National Library of Russia

The National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg after the Russian State Library in Moscow, Russia's second largest library and one of the largest libraries in the world. She was named in 1932 to 1992 after the Russian writer and satirist Mikhail Saltykov -Shchedrin.

The core collection comes from the Kingdom of Poland in the form of the Zaluski Library ( 420,000 volumes), who had seized the Russians in the time of the partitions. Of these books were parts - returned to Poland - last 55,000 volumes in 1921 from the Russian SFSR.

Founded in 1795 Catherine II from their private collections of the libraries of Voltaire and Diderot, which they had purchased from the heirs, the Russian National Library. Voltaire's personal library is to this day one of the highlights of the collection. 1814, including the construction of the library, designed by Carlo Rossi has been completed. The Library was the first public library of the Russian Empire and served as the basis for the second university in the country. Unlike the national libraries in Western Europe, the Saltykov -Shchedrin Library was open to the public from the beginning.

From the year 1811, the library began to grow rapidly, because a mandatory copy of every book published in Russia, had to be from now deposited in the library, so that in 1914 the stock had increased to 3,000,000 volumes.

2005 included the collection of more than 34 million media units. Among them are 450 000 manuscripts - the Gospel Ostromir of 1057 and the first resulting in the East Slavic area dated manuscript - and over 600 000 magazine titles. In 2005, the library of about 1.2 million users visited.

Pictures

Ostromir Gospel, 1056

Mary Stuart's personal Book of Hours, 1587