ENThe subject of this investigation is the manuscript of the memoirs of St. Raphael Kalinowski (1835–1907), stored in the Manuscripts Department of the Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, which had been considered to have been lost since World War II . The article briefly presents the most important facts of the biography of the memoirs writer, reveals the circumstances under which the memoirs were written and how they found their way to the said library, analyzes its copies stored in other institutions, presents the characteristics of the primary source analysis of the manuscript, and discusses the peculiarities of its content and structure. The author of the memoirs is an engineer of noble birth who was born and brought up in Vilnius, an officer of the Imperial Russian Army, a participant in the 1863–1864 uprising, a Siberian deportee, and emigrant and a Discalced Carmelite monk whose name was made known all over the Christian world by Pope John Paul II by beatifying him in 1963 and proclaiming him a Saint in 1991. His memoirs written between 10 September 1903 and the second quarter of 1904 in the Discalced Carmelite Monastery in Czerna is an excellent example of the memoirs literature of the second half of the 19th – the beginning of the 20th century. The genesis of the text is related to the general tendency of that period to accommodate and publicize the reminiscences of the participants of the 1863–1864 uprising, of deportees and emigration activists as a source of reliable information about their authors and for future generations of historical investigations into the movement of liberation from the oppression of imperial Russia.The investigation showed that Raphael Kalinowski himself did not intend to publish his memoirs, however, after his death there were several editions in the Polish (1965, 2013), Italian (1992) and some fragments in French (1908–1910) languages. Extracts from Kalinowski’s memoirs were published for the first time in the Carmelite monthly Chroniques du Carmel, published in Belgium in 1908–1910. It is thought that they were translated into French and published by Kalinowski’s biographer Jean Baptiste Bouchaud. It should be noted that he was the only editor of that publication who used the original memoirs of Kalinowski, while the other editors did not have such a possibility. Ryszard Bender who published the complete text in the Polish language for the first time in 1965 (the second edition was issued in 2013) considered the manuscript to be lost and made use of the copy, which was stored at the Discalced Carmelite Monastery in Cracow, made by the historian, graduate of Stephen Bathory University Jadwiga Karaczewska for publication purposes in Vilnius before World War II . Judging from provenance information and historiographic sources, in 1906– 1907 and some time after Kalinowski’s death, the original memoirs were stored in the Discalced Carmelite Monastery in Wadowice. In the second half of the 1930s it was brought to Vilnius and entrusted to Karaczewska. After the war, together with other manuscripts of the historian, the manuscript of the memoirs found its way to the St. James Church, where the depositories of the then Book Palace – the State Center for Bibliography and Press Statistics of the Lithuanian SSR – were established. Since 1988 the unique manuscript has been stored in the Manuscripts Department of the Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences. [From the publication]