Letter exchange between friends in the enlightenment age: from the history of publication of metropolitan Eugene’s (Bolkhovitinov) letters to his Voronezh friend V. I. Makedonets

This article deals with the history of publication of Metropolitan Eugene’s letters to his Voronezh friend V. I. Makedonets. The aim of the article is to compare the letter manuscripts kept in two archival collections with their published versions as well as to publish two letters for the fi rst time. The letter exchange between the two friends lasted for twelve years. It started when E. A. Bolkhovitinov left his home town Voronezh and went to St Petersburg, the city where he began his monastic and episcopal service, and fi nished in 1812, the year of V.I. Makedonets’ decease. Several decades later, the manuscripts of Metropolitan Eugene’s letters to V.I. Makedonets were accidentally discovered and saved from destruction by the teacher of Voronezh Cadet Corps E. A. Zavadsky (1830–1862). The fi rst publication of 90 out of 113 currently known letters was carried out by N. E. Severny in Русский архив (“Russian Archive”) in 1870. Later, the originals of the letters were sent to Chertkov Library, and afterwards they arrived at the manuscript collection of the Historical Museum. At present, this part of the letters, united under the same cover, is kept at F. 445 of the Chertkovs at the Department of Written Sources, State Historical Museum. Ten letters were acquired by A. D. Ivanovsky, the staff member of the Emperor’s Public Library, who published fragments of them in Евгениевский сборник (“Yevgeniev Miscellany”) in 1871. Originals of these letters were later included in the collection of Academician Nikolai Petrovich Likhachev (1862–1936), F. 238 of the archival collection of St Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The publication of the manuscript material allows us to broaden out knowledge about Metropolitan Eugene’s personality, obtain some important and even unique data on his personal and scholarly contacts in the process of his formation as an enlightener and representative of learned monasticism