Andrei Sinyavsky’s collection of manuscripts and books of Cyrillic printing stored at the National Museum of the Republic of Karelia

This paper provides the first-of-its-kind overview of manuscripts and Cyrillic editions collected by a literary critic Andrei Donatovich Sinyavsky (1925-1997) in the Russian North in the 1950s and 1960s and deposited in 2023 at the National Museum of the Republic of Karelia. The collection includes 42 items of storage: manuscripts of the XVIII-XX centuries and printed books of the XVII-XX centuries. Of particular value is the compilation that includes manuscripts of the Vyg literary school written by Vyg scribes. The collections of texts by wandering Old Believers of the turn of the XX century containing polemical works by Andrei Alexandrovich Nadezhdin, Vasily Gavrilov, Roman Loginov, Ivan Vasiliev (monk Benedikt) and other works are analyzed. The printed editions of Sinyavsky’s collection are represented by the editions of the Moscow Printing Yard, the Moscow Synodal Printing House, and the printing houses of Western Russia (Kiev, Chernihiv, Lviv) and the Old Believers (Grodno, Suprasl, Klintsy, Pochaev, Moscow), with emphasis placed on particularly rare editions. Information about the history of the books is extracted from the owner’s and reader’s records, with some of facts presented in the article. The relevance of the research is due to the need to introduce information about unknown handwritten sources into scientific circulation and the close interest of modern archaeographers in Northern Russian literature.