Mentor of the Nelubino wanderers Niktia Ivanov Vikhlyaev and his library
The reconstruction of Old Believer book collections based on archival data has long been actively used by researchers of the Old Faith. However, it is not always possible to correlate the inventories of seized books with the collections that have actually survived to this day. There are many reasons for this: the partial loss of books that have already been seized under a variety of circumstances, and the incorrect identification of a particular manuscript both when it was seized and when it was described in the state repository, etc. Therefore, it is important to describe and introduce each such case into scientific discourse, which is what this article is dedicated to. The identity of the owner. Nikita Ivanov Vikhlyaev was the mentor of the Old Believers-wanderers who lived in the hermitages near the village of Nelyubino. He was arrested in 1873 in Tomsk, and more than 100 books were confiscated from him and his co-religionists. The documents related to this case are kept in the State Archive of Tomsk Oblast (GATO). Sources. An archival case on the arrest of Vikhlyaev and his co-religionists has been reviewed. The file contains an inventory of the seized books, of which there were more than 100 units. The lists are included in the appendix to the article, and their characteristics are given in the text of the article. Searches were also conducted in the collection of the Department of Manuscripts and Book Monuments of the Research Library of Tomsk State University, where 17 items have been found and identified so far, including 16 manuscripts and 1 book of the Cyrillic type. The results of the work. As a result of the functional and thematic classification of the books listed in the lists, it was established that Vikhlyaev's mostly liturgical and statutory manuscripts were confiscated, while most of his co-religionists (Sharapova and Chernyaev) were either polemical texts, or religious and even secular. In the funds of the Research Library of Tomsk State University statutory and liturgical texts, polemical notes and extracts were identified; a convoy composed of manuscripts and copies of documents of various contents deserves a separate study. Conclusion. In the case of the described library, we observe a general correspondence between the composition of this book collection and the descriptions of other libraries of Old Believers, including the presence of a very significant number of "newly written" notebooks of a polemical and dogmatic nature, the use of modern periodicals and newly printed publications, as well as the "scattered" nature of the collection as a whole, seized, as can be seen, from three people in different geographical locations. It should also be noted that there are practically no ancient Russian texts in the collection. Thus, the described library can be correlated typologically with the collections of Old Believers-wanderers already described earlier. The author declares no conflicts of interests.
Keywords
Old Believers, wanderers, book collections, archeography, SiberiaAuthors
Name | Organization | |
Esipova Valeriya A. | Tomsk State University | esipova_val@mail.ru |
References

Mentor of the Nelubino wanderers Niktia Ivanov Vikhlyaev and his library | Tekst. Kniga. Knigoizdanie - Text. Book. Publishing. 2025. № 38. DOI: 10.17223/23062061/38/4