Aleksei Ivanovich Musin-Pushkin (1744 — 1817), (also spelled Aleksei Ivanovich Mussin-Pushkin) count since 1797, statesman, historian and art colector.
Musin-Pushkin is credited with discovering in Yaroslavl the manuscript The Tale of Igor's Campaign. His vast collection of antiquities also included the Laurentian Codex of the Russian Primary Chronicle and the earliest manuscripts of Zadonshchina.
Late in the eighteenth century Count Musin-Pushkin, a distinguished archaeologist, was looking through a bundle of dusty, mildewed books and parchments brought to his attention. While deciphering a sixteenth-century manuscript he realized that it was a copy of an earlier tale which the transcriber had not fully understood and had interpreted in his own way.
"Yet Boyan, my brothers, did not let loose ten falcons on a flock of swans, but laid his own wizard fingers on the living strings, which then themselves throbbed out praise for the princes..." The manuscript proved to be the famous Lay of Igor's Host.
The exposition of Yaroslavl museum - preserve of History and Architecture "The Lay of Igor's Host" is a unique museum dedicated to only one literary work, discovered within the Spasso-Preobrazhensky monastery. It is an outstanding monument of ancient Russian culture. In the bibliographic part of this literary work one can reveal the role of "The Lay" in the Russian literature and culture of new times, the international importance of this monument and its reflection in Russian and Soviet art of the 19-20-th centuries.
The section begins with the collection of books and magazines published in the second part of the 18-th century, which were the basis for the first scientific researchers, translators of the ancient Russian literature. Collecting homeland antiquities was very popular in Russia at that time. One of the most successful and well known collectors the professor of monuments of the Ancient Russia was earl A.I.Musin-Pushkin (1744-1817) over-procurator of Synod, the President of the Academy of Arts, the member of the Russian Academy and Society of History and Antiquities.