Topic: Archives
In the Uppsala University Library is preserved a most peculiar collection called Dorpat-Riga-samlingen. It consists of three medium sized boxes, filled with largely uncatalogued and only partially sorted documents which at least to some extent were discovered in the early 1940's by library staff in a local junk-dealer's shop. Apparently they had once been acquired in Berlin by a Swedish collector, but that is as far as they can be traced. However, as many of them bear the small blue stamp of the Russian archival commission which around 1900 were trying to organize the old Swedish archive in Riga it's obvious that they must have been removed after that. There is no distinctive logic to the material, so it's entirely possible that the whoever took them was mostly after autographs and seals. The oldest documents are from around 1600, but a large proportion of them dates from the first decade of the Great Northern War.
In the collection there are many letters from local commanders during the GNW, for example more than a dozen written by Georg Lybecker. Some of these are from the time of his ill-fated expedition into Ingria in 1708 and does not only shed light on his decisions but also on what sort of information he was able to acquire. There are also quite a few letters from various officers in Livonia and Courland, not least from early 1708, as well as from diplomatic representatives abroad. In the next few weeks I will present some of the material in more detail.
