A.I. Milutin as a researcher of the Stroganovs book collection in the Research Library of the University of Tomsk

The article describes the main stages of biography and scientific activity of Alexander Ivanovich Milutin, the head of the Library of the University of Tomsk in 1912-1922 on the basis of numerous new archive documents. The name of A.I. Milutin (1865-1930?) is inseparable from the history of the University of Tomsk, the history of book studies and cultural life of Siberia at the end of the 19th - the first third of the 20th centuries. Milutin worked in the Research Library of the University of Tomsk for 34 years, since August 1895 until his arrest in December 1929. In his work with books he was guided by the ideas of a French philosopher of the turn of the century, Alfred Jules Emile Fouillee (1838-1912). Developing ideas of Fouillee, Milutin believed that the most important function of the library was in selforganization of the numerous "I"-s of an individual into a certain "super ego", corresponding to his/her supreme vital forms. By analogy with this, the private library may be apprehended as one of the forms of such "self-organization" and "presence" of the Stroganov family in Russian and West European history and culture of the end of the 18th - 19th centuries. Developing ideas of one of the university organizers, later the trustee of the West Siberian Academic District V.M. Florinsky, about the university library as a library of the research type, Milutin started to engage in the Stroganovs' library studying, he translated a fragment from the European travel diary of Baroness N.M. Stroganova in 1780-1781 from French into Russian and published these materials in the Russian Bibliophile journal in 1914. These publications by Milutin brought the studying of the Stroganovs’ library beyond the scope of regional research and made it a significant event in the scientific and cultural life of Russia in the 1910s. Several years later, during the Soviet power regime, Milutin formulated new approaches to the Stro-ganovs’ library research. One of them bases on the idea of synchronization, connecting the library formation with the fact of the opening of the university. Another approach allows considering the Stroganovs’ library as a sort of a "library in the library", which causes the special principles of its studying. Review of different stages in the study of the Stroganovs’ library connected with the name of Milutin allows considering the library both as a big cultural form and as a "library in the library" that possesses a special internal organization actualizing individual, collective, and supra-individual mechanisms of preservation, reproduction and generation of cultural memory.

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