THE ATTEMPT TO RECONSTRUCT THE LIBRARY OF THE KREMENETS BASILIAN MONASTERY OF THE FIRST DECADES OF THE XIX CENTURY

The article attempts to reconstruct the genre and thematic composition of the library of the Kremenets Basilian Monastery, which was formed in the early 1820s, based on an analysis of the visitation protocol, in which a significant part is a description of the monastery library. At the beginning of the XIX century, the library had 2,156 volumes (1,241 works) published in the XVI–XVIII centuries and until 1821. Of these, 508 works (41%) date from the second half of the XVIII century. The presence in the library of 283 works (23%) published in 1801–1821 indicates that the library continued to be regularly replenished with new books. The geography of the publications covered the cities of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Germany, Austria, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Kyiv, Moscow, and Saint Petersburg. The basis of the library were works in Polish and Latin, numbered 640 and 440, respectively (52% and 35%). There were only 54 (4%) Cyrillic editions. The entire book collection is divided into thematic sections: Holy Scripture, divinity, law (civil and canonical), "books of ascetics," homiletics, philosophy, physics and mathematics, chemistry, geography, economics, history, rhetoric and poetics, "letters," grammar, medicine. In terms of the number of works, the largest is the section "History," which includes periodicals published in Warsaw and Vilnius in the early nineteenth century and fiction of instructive content. It is noted that many works by ancient authors, textbooks in many mathematical disciplines, dictionaries, phrasebooks, and grammars in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Polish, German, French, and Russian were kept in the monastery library. The conclusion is that the themes of the monastery library in Kremenets in the early XIXth century reflected the state of the rich spiritual life of the Basilians, which closely combined the traditions of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. The Basilians, through preaching and missionary activity, indeed spread and consolidated in society the spiritual and moral values that they nurtured within the walls of the monastery. The library in general, reflected the development of education, science, art, and contemporary socio-political thought in the Ukrainian lands.