« Back       Contact information  •  History  •  Holdings  •  Access & Facilities  •  Bibliography

ArcheoBiblioBase: Archives in Russia: H-224

Last update of repository: 18 March 2020

Gosudarstvennyi muzei-zapovednik “Pavlovsk” (Pavlovsk, Leningrad Oblast) (GMZ “Pavlovsk”)


Holdings

Total: ca. 40,000 units, 16th–20th cc.
manuscripts—2,262 units; photographs—1,841 (late 19th–early 20th cc., 1930s–1990s); negatives—ca. 33,000 (1930s–1990s); drawings—1,834 units

Archival materials are held for the most part within the Painting and Graphic Art Fond, which is administratively considered part of the basic museum holdings.
        Manuscripts remaining from the imperial palace library (known as the Rossi Library), dating from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century, contain texts on religious and secular subjects and include some illuminated manuscripts. Most numerous among the early Russian manuscript books (16th–18th cc.) are apocryphal and liturgical texts: a Psalter; Gospels; the Books of the Apostles; the Apocalypse; choral manuscripts in both the early non-linear, neumatic notation and later linear notation; church calendars (mesiatseslovy); calendars of saints and religious festivals (sviattsy); collections of canons; anthems and hymns sung in praise of Russian holy men and icons of the Virgin; and a collection of the sermons of St. John Chrysostom, St. Cyril of Alexandria, and Lucidarius.
        Included among the late seventeenth-century manuscripts are the “Debate on Religious Faith with Voldemar, Heir to the Throne of Denmark”; an essay entitled “On the Origins of the Ancient Slovenian People”; and a tale of how St. Cyril (Constantine) established the Slavonic alphabet. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pedagogic and scientific literature is represented by a cosmography and a collection of arithmetical problems. There are also nineteenth-century manuscript essays on the history of the Old Testament and the history of the Orthodox Church, as well as Church services and prayers.
        Part of the collection relating to the imperial Romanov family includes textbooks and lesson books of Grand Duke Paul (Pavel Petrovich) and Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna, and their correspondence with other members of the imperial family and with the Pavlovsk city administrator Karl Küchelbäcker (K.I. Kiukhel'beker) (1780s). There are some manuscript librarycatalogues and other documentation relating to the imperial family.
        There are some additional documentary materials relating to the history of the palace and its owners, some of which were originally part of the Rossi Library. There are some documents relating to the Pavlovsk Town Administration (Pavloskoe gorodovoe pravlenie) during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These include income and expenditure accounts, building estimates and estimates for decoration work on the Pavlovsk Palace, building accounts presented bythe architect Vincenzo Brenna, records of furniture acquisitions by the palace, and property inventories from the palaces of Pavlovsk and Gatchina.
        The Painting and Graphic Art Fond has numerous original works done by Russian and European graphic artists (drawings, watercolors, engravings) from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, most of which are landscape pictures of the suburbs of St. Petersburg. They include views of the parks at Pavlovsk, Gatchina, and Tsarskoe Selo by S.F. Shchedrin, A.E. Martynov, and O.A. Kiprenskii. There are also a number of original drawings (many of them signed) of the Empress Maria Fedorovna and her children and descendants, particularly Grand Duke Constantine (Konstantin) Romanov, who was a poet (pseud. K.R.) and president of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.
        The museum Photograph Archive (Fototeka) contains both interior and exterior views of the palace, the park, and the outbuildings. There are sets of photographs showing the restoration work done on the palace and the park from the 1930s to the present. There are also a few prerevolutionary photographic portraits of the imperial family.


ABB ArcheoBiblioBase Archeo Biblio Base Patricia Kennedy Grimsted