Tatyana Fedorovna Volkova,
Doctor of Philology, Syktyvkar State University named after I.I. Pitirim Sorokin, Syktyvkar, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
To the Reconstruction of the Family Book Collection of the Ust-Tsilma Peasants Bulygins
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2023-2-10
The article is devoted to one of the important problems in the study of the Pechora hand-written book tradition – the reconstruction based on the records of the owners and readers of hand-written and early printed books that existed in the Lower Pechora among the Old Believer peasants, one of the tribal libraries – the collection of old books of the Bulygin peasants. In the presence of very few sources, the author of the article tried to show that even such poor material testifies to the involvement of representatives of this Ust-Tsilma family in the preservation of book culture, originating in Old Russian and Old Believer literature, which continued its life outside the Middle Ages in the homes of Pechora peasants who read and carefully preserved the book heritage of their ancestors. The Bulygin family, which had been formed since the end of the 17th century, apparently possessed a rich book collection. On some surviving handwritten books, such as a handwritten collection of the first third of the 19th–20th centuries from the Ust-Tsilemsky collection of the IRLI, No. 55, containing diverse and relevant literary material for the Old Believers, and a manuscript with Pomor answers of the late 18th century preserved the ownership records of the founder of the family branch of the Bulygins-Vanins Bulygin Ivan Antonovich. According to the records on these and other handwritten books from Ust-Tsilma, it was possible to see close reader contacts of the Bulygin family with other Pechora families – the Durkins, Chuprovs, Ermolins – and to realize that old books in the Ust-Tsilma region did not lie idle in one of the. Ust-Tsilma houses, but were constantly on the move, moved from one home library to another, bringing spiritual joy to their readers. This spiritual light found in handwritten books was handed down from generation to generation and reached the descendants of the first scribes Bulygins, illuminating the life of our contemporaries, the Bulygins of the 20th and 21st centuries. Mother and daughter – Natalya Yakovlevna Bulygina-Nosova and Tatyana Dmitrievna Bulygina-Vokueva, with their devotion to the Ust-Tsilma Old Believers, have made and are still making a great contribution to the maintenance and strengthening of the Old Believer culture, its propaganda among modern Ust-Tsilma people and far beyond Ust-Tsilma. Those few names of the Bulygins (Alexey Antonovich, Ivan Ivanovich, Timofey Ivanovich, Grigory and Evfimy Bulygins), who have kept records on the books of their family library, are the guiding thread for new researchers of the book culture of Ust-Tsilma, which, perhaps, will lead them – through archival research, conversations with the descendants of the first Bulygins – to the discovery of new names, new evidence of the existence of a once rich peasant library that was alive and pulsating for two centuries.
Publishing: 28/02/2023
The article has been received by the editor on 11.01.2023
How to cite: Volkova T.F. To the Reconstruction of the Family Book Collection of the Ust-Tsilma Peasants Bulygins // Historical Courier, 2023, No. 2 (28), pp. 117–128. [Available online: http://istkurier.ru/data/2023/ISTKURIER-2023-2-10.pdf]
Links: Issue 2 2023
Keywords: tribal libraries of Old Believer peasants; Ust-Tsilma; Old Believer literacy; owners and readers of rare books