The history of the Orenburg encyclopedia project (based on materials from T.L. Bolshakova’s family archive)

The paper analyzes the history of the unrealized project of the Orenburg encyclopedia, which could become an example of the first regional encyclopedia creation in the history of modern Russia. However, this project faced unforeseen organizational difficulties, contradictions of a subjective nature, and as a result was reformatted into several narrowly thematic regional encyclopedic publications. The author shows main stages and directions of the work of the authors on this project, identifies fundamental approaches to the encyclopedia and its structure, which were followed by the authors and well-known regional scientists of the Orenburg Region. The paper is based on the materials of the family archive of T.L. Bolshakova. One of them is a personal diary of Leonid Naumovich Bolshakov, the head of the team of authors who worked on the encyclopedia project. This unique source made it possible to see the emotional component of the work on this project, the internal mechanisms of its development, to trace the ambiguous role of historians and representatives of the government of the Orenburg Region in the encyclopedia creation as well as in the reasons for this project failure. It is noted that the Orenburg encyclopedia could become the first project of this kind in Russia, if there weren’t any objective and subjective difficulties that arose while working on it.