The images of local museum in Russian guidebooks of the second half of XIX – early XX centuries
In this paper the methods of presentation of regional museums in Russian guidebooks of the second half of XIX – the beginning of XX centuries are studied. Regional museums and mass guidebooks appeared in Russia at the same period. The appearance of these two notions in the second half of the XIX century was the result of the overall democratization of culture. Since the early years of its existence, a guidebook was not merely a guide, but also a form of advertising a region and its important historical and cultural sites. Addressed to a general reader, it simplified and shortened the information, at the same time making it more catchy. However, the authors of guidebooks did not create the forms of presentation of cultural objects, they only distributed already existing ones. So guidebook can be viewed as a source that fixes a perception of museum in a region and existing forms of its self-presentation.