Peter P. Dubrovsky

Peter Petrovich Dubrovsky (; December 9, 1754 – January 9, 1816), was a Russian bibliophile, diplomat, paleographer, secretary of the Russian Embassy in France, collector of manuscripts and books. Throughout his life he collected about 2000 manuscripts. Between 1805 and 1812 he worked at the Imperial Public Library.

Life

In 1772 Dubrovsky finished his studies at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Kyiv . In 1773 he served as a copyist in the Synod. Between 1780 and 1805 Dubrovsky worked in the Board of foreign affairs as a churchman at the Russian ambassadorial church in Paris and as a secretary-translator for embassies in France and Holland.

During the French Revolution he acquired manuscripts and documents from the public libraries in France. Most of them were stored at the Bastille, in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and the monastic Library of Corbie Abbey. The material was not safe as the Jacobin mobs plundered French cities.

In February 1800, Dubrovsky returned to Petersburg with a collection of 400 Western European medieval manuscripts, miniatures, and early books. Somehow he came into possession of 94 manuscripts from the East (in Greek, Persian, Arabian, Hebrew and 11 other languages), about 50 Slavic manuscripts.

Originally Dubrovsky's collection interested Russian bibliophiles. In 1805, Alexander I of Russia accepted the collection as donation to the Imperial Public Library, where his collection became the basis of the "Manuscript Depository". (Recently it was established that one manuscript with an inscription allegedly by Anne of Kiev is in fact a Serb manuscript of the 14th century. ) As a consequence of the donation, Dubrovsky received the Anna's award of the 2nd class and he was also appointed as a keeper of the manuscripts under an offer by the Department of Manuscripts . He described every document in his collection. Unfortunately some of the descriptions were lost. The manuscript of the Breviloquium Vitae Wilfridi Saint Petersburg Bede, the 8th-century manuscript of the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum of Bede