National Library of Russia

Российская национальная библиотека
English	The National Library of Russia
New building of the Library
Country	Russia
Type	National library
Established	1795
Reference to legal mandate	Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation authorizing the Statute of the Federal State Institution "The National Library of Russia" (March 23, 2001)
Location	St Petersburg
Coordinates	59°56′0.66″N 30°20′8.28″E / 59.9335167°N 30.3356333°E / 59.9335167; 30.3356333
Collection
Items collected	Books, journals, newspapers, magazines, official publications, printed music, sound and music recordings, databases, maps, stamps, prints, drawings, manuscripts and media.
Size	35,718,000 items (15,000,000 books)
Criteria for collection	Legal deposit of materials published in Russia; "Rossika": materials about Russia or materials published by the people of Russia residing abroad; selected foreign scholarly publications and other materials.
Legal deposit	Yes (Legal Deposit Law[1])
Access and use
Access requirements	Reading rooms – free. Russian residents must be 18 or older. Foreign visitors are limited by the period of their visa.
Circulation	8,880,000 (2007)
Population served	1,150,000 (2007)
Other information
Budget	569,200,000 RUB ($23,400,000)
Staff	1850
Website	http://www.nlr.ru/eng/
Phone number	[phone]

The National Library of Russia in St Petersburg, known as the State Public Saltykov-Shchedrin Library from 1932 to 1992 (i.e. in the Soviet era), is the oldest public library in Russia. It should not be confused with the Russian State Library, located in Moscow.

Establishment

The Imperial Public Library was established in 1795 by Catherine the Great, whose private collections included the domestic libraries of Voltaire and Diderot, which she had purchased from their heirs. Voltaire's personal library is still one of the highlights of the collection.

The cornerstone of the public library came from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the form of Załuski's Library (420,000 volumes), stolen by the Russians at the time of the partitions.^[2] Those books were only partially returned to Poland by the Russian SFSR in 1921 (55,000 printed books).^[3]

The 18th-century building of the library
faces Nevsky Prospekt.

For five years after its foundation, the library was run by Comte Marie-Gabriel-Florent-Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier. The elegant main building on Nevsky Prospekt was built in a Neoclassical style designed by the architect Yegor Sokolov in 1796-1801. Several annexes were added in the course of the following century, notably the Gothic Hall in 1857.

19th century

Visit of Alexander I to the library in 1812.

Under Count Alexander Stroganov, who managed the library during the first decade of the 19th century, the Rossica project was inaugurated, a vast collection of foreign books touching on Russia. It was Stroganov who secured for the library some of its most invaluable treasures, namely the Ostromir Gospel, the earliest book written in Russian language, and the Hypatian Codex of the Russian Primary Chronicle.

The Imperial Public Library was officially opened on January 3, 1814 in the presence of Gavrila Derzhavin and Ivan Krylov. In 1811 the library's collection began to grow rapidly, because a copy of each book published in Imperial Russia was henceforth deposited with the library, so that by 1914 the collection had expanded to 3,000,000 volumes.^[3]

The library's third, and arguably most famous, director was Aleksey Olenin (1763–1843). His 32-year tenure at the helm, with Sergey Uvarov serving as his deputy, raised the profile of the library among Russian intellectuals. Such luminaries as Krylov, Konstantin Batyushkov, Nikolay Gnedich, Anton Delvig, Mikhail Zagoskin, Alexander Vostokov, and Father Ioakinf joined the library staff and the library's doors were opened to all kinds of readers, including women and peasants.

Visit of Nicholas I to the library in 1853.

From 1849 to 1861 the library was managed by Count Modest von Korff (1800–76), who had been Alexander Pushkin's school-fellow at the Lyceum. Korff and his successor, Ivan Delyanov, added to the library's collections some of the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament (the Codex Sinaiticus from the 340s), the Old Testament (the so-called Leningrad Codex), and one of the earlies Qur'ans (the Uthman Qur'an from the mid-7th century).

20th century

In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, the institution was placed under the management of Ernest Radlov and Nicholas Marr, although its national preeminence was relinquished to the Lenin State Library in Moscow. The library was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour in 1939 and remained open during the gruesome Siege of Leningrad. In 1948, the Neoclassical campus of the Catherine Institute on the Fontanka Embankment (Giacomo Quarenghi, 1804–07) was assigned to the library. By 1970, the Library contained more than 17,000,000 items. The modern building for the book depository was erected on Moskovsky Prospekt in the 1980s and 1990s.

• Highlights of the library
• 

  St. Petersburg Bede (746)

• 

  Trebizond Gospel (10th cent.)

• 

  Codex Zographensis (ca. 1000)

• 

  Leningrad Codex (ca. 1010)

• 

  Ostromir Gospel (1056)

• 

  Spiridon Psalter (1397)

• 

  Guyart de Moulin's Bible Historiale (1350s)

• 

  Simon Marmion's Grandes Chroniques de France (1450s)

• 

  Breviary of Mary Stuart (1490s)

• 

  Lancelot du Lac (ca. 1500)

References

1. ^ Legal Deposit Law
2. ^ Малый энциклопедический словарь Брокгауза и Ефрона, published in the Imperial Russia in the early 1900s
3. ^ ^{a b} Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd. edition

Bibliography

• История Государственной ордена Трудового Красного Знамени Публичной библиотеки имени М. Е. Салтыкова-Щедрина. — Ленинград: Лениздат, 1963. — 435 с., [15] л. ил.
• История Библиотеки в биографиях её директоров, 1795—2005 / Российская национальная библиотека. — Санкт-Петербург, 2006. — 503, [1] с.: ил. — ISBN 5-8192-0263-5.

External links

• Official site of the library
• Russian National Library on the Fontanka Embankment
• Russian National Library on the Moscow Prospect
• The personal library of Voltaire as exhibited in the RNL

Coordinates: 59°56′01″N 30°20′08″E / 59.933516°N 30.335634°E / 59.933516; 30.335634