For the first time in Ukrainian and world musicology, based on previously unexplored archival materials, information on one of Yakiv Yatsynevych’s most popular works – arranging of the folk song “Susidka” has been reconstructed and supplemented. In the process of research in Central State Archives Museum of Literature and Arts of Ukraine (Kyiv) were found out many valuable sources. Among them, more than twenty letters which are the correspondence of composer’s wife – Iryna Yatsynevych with the musicologist Leonid Kaufman; a letter to I. Yatsynevych from her brother, Methodiy Pavlovsky and from the editorial office of the vocal literature of the State Musical Publishing House; articles from the periodicals and posters of concerts, which inform about the performance of the work, original musical manuscript of “Susidka”. As a result of work, all founded documents were included to scientific circulation. The materials give an opportunity to supplement the history of the creation of work, to determine its place in the stage life of the twentieth century, to find out the “detective” story by I. Yatsynevych about the appropriation of the composer’s work by another artist and to establish that Y. Yatsynevych’s “Susidka” is not just a processing of folk song, but almost original author’s composition.
The article is devoted to the scientific and organisational activities of Hermann Sommer (1899–1962), the founder and head of the Office for the Care and Preservation of the Cultural Heritage in the Fischhausen district of the German province of East Prussia, during the difficult period of Germany’s history from 1929 to 1945. It describes the circumstances surrounding the creation, as well as the later rescue and finally rediscovery by the archaeological community, of Sommer’s historical and archaeological legacy. One of the most important components of the archaeological part of the heritage is the Fischhausen Archive, a card-index archive of archaeological monuments that were known in the district in question by 1945. By this time, the first experience of using the data from the archive had already demonstrated the enormous potential of these documents for the reconstruction of the prewar state of research, as well as for the modern study of the archaeological sites on the Kaliningrad Peninsula. The search for the rest of his legacy has already resulted in a number of unexpected discoveries of further archaeological material. Preliminary results also indicate that similar archives of archaeological monuments could also have been created for other districts of the former German province of East Prussia.