Abstract

The study of the historical space of the South Coast of Crimea, which underwent signifi cant economic, social and cultural transformations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, has received a new impetus in recent years. This can be attributed to several factors. First is the importance of comprehensively reconstructing the history of Crimea as the primary “place of memory” of modern Russia. Second — ongoing debates about the nature of changes in the life of Russian society in that period. Third — significant developments in methodology and historiography, including the “memorial” and “sociocultural” turns. Finally, new opportunities for source research, that have arisen due to the large-scale digitization of Russian archives and museum collections. This article represents a continuation of the author’s series of works on the subject of the history of dacha resorts on the South Coast of Crimea. This series of works culminated in the monograph Dachas and Summerfolk of the Russian Riviera. Essays on the History of the South Coast of Crimea and Sevastopol in the Early Twentieth Century (2024). The present article is noteworthy as it introduces and analyses for the fi rst time paperwork documentation that has been preserved in the papers of the eminent scientist V.I. Vernadsky. This documentation is deposited in his fund in the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences and relates to the existence of Batiliman, the dacha resort of “intellectual labourers” in the west of the South Coast of Crimea (the present-day territory of the city of Sevastopol) in 1911–1920. The history of this dacha resort, whose shareholders included prominent scientists, writers, artists, and leaders of the Cadet Party, has been reconstructed in the literature in fragments, primarily from ego-sources, i.e. memoirs and diaries. The complete list of shareholders has remained unknown, whereas it included K.S. Stanislavsky, I.Ya. Bilibin, V.G. Korolenko, P.N. Milyukov, M.I. Petrunkevich and other prominent fi gures. The documents from the V.I. Vernadsky’s fund, among others the map of the dacha resort’s boundaries, the list of plot owners and other materials, allowed, when used together with documents from the State Archive of the Republic of Crimea, as well as sources of personal origin and visual documents, to establish for the first time reliably the composition of the dacha residents of Batiliman, the history of the creation of the resort, and to systematize the data for further research.