The tragic fate of one of the most talented students of P.K. Kokovtsov was burdened with the fact that his main work on Abul Faraj, written in spite of all life's obstacles and generally completed by the time of his arrest, is lost now. We can judge about this researcher only by his three short publications, which he managed to publish in the second half of 1920s. Two of them are of a special nature and are in the field of medieval Jewish literature, while the third one is of interest to a wider audience. This article is a good example how colossal research work, constantly bumping into a broken thread of search, ultimately leads to a discovery that crystallizes in several pages of printed text. The subject of this article is a handwritten document of 1816 from the archive of G.P. Blok (the poet's cousin). This document describes an act of fortune-telling about the fate of daughters of Lieutenant General P.F. Goering, performed by the court adviser V.V. Stavisky on Saturday, March 25, 1816, “in the evening, at 8 o'clock in the 37th minute”, and received the next day “in the morning at 11 o'clock” from the “sacred oracle of ancient Sibyls” – that divination was written in Hebrew with a parallel Latin text and its Russian translation. S. establishes the source of that divination: the book of the Giessen professor Johann-Heinrich May, published in 1720; he shows how V.V. Stavisky, former librarian of the Imperial Public Library, could get access to it and with what dictionaries (1535 and 1644, respectively), with a rather poor knowledge of Hebrew, he used to compose the ‘Sibyl Oracle’. The summary of the article emphasizes a special veil of mystery and magic that surrounded any Hebrew texts in the Russian culture of the early nineteenth century.