Count P.A. Valuev's multicultural personality as a fund-generating feature of his book collection stored in the Scientific Library at Tomsk State University

Personal book collections of famous Russian statesmen and politicians of the 19th century have become an object of intensive study in modern library science. The book collection of Count P.A. Valuev, acquired for the needs of the Imperial Siberian University in 1885 and stored in the funds of the Scientific Library of Tomsk State University, is analyzed in this article as an independent historical and cultural object of research that possesses its own unique characteristics, internal structural organization and integrity. Count P.A. Valuev's personal library in the form it is currently stored is the result of efforts put by the owner in the task of selecting and completing his book collection. It reflects the versatility of the collector's personality, his professional needs and aesthetic preferences, his level of education and the influence of the multicultural environment. Immersion in a multilingual educational and cultural environment was perceived by Count P.A. Valuev as a habitual practice, that is why it contributed immensely to the upbringing of a range of his values, to the formation of a desire to expand the range of opinions when studying a particular problem or topic and to an indepth, multilateral analysis of the issues he used to be working on. The composition and structure of Valuev's personal book collection fully corresponds to a wide range of his professional and personal interests, and also testifies to the multiculturalism of his personality, which contributed to the formation of a multivolume library as a single communicative space in which a dialogue of cultures and languages was carried out. Structurally, the personal library of P.A. Valuev can be organized according to the language principle, since it includes subcollections in English, German, French, Russian, Polish and other languages. This article presents book editions in foreign languages, which in terms of numbers do not form huge collections. The Polish-language part of Count Valuev's library includes ten titles that are thematically related to the professional interests of the owner, who served as the civil governor of Courland between 1853-1858. A separate sub-collection is made up of editions in Latin, Ancient Greek and Ancient Persian. The library also includes ancient editions of the Bible in Latin, French, Swedish and Latvian, which can be classified as bibliographic rarities. The Italian language is represented in the book collection by single professional publications. The study of P.A. Valuev's personal library as a whole unit with its unique combination of books contributes to the investigation of the issues specific to the humanities such as holistic knowledge of a person in society and in time, to the study of the path that an individual takes in culture, and also contributes to the study of personal libraries considered as a historical and cultural source.

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