Professor W. L. Kotwicz: Archival Heritage Revisited

Introduction. A number of both Russian and foreign historical works deal with the migration of part of the Oirats to the Volga. However, researchers have still come to no consensus on what exactly had caused the latter. One of those to have been scrupulously searching the domestic archives for documents that would shed light on the actual reason of the arrival of the Kalmyks to the Volga was the famous Mongolist W. L. Kotwicz. In 1919, he published the article ‘Russian Archival Materials on Relations with the Oirats in the 17th and 18th Centuries’ which introduced a series of archival papers he had discovered in Russia’s archives. But subsequent to W. L. Kotwicz’s relocation to Lviv University (Poland), the bulk of the documents was never published. Goals. The paper aims to introduce into scientific discourse two articles by W. L. Kotwicz found in his personal archives in Poland (Krakow). Materials. The work deals with archival materials from the researcher’s personal papers. For long years he persevered in his attempts to publish the discovered archival data. This is evidenced by his correspondence with the leadership of Kalmyk Autonomous Oblast contained in the Mongolist’s archives. The latter also happened to include two manuscript articles prepared by him in the early 1920s for publication in the Oirat News journal. However, only four journal issues (clustered in two volumes) had been released before it ceased to exist. Conclusions. The contents of the two works indicates that those are as essentially relevant and can still make a decent contribution to modern Kalmyk archaeography