Pavel Pierling (1840–1922), his Works and his Archive

Abstract

Pavel Pierling, a Russian historian and member of the Society of Jesus, is the author of the fundamental five-volume work La Russie et le Saint-Siège, published in French in Paris from 1896–1912. He wrote this great work based on collections of Russian and European (primarily Italian) archives. Pierling gathered a significant part of these documents in the process of his own research and correspondence conducted with the archives and fellow historians. The historian published a substantial number of collected documents, either in the form of separate publications or as appendices to his research and cites from many of these in his works. At the same time, a lot of material was preserved in his personal archive. It was originally stored as part of the Slavic Library in Paris (Bibliothèque slave de Paris), which he presided over from 1877 to 1922. In 1901, due to the tightening of French legislation in relation to religious associations, most of the library had to be transported to Brussels. In 1905, it was moved again to new, more spacious premises. In 1908, Pierling arrived from Paris with the remainder of his books and spent the rest of his life here. In 1923, the Slavic Library was again transported to Paris, until it was moved to a suburb of Paris in 1982, together with the library’s archive, in Le Centre d’études russes de Meudon. In 2002, this extensive collection, including Pavel Pierling’s personal archive, was divided into two larger parts: documents related to the history of the Society and the personal funds of its members were transferred to the Archives françaises de la Compagnie de Jésus in Vanves, while the rest ended up as part of the Bibliothèque Diderot de Lyon. The extensive collection of Pavel Pierling makes it possible, firstly, to get acquainted with his large private and professional correspondence networks; secondly, to get an idea of his activities as a priest, member of the Society of Jesus, and researcher; and thirdly, to get acquainted with the collections of documents that he had been carefully collecting for his work and which reflect all the subjects and topics of his research. Based on this, one can identify important details of his biography and comprehend the personal and scholarly achievements of this bibliophile, Slavist, and major researcher of the relations between Russia and the Holy See.