Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Visiting the State Archives in Kiev

Today I went to the Central State Archives to see what was there. I was able to read through a list of their materials on Sukhomlinsky, and I have ordered some of them to look at tomorrow. The archives contain thousands of manuscripts, letters and published works, so I will only be able to look at a small proportion of it. I have ordered a selection of Sukhomlinsky's correspondence and notebooks. The list of correspondence is huge, including many thousands of letters from teachers, students, parents and even prisoners. I have chosen samples of these from his final years, and also family correspondence, and some correspondence with people overseas. I have also ordered some notes made for a trip to Cuba and East Germany. I will only have time for the briefest sampling of the huge collection.

Tomorrow I will also be visiting the Sukhomlinsky Collection at a library attached to the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences. This collection includes photographs, and access will be easier than at the state archives, which are very strictly controlled. I will be able to photograph materials free of charge, whereas at the state archives there is a charge for each resource photographed.

I was taken to the state archives by one of Olga Vasilievna’s post-graduate students (Tanya), who is writing a doctoral dissertation. She was very helpful, and even ordered resources for me to look at under her name, as there is a limit of 10 resources which can be ordered at a time by one person. On the way to the archives I took some photographs from a corner of Sevastopol Square, including the imposing grey building of the police academy, and some beautiful autumn leaves in a park on the square. Tanya didn’t want me to photograph her, so I cannot show a picture of her.

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