Boris O. Unbegaun: A Sketch of the Early Period of Life

The article is devoted to Boris O. Unbegaun, one of the most notable scholars in the field of Slavic philology of the second third of the 20th century, a Russian emigrant by origin. Despite the fact that Unbegaun had a wide range of research interests, his scientific publications on the Russian language, primarily his book «Russian Surnames», made him famous. At the same time, as it turned out, Unbegaun has chosen the humanities in many ways by accident, since before the Russian revolution he was going to become a railway engineer. Based on previously unknown documents, an attempt is made to clarify the early period of the scientist’s life, which was traditionally neglected by the biographers. The documents published within this article are extracted from the personal student files of Boris O. Unbegaun and previously they have not been entered into general scientific circulation.