Books from the Valaam Monastery Library in the collections of the National Library of the Republic of Karelia

The aim of the author is to present various ways to demonstrate the belonging of printed publications to the Valaam Monastery Library in the second half of the XIX–first quarter of the XX centuries. The study was conducted in 2021 in the regional library – the National Library of the Republic of Karelia (Petrozavodsk), which received in 1945 a batch of books from Valaam. When compared with the 1945’s inventory books of the National Library of the Republic of Karelia the list of transferred literature made it possible to reveal more than eighty copies of books and periodicals of the XVIII – the first quarter of the XX centuries with the undoubted signs of their former belonging to the Valaam Monastery. The article presents two types of owner’s stamps of the Valaam library. However, the author notes that cases of their use are rare; while the use of a sheet inscription to demonstrate the monastery’s ownership of the book is much more common (more than 60 volumes with similar inscriptions were found in the National Library of the Republic of Karelia).
Moreover, a number of copies have traces of belonging to the personal book collections of the monastery inhabitants. The article provides examples of various marks of belonging, donation and other inscriptions that indicate the ownership of books by such famous persons as, for example, Abbot Damaskin (Kononov), Archbishop of Karelia and Finland Pavel (Olmari), monastery librarian Hieroschemonach Antipas (Polovinkin), etc. As a practical result of the study, the information about the ownership of all identified copies of the Valaam Monastery Library (before 1945) was included in the electronic catalog of the National Library of the Republic of Karelia. It allows, if necessary, to form any information resource from these electronic bibliographic records: from a simple list of literature to a virtual collection representing a part of the stock of the Valaam Monastery Library, preserved in the National Library of the Republic of Karelia.

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