Perspectives of updating the sources of personal origin in the history of Odesa in «Vorontsov epoch»

Abstract

The article raises the problem of expanding the source base for studying the history of Odesa in the first half of the 19^th century through updating sources of personal origin. In particular, we are talking about the diary of the famous Odesa historian Apollon Skalkovskyi. The original diary covering 1830-98 is kept in St. Petersburg (the Russian Federation). Its copies from 1835-45 are kept in Odesa.

The diary is written in an extremely illegible handwriting and therefore has attracted little interest in historical research. With the help of content analysis of the multi-volume Soviet annotated index of publications of diaries and memoirs and the fundamental monograph on the history of Odesa by the American researcher Patricia Herlihy, it was demonstrated that the two largest groups of sources of personal origin as regards the above-mentioned issue are memories and travel notes, which number dozens of works even in the «Vorontsov epoch» of Odesa (mid-20s – mid-40s of the 19^th century).

The number of diaries is extremely limited. This makes A. Skalkovsky’s diary a unique narrative. The article reports that the author, thanks to the scholarship support of the Institute for Human Studies (Vienna, Austria), deciphered and prepared for publication the historian’s records for 1835. The volume of the diary in one year is six so-called author’s sheets. The general characteristics of the source materials contained in the diary for that year, which was a turning point for A. Skalkovsky, are given. After all, that very year, with the support of Governor-General Michael Vorontsov, he began to be purposefully engaged in historical research. That year he made a trip to the region, so the content of the source should be interesting not only for researchers of Odesa antiquities, but also for a wide range of historians and local historians.