Partner organizations (inside or outside Oxford): Pavel Nerler
Project Description:
This pilot project's objective was to digitize and deposit with the Oxford Text Archive the holdings of the State Russian Museum for Literature and the Arts, Moscow, and the Central Archive of the FSB (formerly KGB), Moscow, relating to the life and work of the poet Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), generally considered the foremost Russian poet of the C20th. This was seen as a first step to the reuniting of his entire archive, scattered all over the world, in digital form, in order to afford free, universal access to scholars, students and poetry lovers world-wide. The fragile nature of century-old material also made conservation in virtual form a matter of urgency. Research into the location of a proportion of the material, amendments to archive cataloguing, and textological work on the manuscripts in order to compile metadata, have been an integral part of the pilot. In addition to the two archives mentioned above, Mandelstam holdings from the following institutions have also been harvested: The Alexander Mandelstam Personal Collection; The Evgeny Mandelstam Family Collection; The Khardjiev Collection (Amsterdam Section); The Ministry for Internal Affairs; The Russian National Library; The Russian State Library; The Russian State Military Archive; The Sorbonne Library; The State Anna Akhmatova Museum; The State Archive of Socio-Political History of the Voronezh Region; The State Literary Museum; and The State Russian Federation Archive. Jennifer Baines, Pavel Nerler, Sergei Vasilenko, Vladimir Litvinov and Artem Kozmin have been preparing metadata for the digitized Mandelstam archive in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University.
Other projects the participants have been involved in:
