of a given culture or epoch. more temporally distant the epoch the more difficult it is to state with certainty exactly which books were available to a given cultural or historical personage and this makes research into his or her formation and oeuvre extremely difficult. While we have extensive surviving libraries of such modern writers as Gor'kij, Tolstoy, and Pushkin, we are generally not so fortunate as regards their contemporaries, and even less fortunate with writers from earlier periods.The case of Simeon Polockij is perhaps a unique exception. It has long boon known that his library has survived largely intact, the major portion being preserved in the Synodal Typography Library (Sinodal'naja tipografskaja hibliuteka) housed in the Russian State Archive of Ancient Documents (Rossijskaja Gosudarstvennyj arxiv drevnix aktov, RGADA) and in the State Historical Museum Synodal Collection (Gosudarstvennyj istoricheskij muzej, GIM, Sinodal'noe sobranie) While inventories of the collection were done in 1689 and 1718 and these were published in 1853 and 1864 respectively, it is only now with the under review that we have a full and accurate catalog and meticulous description of the imprints contained in the collection. is a work which opens a window not only on the intellectual world of Simeon and his friend and heir Sylvester Medvedev, but on the culture of Moscow based Westernizers of the period 1664-1689.This painstakingly detailed work, compiled on the basis of an in situ examination by the joint efforts of Anthony Hippisley, the recently retired Reader in Russian at St Andrews University in Edinburgh, Scotland and Evgenija Luk'janova, Librarian at RGADA, is a model of thoroughness and industry. Its modest size (226 pages of text) is far outweighed by its scholarly significance. It consists of three chapters and three appendices.Chapter 1, The Personal Library of Simeon serves as an introduction to the whole. authors delineate the scope of the and discuss the so-called i.e. the 1689 inventory as published by I.E. Zabelin in 1853 and the 1718 inventory known as Knigi v sunduke published by M.P. Poludenskij in 1864. In outlining The scope of this book the author (presumably Hippisley) notes that the collection is not just that of Polockij alone (who signed his name on some sixty out of the 603 imprints in the collection), but also that of his alter ego Sylvester Medvedev, who inherited the library after Simeon's death in 1680, added to it, and whose name was inscribed on all the items in the collection by the clerks compiling the 1689 inventory.Hippisley notes that the starting point for his research was the manuscript versions of the two inventories together with their published versions and the published catalog of the Synodal Typography Library, as well as articles by S.R. Dolgova, Anthony Hippisley, and M.A. Jusim. He further notes that the catalog includes only the non-Slavonic books owned by Polockij and Medvedev, excluding Slavonic printed books in the collection and any manuscripts owned or created by Polockij, as well as any non-Slavonic manuscripts found in the 1680 inventory. Hc also briefly outlines the history of the collection after the hapless Medvedev's execution in 1689. …

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