Andre Kostelanetz (1901-1980) was a Russian-born conductor, arranger, and pianist known for juxtaposing popular and classical repertoire in radio broadcasts during the 1930s and 1940s. He had a highly successful concert career performing with some of the world's foremost orchestras and leading the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Kostelanetz also commissioned several compositions which have since become staples in the orchestral repertoire, including works by Aaron Copland, William Schuman, and Jerome Kern.

The Andre Kostelanetz Collection contains over 150,000 items spanning the period 1922 to 1984 with the bulk of the materials dating between 1935 and 1979. It consists of musical arrangements, correspondence, business papers, programs, photographs, clippings, and scrapbooks that document Kostelanetz's 50-plus-year career in the United States along with materials related to the career of Kostelanetz's first wife, soprano Lily Pons.

This web presentation includes a wide range of Ballets Russes objects, including photographs, scrapbooks, writings, costume and set designs, choreographic notes, music scores, diaries, and programs. Selections for this presentation were drawn from the rich collections of the Music Division of the Library of Congress, including the Adolph Bolm Collection; Alexandra Danilova Collection; Bronislava Nijinska Collection; Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Fund Collection; Serge Diaghilev/Serge Lifar Collection; Serge Grigoriev/Ballets Russes Collection; and the Spivacke Fund Collection.

The collection of notable dancer, choreographer and teacher Bronislava Nijinska (1891-1972) contains a diverse variety of materials documenting dance and the arts in the twentieth century. Available here are over 200 collection items, including manuscripts, books, diaries, choreographic notebooks, correspondence, moving image materials, music scores, photographs, posters, programs, set and costume designs, and scrapbooks.

Bronislava Nijinska (1891-1972) was a dancer, teacher, and a significant artist in the development of twentieth-century ballet choreography. Nijinska studied ballet at the school of the Maryinsky Theater of Saint Petersburg, along with her celebrity brother, Vaslav Nijinsky. She was a dancer in the Ballets Russes de Serge Diaghilev where she created a number of roles in ballets by Michel Fokine and Nijinsky.

William C. Brumfield, Professor of Russian Studies at Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, has extensively photographed and written about the wooden architecture of the Russian North, the jumping-off point for the explorers, traders, and missionaries who colonized Siberia. He also has photographed the distinctive architecture of such Siberian cities as Perm, Tiumen', Tobol'sk, and Tomsk. The William C. Brumfield Collection contains photographs given to the Library of Congress for inclusion in its permanent collections. The 1,100 photographs document the architectural heritage of pre-Soviet Russia, highlighting wooden buildings, and religious, commercial and industrial facilities, as well as some landscapes.

The Russian-born artist Ilka [Irène] Kolsky (1909–1938) worked in Paris in the 1930s. It was in Paris that she and violinist Roman Totenberg became acquainted and developed a close relationship. Kolsky had just begun to establish herself as a noteworthy contributor to the genre of Expressionist woodblock printing at the time of her untimely death, before age thirty. She worked in a variety of media including pen-and-ink, watercolor, and charcoal, but her most significant and best remembered work is her woodblock prints.

Meeting of Frontiers is a project, originally funded by the United States Congress, devoted to the theme of the exploration and settlement of the American West, the parallel exploration and settlement of Siberia and the Russian Far East, and the meeting of the Russian-American frontier in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest.

With the collections digitized at the national libraries in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and complemented by materials from the Library of Congress's own rich holdings relating to Russia and Alaska, these materials are a rare and valuable resource for teachers, students, and members of the general public interested in the history and geography of Siberia, the Russian Far East, and Alaska; polar exploration; the indigenous peoples of Siberia and Alaska; the climate, geography, geology, flora, and fauna of Alaska, Siberia, and the polar regions; political prisoners and exiles in Siberia in the communist and tsarist eras; cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union during World War II; and many other topics. Much of the material also relates to the history of Canada, China, Japan, and other countries bordering the Pacific Ocean.

Features color photographic surveys of the vast Russian Empire made between ca. 1905 and 1915. Frequent subjects among the 2,607 distinct images include people, religious architecture, historic sites, industry and agriculture, public works construction, scenes along water and railway transportation routes, and views of villages and cities. An active photographer and scientist, Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook most of his ambitious color documentary project from 1909 to 1915. The Library of Congress purchased the collection from the photographer's sons in 1948.

This collection contains cultural heritage materials gathered during the World Digital Library (WDL) project, including thousands of items contributed by partner organizations worldwide as well as content from Library of Congress collections. The original World Digital Library site (preserved in LC’s Web Archives here) and all descriptive metadata were translated from English and made available in six additional languages: Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic, Russian, and Chinese. All item records include narrative descriptions submitted by the contributing partners and enhanced by WDL researchers to contextualize the item and its cultural and historical importance. Books, manuscripts, maps, and other primary materials in the WDL collection are presented in their original languages; more than 100 languages are represented, including many lesser known and endangered languages. Additionally, all World Digital Library metadata in each of the seven languages is available as a downloadable dataset.

The records of the Russian-American Company include correspondence of Gregorii Shelikhov, Natalia Shelikhova, and other company officials, ships’ logs, expedition records, company reports, and lists of the goods the company traded. They document the operations of the company and its predecessors in Siberia and Alaska, the lives of company personnel and the native people they encountered in Alaska and Siberia, Russian colonization and missionary efforts in Alaska and the Pacific coast of North America, including California, and trade and diplomatic relations between Russia and Japan. The records are mostly in Russian, with some in English, German, and French. The manuscript of a brief autobiography by Yudin is also included here.

The coming together of a renowned scholar and a rich, but relatively unknown and unused archive of historically significant documents is a rare phenomenon. Last winter [1993-1994] the Librarian of Congress, Dr. James H. Billington, asked Dr. Vyacheslav Ivanov, one of the foremost linguists of our day, to review and evaluate the Alaskan Russian Church Archives, and to select some items for an exhibition. This installation is the direct result of that encounter, and it offers a rare opportunity to witness the insights that such an exchange can produce.

This exhibit is remarkable for what it contains: the first significant number of documents ever shown anywhere from what may be the most important new source of primary materials for understanding the history of the twentieth century. These documents provide an unprecedented inside look at the workings of one of the largest, most powerful and long-lived political machines of the modern era. As in any modern archive, there is more bureaucratic verbiage and fewer instant revelations than one might hope for. But the documents that the Library of Congress has here chosen from the 500 made available from the Russian archives cover the entire range of Soviet history from the October Revolution of 1917 to the failed coup of August 1991. They include material from archives that had been key working files of the Communist rulers until August 1991: the archives of the Central Committee, the Presidential archive, and the KGB.

On March 6, 1992, some three months after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a handful of enthusiastic young Westerners living in Moscow began publishing the first English-language daily newspaper ever to be printed in Russia, the Moscow Times. Digital files of these pictures have been generously donated to the Library of Congress by the Moscow Times.

Features material concerning the Ballets Russes, one of the most influential dance companies of the twentieth century. Most of the objects come from the Library's Bronislava Nijinska collection. Nijinska, sister of the legendary Ballets Russes member Vaslav Nijinsky, was also a dancer and a choreographer for the company. Objects include photographs of Diaghilev and members of the company, musical scores, production photographs, costume designs, dance notation manuscripts, souvenir programs, and posters.