Elga Borisovna Vadetskaya. Two Letters to Mikhail Petrovich Gryaznov. Publication and Comments

The archives of Mikhail Petrovich Gryaznov are a remarkable source of information which concerns not only scientific problems and their solution but, to a large extent, also human interrelations. The expansive scientific and friendly relations of M.P. Gryaznov with persons of the same age, as well as his senior and younger colleagues, resulted in the appearance of a huge corpus of the epistolary heritage of the scholar which is fortunately preserved at the scientific archives of the Institute of the History of Material Culture, RAS. Among hundreds of letters to M.P. Gryaznov, some messages by Elga Borisovna Vadetskaya are preserved. For the publication, two letters were selected of the early summer of 1969 written in the expedition when Vadetskaya was already conducting field surveys while Gryaznov seemed to have remained in Leningrad and was just preparing for the trip. In my opinion, these letters describe the situation of the everyday life of the participants of the Krasnoyarsk expedition and vividly characterize Elga Borisovna herself as an independent, ambitious and devoted to science young researcher who studied the antiquities of Southern Siberia. Of particular interest is the subject touched in the second letter and concerned with the history of the resumption of the excavations of the famous burial site of Oglakhty