A brief overview by Andrey Glagolev: the first corpus of monuments of history and culture of Russia (based on publications of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the 1830s-1840s)

The article analyzes the first corpus of monuments of Russia-A Brief Overview of Ancient Russian Buildings and Other Domestic Monuments. The corpus was compiled by the scientist, historian and archaeologist Andrey Glagolev under the instruction of Minister of Internal Affairs Dmitry Bludov. The analysis aims to determine which monuments were selected by the state for protection and why. Glagolev’s A Brief Overview has never been the subject of separate consideration in Russian science. At the same time, this is a very valuable document for the history of cultural heritage protection in Russia. A Brief Overview was based on materials prepared by local governors in response to circulars from the Ministry of the Internal Affairs of 31 December 1826 and 9 October 1837. The Ministry of Internal Affairs received these materials and passed them to Glagolev for verification and editing. Thus, the materials published in the official publications of the Ministry of internal Affairs are the result of the work of a lot of people throughout the country; they allows us to understand what local officials and metropolitan scientists understood by ancient monuments. The article consists of two parts. The first is devoted to the process of compiling the corpus, and the second to the analysis of its object-specific composition. The first part was prepared using narrative and historical research methods, while the second part was prepared using comparative and typological methods. In total, A Brief Overview and its accompanying materials contain information about 2,155 monuments, which fall into two large groups: Russian monuments (1,506 objects) and monuments of other ethnoses (649 objects). The analysis of the structure of the corpus of monuments and the distribution of all the described monuments into types (churches, monasteries, fortifications, civil buildings, necropolises, engineering structures, natural objects, etc.) leads to the conclusion that the basis of the first corpus of Russian monuments was primarily monuments of church architecture. The analysis of the description of objects in Glagolev’s materials allows concluding that the main criterion for selecting monuments for inclusion in the corpus was their antiquity, involvement in history, out-standing historical events and the lives of great people, that is, historical and memorial value. Thus, in the first half of the 19th century, Russian society considered the ancient church architecture as the main channel for transmit-ting the historical memory of the people from generation to generation.