Letters to Vasily Zhukovsky as a Phenomenon of Russian Culture and an Editorial Problem

The study was conducted at Tomsk State University and supported by the Russian Science Foundation (RSF) Project No. 19-1800083 "Russian Epistolary Culture of the First Half of the 19th Century: Textology, Commentary, Publication". The article presents a project devoted to archival and textual preparation, scientific commenting and publication of letters to Vasiliy Zhukovsky. The volume of this archive is huge. It has more than four thousand texts stored in Russian (Russian State Library, Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, State Archive of the Russian Federation, State Historical Museum, Russian National Library, Institute of Russian Literature, Russian State Historical Archive, Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts, Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire, Russian State Archive of the Navy, Archive of the Russian Academy of Science in St. Petersburg) and foreign (in Weimar, Berlin, Frankfurt, Oldenburg, Basel, Geneva, Rome, Naples, Paris, London, Edinburgh) archives). The archive was published only partially despite the fact that it included letters from representatives of the "Golden Age" of Russian literature: the royal persons, dignitaries, officials, well-known military leaders, representatives of the noble and other social classes, from European writers, artists, politicians, scientists and doctors. The insufficient introduction of these letters into scientific discourse distorts the view on the biography of Zhukovsky and of his correspondents (565 people), creates gaps in the history of Russian literature and culture. To expand the range of the published epistolary documents, a range of textual and ethnological issues require resolving. The article presents the history of the study and publication of letters to Zhukovsky for the period from 1855 to 2019. Despite the wide range of publications, mainly pre-revolutionary ones, the published epistolary texts, with some exceptions, often have textual defects (incorrect readings, abbreviations, recombinations of parts, editors' additions, etc.), do not contain indications of archival sources, are rarely supplied with commentaries, which are (if any) fragmented and superficial. Thus, in relation to the main body of letters, there are many unresolved issues requiring additional research related to archival and textological preparation, attribution, dating, clarification of biographical, historical, cultural and literary realities. The article outlines the principles for the publication of letters to Zhukovsky. First of all, this is the maximum completeness, due to the need to give an idea of all the known and first identified letters to the poet. The second objective of the project is the textological study of letters to Zhukovsky, which involves the compilation of textological references, commentaries with different versions of texts (in the presence of copies and draft letters), and the text of the letters should be compared with all detected autographs, copies, and book and journal publications. The third objective of the project is scientific commenting and systematic comprehension of letters to Zhukovsky. The fourth objective of the project is to prepare for publication blocks of letters to Zhukovsky (by authors of the letters). The article describes the features of the textological and editorial presentation of these epistolary documents.

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