The Scientific
Archive of the Institute of Archaeology of the National Academy of Sciences of
Ukraine houses the home archive (now the personal fund) of the famous
scientist, and specialist in ancient archaeology Lazar Moiseyovych Slavin.
Among the large epistolary are several letters from his friend and colleague,
one of the researchers of ancient Olbia, Oleksandr Mykolayevych Karasev,
written in 1942 and 1943.
With the beginning
of World War II, the Ukrainian Institute of Archaeology, together with the
Academy of Sciences, was evacuated from Kyiv to Bashkortostan, to the city of
Ufa. Many employees of the Institute went to the front, some left with their
families, and some failed to leave for various reasons, like young mothers
Makhno Yevheniya Volodymyrivna and Pokrovska Yevheniya Fedorivna remained in
Kyiv. Slavin Lazar Moiseyovych, who headed the Institute, Lagodovska Olena
Fedorivna, Blifeld Davyd Isakovych, and Dmytrov Leonid Dmytrovych went to the
evacuation together with the Institute.
Oleksandr Karasev
from Leningrad, together with his wife Elena Levy (also a researcher of Olbia)
and their young son, like other scientists, found himself in a besieged city.
Gradually, scientists managed to evacuate from the besieged city by academic
echelons. The Leningrad Institute of the History of Material Culture, where Oleksandr
Karasev and Elena Levy have worked, was evacuated to Tashkent. Patient Oleksandr
Karasev and his family were taken away in the summer of 1942; from this time
begins his correspondence with L. Slavin.
The letters tell
about the winter in besieged Leningrad, about the evacuation, about life in the
evacuation in the Saratov region, and then – moving to Tashkent, where
Leningrad archaeologists were evacuated. Oleksandr Karasev's letters repeatedly
mention Olbia, in which he dreams of returning after the war, a request to
L. Slavin took him to his Institute and desire to work permanently in
Olbia as its director or scholar-custodian.
