POTANIN'S EPISTOLAR HERITAGE IN THE CONTEXT OF ARCHEOGRAPHY

The author makes a historical reconstruction of the publishing work of Russian researchers based on historiographic sources. The article contains information about the first experience of publishing a letter from Grigory Potanin to Nikolai Naumov, which was found by the Tomsk local historian I.E. Lyasotsky in 1948. In the mid-1950s, the Leningrad researcher A.G. Grumm-Grzhimailo was working on it. He invited the Siberian researchers Ya.R. Kosheleva, N.N. Yanovsky and S.F. Koval. The work on collecting Potanin's letters, preserved in various museums and archives of the country, lasted more than 30 years. In 1977, the first part of the four-part edition of Potanin's letters was published in Irkutsk. It was made according to all the rules of archeography. The author of the article reports that in 1987 the publishing work resumed. Over the course of five years, five parts of letters by G.N. Potanin. The publication was prepared by the same researchers who worked on the release of the first part in 1977. The article notes the high level of archaeographic preparation of the publication. It includes 731 letters written by Potanin in 1859–1919. The text of all letters is given in compliance with modern spelling rules. All letters are supplemented with comments, they indicate the storage location of the original of each document, information about the people mentioned by Potanin is given, a name index is attached. In the appendix to the fifth part there is a bibliography of the works of G.N. Potanin, corrections of errors and typos made by the Tomsk researcher N.V. Serebrennikov. The article contains information about personal letters of G.N. Potanin in scientific collections and journals that were published in the 1980s–1990s in Tomsk and Barnaul. In addition, the scientists of the Scientific Library of Tomsk State University N.V. Vasenkin and G.I. Kolosov found a correspondence between Grigory Potanin and the Barnaul poetess Maria Vasilyeva. As a result, in 2004, the book was published with 184 letters from Potanin addressed to his future wife. This edition complements the epistolary heritage of G.N. Potanin. In the conclusion of this article, the author notes that unpublished letters of Potanin are kept in the collection of the TSU Scientific Library. The identification, archaeographic processing and publication of these letters help the research of the scientific heritage of G.N. Potanin.