Collection of Russian manuscripts in the Chester Beatty Library and Museum

Abstract

A significant part of Russian handwritten monuments, due to various circumstances, ended up outside of Russia. The lack of detailed descriptions, and often even information about such rarities, especially those that ended up in private collections, creates certain difficulties in conducting special studies of the Russian manuscript heritage, results of such works may turn out to be incomplete without taking into account information about “emigrant” monuments. The processes of accumulation of such monuments in private Western collections also deserve special attention: they allow us to identify the general patterns of the emergence of interest in Russian medieval and Old Believer art, to trace the ways in which monuments came to Europe and America from Russia in connection with the tragic events of the 20th century. The object of our study is a little-known collection of Russian-by-origin manuscripts of the Chester Beatty Library and Museum in Dublin (Ireland). The collection’s founder, British-American mining magnate Alfred Chester Beatty, collected Russian manuscripts during the interwar period. Apparently, the interest in Russia was due to the influence on Beatty of the largest bibliophiles in Western Europe of that time, the concession business in the Soviet Union and connections with the firm A la Vieille Russie, which was engaged in the trade of Russian antiques. The second part of the article contains detailed descriptions of the monuments of the collection. The need is caused by the fact that the only published catalog of Cyrillic manuscripts in the British and Irish collections (1988), although being the first to introduce them into academic use, does not define the material of the codices, their origin, it provides extremely extensive dating.