D.I. Dovgiallo as an archivist, archaeographer, expert in source studies: To the scholar’s 150th anniversary

The article discusses the activities of D.I. Dovgiallo, one of the representatives of the pre-revolutionary archival-archaeographic school, a graduate of St. Petersburg Archaeological Institute, who worked in the late 19th – early 20th centuries as an archivist at the Vitebsk Central Archives of Ancient Register Books (1897–1903), then – the chairman of the Vilna Archaeographic Commission (1913–15).With the establishment of the Commission, D.I. Dovgiallo became an authorized representative of the RSFSRGlavarchiv for the Mogilev provinceand made a significant contribution to the archival reform in Russia and Belarus in the 1920s. His personality was a vivid example of preserving and augmenting– under the conditions of Soviet realities – of the archival-archaeographic traditions formed in Russia in the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries.Dovgiallo was one of the initiators of the creationof the Archaeographic Commission within the structure of the Institute of Belarusian Culture, which became the predecessor of the Belarusian Academy of Sciences. Being at the head of the Commission together with M.V. Dovnar-Zapolsky, Dovgiallo, drawing on the experience of its Vilna predecessor, developed a plan of a serial documentary publication that was purely national in nature, thereby contributing to the formation of Belarusian archaeography. The archival and archaeographic experience of D.I. Dovgiallo was in demand in the conditions of the formation of the State Archival Service of Soviet Belarus, as evidenced by his assiduous participation in the First All-Belarusian Conference of Archivists (May 1924), the SecondMeeting of Belarus Archivists (December 1927) and his teaching activity at Belarusian State University. D.I. Dovgiallo in Belarus, as well as S.V. Rozhdestvensky, I.L. Mayakovsky in Russia, advocated a strong union between archivists and archaeographers, on the one hand, and historians, on the other; he was a supporter of the democratization of archives through the involvement in their work of many local history researchers.

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