Libraries and Cultural Heritage Institutions of St. Petersburg, Russia: The National Library of Russia (not to be confused with the other two national libraries: the State Library of Russia in Moscow, and the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library)

Founded in 1795 by the order of Catherine II, the building we visited today was originally the Imperial Public Library, Russia's first public library, and houses the older collections dating 1725-1956. Another location houses more recent materials. Our guide, Olga, is a reference librarian for the foreign languages collection and gave us an informative tour which included a tragically ironic story about how the foreign language collection was initially established:

The Zaluski brothers of Poland, who were book-obsessed scholars, established Poland's first public library with their own private collection. In 1794 after a Polish uprising against Imperial Russia, Catherine II ordered troops to seize the library's holdings and had them transported to St. Petersburg. Over 250,000 items arrived and became the basis of the new library. A legal deposit law was established in 1810 by Alexander I to develop the library collections. Poland's independence began in 1918 and after the end of the Soviet-Polish war in 1920, Poland demanded their books back from Russia. It took about eight years to locate and return the books which had been integrated into the rest of the library collection. Sadly, those books in the National Library of Poland ended up burning in the fires of the Warsaw uprising against German forces in 1944.

This is the first room we saw after walking through what seemed to be a maze of hallways and card catalog rooms. This space is now the stacks for the general Russian language collections. The columns are now gone as more bookshelves were installed to optimize storage space. Image from National Library of Russia website.

Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take photographs in the building except for this hall named after Ivan Krylov, Russia's best known fabulist and friend of Pushkin.

There are a number of small book exhibits throughout the building in lovely display cases.

Rachel, Darrell, and Lisa in the Krylov Hall.

The library does not have WiFi, but through these doors are computer stations where visitors have internet access.

The repository for incunabula and rare books. Image from National Library of Russia website.

We were able to see the Lenin Reading Room which is currently preparing to undergo restoration. Another larger reading room was blocked off because of current construction and restoration work. We were shown the manuscripts department where we saw a facsimile of one of the oldest hand-written Slavonic gospels from Saint Sophia in Novgorod. Unfortunately, the manuscripts curator was abroad and we could not be shown more. The rare books department had a room built in the style of a gothic monastery. There we got to see the first book printed in Russia from 1564, Acts of the Apostles, the fifth book of the New Testament.

Afterward we were shown the personal library of Voltaire! Catherine the Great conducted correspondence with Voltaire and after his death she set out to acquire his correspondence letters and book collection, with the initial motive of keeping her letters from being exposed because of certain political opinions she may have expressed in them. Inevitably, some were stolen and published, her secrets revealed. She had a goal of constructing a life-size replica of Voltaire's last home and housing the collection there, but this plan fell through and only a model of the home exists. Voltaire's books consist of 7,000 volumes, some 2,000 include his original notations, which are being published in collaboration with Oxford. Many of his books are about Russian history translated into French.

Lastly, we briefly visited the foreign language department which still uses an old hand-written card catalog (the rest of the library has an electronic catalog, excluding manuscripts), mostly processed in the "Prussian Instructions" style of cataloging which really has no standards. I don't completely understand the process, but somehow the book titles are broken down into their separate words, and the nouns get prioritized and ordered in the catalog entry, and the excess words in the book title get excluded from the catalog record according to their "grammatical dependency." And then there may be an additional main entry which describes the book. Sounds pretty confusing and archaic. The library has plans to re-catalog this collection, but this immense project has not started yet.