Russian State Library in Moscow

"Here they live dead and say dumb" - this is what expression is suitable for the Russian State Library (the former name of Lenin) - the largest library of Russia. Created on the basis of the library known in the past Diplomat Rumyantsev, it has a unique meeting of domestic and foreign priceless documents, books, manuscripts, cards in many languages \u200b\u200bof the world.

We will conduct a brief excursion. In the first hall we can see the cardinate cabinets, which are a kind of database on the collection of cards, notes and records of great composers and musicians (including the ether with the "Leningrad Symphony" Shestakovich, who first sounded in 1941 in Blocade Leningrad) , rare handwritten books, as well as dissertations and newspapers.

Here, polite library staff will always gladly help you find the necessary document. With the help of a modern electronic database, which is now starting to "displace" file cabinets, this process takes less than a minute. So, we learned how we need to go, and follow further.

The next "stop" will be a research and development department of rare books, where archival cabinets are standing in which the rarest handwritten books are represented, such as the Gospel of the Times of Kievan Rus, in the Department of Rare Books - the first publication of the Labor N. Copernicus, Archives N. V. Gogol, A.S. Pushkin, A. P. Chekhov, A. A. Blok, L.N. Tolstoy (the one, with the help of which he worked on the "war and the world"), etc.

This department regularly attend future candidates and doctors of historical, psychological, humanitarian and other sciences when they lead work on dissertations.

In the Foundation, the newspapers, located near, we can see the types of accounting cabinets, in which the binders are stored in the past newspapers and magazines: "Russian truth", "Russian disabled", "Komsomolskaya Pravda", etc. We especially visited the release of the Pravda newspaper dated May 10, 1945 with portraits of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill on the main page.

The main fund of the library, so-called. "The main reading room" has more than 35 million books and magazines. It is a key storage of document funds. The fund is formed on the basis of a collection principle.

Present books of famous historical characters are particularly valuable. Among the most significant - Collections of Rumyantsev, Weltman, Sheremetyeva, Chaadaeva, Norova, Empress Alexandra Fedorovna and Catherine II (the complete collected works by Didro and Voltaire, with whom the Empress personally was familiar).

Employees of this department told us that in the dashing 90s they were repeatedly tried to buy not only ours, but also foreign collectors in their fabulous money. Unfortunately, some of this fund was abducted after the collapse of the USSR and since then these lost books are not known anything.

For almost 200 years of history, the Russian State Library was awarded the Order of Lenin - the highest award of the USSR, as well as the medal "Symbol of Science"