Memoirs of I.N. Loboyko from His Newly Discovered Archive

This article presents an overview of documents preserved in the archive of I.N. Loboyko, a philologist, ethnographer, and historian of the first half of the 19th century, and professor at Vilnius University, which has not yet been released for scholarly use. Scattered across various archival repositories in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Vilnius, Loboyko’s personal documents have been sporadically used by researchers. In 2013, his memoirs (based on manuscripts from the Russian Institute of Literature (Pushkin House) of the Russian Academy of Sciences) were published as a valuable monument to 19th-century memoir writing. However, it turned out that not all of the materials from the Loboyko archive were transferred from the Library of the Academy of Sciences to the Pushkin House in the 1930s. A small collection was received by the Leningrad branch of the Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1950 and was only recently processed and described. Of particular historical and cultural interest is the notebook containing a later edition (1858–1861) of Loboyko’s memoirs, which significantly expands and corrects the earlier editions included in the 2013 edition. Specifically, in his account of the St. Petersburg period of his life, Loboyko recounts the history of the Free Society of Lovers of Russian Literature in more detail, adds separate chapters dedicated to the renowned writers and journalists F. Bulgarin and O. Senkovsky, and covers several other topics, a list of which is presented in the article.