The relevance of the study is due to the interest of the humanities in the study of the processes of formation and development of foreign philology as a field of scientific and educational activities in the Perm University, since its foundation in 1916. In the Perm archives we study personal files and personal provenance fonds of philologists and historians affiliated with the Perm State National Research University (PGNIU), whose field of interests is foreign literature and language, as well as other archival documents. Research methods are source study and archival methods, methods of philological analysis. Personal files of the Perm philologists of the first third of the last century A. A. Smirnov, B. A. Krzhevsky, B. L. Bogaevsky, N. P. Obnorsky, A. F. Shamray, E. O. Preobrazhenskaya, who taught language and literature or even history and language (V.V. Weidle, N.P. Ottokar, V.E. Krusman) contain documents related not only to their professional pedagogical activity, but also documents on their scientific interests, everyday and family life, places of residence, reflecting the realities of time and representing the era in Perm. Personal files of the staff of the Department of Foreign Literature (since 1999 – the Department of World Literature and Culture) A. A. Belsky, R. F. Yashenkina, N. S. Leites, E. P. Khanzhina, A. F. Lyubimova, G. S. Rutskoi, who worked there in the 1950s-2010s, have not yet undergone evaluation and remain in the departmental storage. The personal provenance fonds of philologists B. M. Proskurnin and N. S. Bochkareva, containing a large amount of hand- and typewritten documents, can be considered not only as archival sources, but also within the framework of philological discourse as a post-modern text created as a game of different texts that refer to different cultural layers, languages, realities. Documents of the personal fond, reflecting the methods of scientist’s work with literature, play a pedagogical role in the formation of the competencies of a university graduate. Today, archives need to create personal provenance fonds and collections of philologists who worked in the 1950s and later, via interaction with the scientists themselves or their relatives.