The literature on the Russian collections at the Library of Congress (LC) is voluminous, but most of it focuses on the acquisition of the Yudin Collection in November 1906, the pivotal event for the LC Russian collections, or on subsequent developments in the 20th century. Very little has been written about Russian materials in LC before 1906, a surprising phenomenon considering that there were Russian books in the Jefferson library and that LC was participating in international exchanges with Russian institutions already in the mid-nineteenth century. This article will survey the Library's pre–1907 holdings and acquisitions policies for Russian publications, including discussions of the Jefferson collection, the Smithsonian deposit, the early exchanges, and purchases. The author makes use of archival documents from the LC and Smithsonian Institution archives.

Resources on the pre–1907 Russian collection include an unpublished paper by David H. Kraus (1923–1997), long-time acting chief of the LC European Division. Kraus presented a paper at the annual American Library Association conference in 1985 entitled "The Development of the Russian Collections at the Library of Congress before World War II."¹ Approximately two pages of his thirteen-page paper address the pre-Yudin collections. While he utilized the annual reports of the Librarian of Congress, he did no archival research to gather more details about the collecting policies and procedures or about the items themselves. Evgenii Pivovarov, a Russian library scholar, wrote about early Slavic collecting at LC in his book Formirovanie kollektsii slavianskikh materialov Biblioteki Kongressa SShA (1800–1933 gg) [The Formation of the Slavic Collections at the Library of Congress, USA (1800–1933)].² Concerning the pre-Yudin era, his work is particularly valuable because he paints a broad picture of Russian-American relations with an emphasis on book culture, but his work focuses more on personalities and general history rather than on details of the LC collection and LC's acquisitions methods; Pivovarov apparently also examined but opted not to discuss in any detail the resources related to Russian book acquisitions held in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution, the exchange agent for LC for many decades of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Finally, Edward Kasinec, the former Slavic curator at the New York Public Library, penned an overview of Slavic publications in library collections in the United States, but, as an overview, it has few details related specifically to LC.³

In order to interpret the events described below, it is helpful to understand the current state of the Russian collections at LC. The collection is estimated to contain over 800,000 volumes in Russian as well as an additional 800,000 volumes about Russia or the Soviet Union in other languages, including languages of the former Soviet Union. In recent years LC has added approximately 20,000 to 23,000 Russian-language items per year. That number includes not only books, but newspaper and serial issues as well as reels of microfilm. LC collects in all subject areas except clinical medicine and technical agriculture, deferring those areas to the National Library of Medicine and the National Agriculture Library, respectively. In short, it is the largest collection of Russian materials in the United States.

The year 1906 is the date traditionally given for the beginning of Russian collecting at LC, for that is when LC purchased one of the largest and finest private Russian libraries of the time, the collection of Gennadii Vasil'evich Yudin (1840–1912), a Siberian merchant and bibliophile. The Yudin Collection consisted of 80,000 volumes in approximately 39,000 titles of books and serials ranging from Sibirica and rare books to long runs of pre-revolutionary Russian periodicals and works of Russian literature. With this purchase LC put itself on the map as possessing the largest Slavic collection in North America at the time and also put itself on the path to possessing a universal collection of Russian materials. Before the Yudin purchase, LC's Russian collection was quite small and somewhat specialized. This article will focus on the history of Russian collecting at LC prior to the Yudin acquisition and thereby will further illuminate why the Yudin purchase was so significant for LC. Highlighted in the article are examples of early acquisitions still extant in the collections.

When LC was established in the Capitol building in 1800, $5,000 was appropriated for the purchase of books. A committee drew up a list of desiderata and placed the first order for books with Cadell & Davies, a bookseller in London. As a result, 155 titles in 728 volumes and three maps were received, all in English. Only one title in a foreign language (French) was part of the initial request, but it did not arrive in the first shipment. The subjects of the books were history, geography, law, politics, economics, government, and philosophy — all appropriate for a legislative library, which was the original congressional intent for the scope of LC. The initial collecting emphasis for LC was the utility of the books for the congressmen in writing laws and statecraft. The category of geography was important to a new nation intent on establishing and expanding its borders.⁴ In this first purchase, only two books, both by William Coxe (1748–1828), an English historian, and both published in London, concerned Russia; — they were listed in the first LC booklist, dated December 11, 1800, as "Coxe's Russian Discoveries" and "Coxe's Travels in Poland." The full titles are Account of the Russian Discoveries between Asia and America: to Which Are Added, the Conquest of Siberia, and the History of the Transactions and Commerce between Russia and China (1780) and Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden and Denmark. Interspersed with Historical Relations and Political Inquiries (1784).⁵

The lack of foreign language titles was deliberate, as was made clear in a letter dated April 14, 1802, by Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) to Abraham Baldwin (1754–1807), the chair of the Library Committee of Congress. "I have prepared a catalogue for the Library of Congress in conformity with your ideas that books of entertainment are not within scope of it, and that books in other languages, where there are not translations of them, are not to be admitted freely." However, Jefferson did provide one caveat later in the letter, "I have added a set of dictionaries in the different languages which may be often wanting."⁶

In 1803 and 1804 LC published a supplemental catalog and an updated catalog, but neither of them revealed any additional holdings related to Russia, and a Russian dictionary was not among the early purchases, although foreign language dictionaries did start to appear in the collection in 1804. For example, there were dictionaries of Danish, French, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish. By 1804 the collection had almost doubled in size to 323 titles in 1,382 volumes and nine maps.⁷

The 1812 catalog contained 941 titles in 3,076 volumes plus maps and newspapers, reflecting a tripling in size over the eight-year period since 1804. It was also the first in which LC began to list titles by subject and with some alphabetical order. By skimming the 1812 catalog, one can see a very slight growth in books related to Russia, from two titles to fourteen in eight years but, not surprisingly given the early time period and the lack of a Russian population in the U.S., none of these fourteen titles were published in the Russian language or in Russia. The books group under the categories of history, geography, and commerce, all within the purview of a legislative library containing only "useful" books. All books were purchases, since library exchanges did not exist and the copyright law in force at the time required mandatory deposit in a district court and with the U.S. Secretary of State, not with LC. Only three of the Russian-related titles were published in the United States. This catalog also revealed the first Russian author present in the LC collections, albeit in English translation, to be Sergei Ivanovich Pleshcheev (1752–1802), a Russian vice admiral and author of one of the first geographic descriptions of Russia, Obozrienie Rossiiskiia Imperii, originally published in St. Petersburg in 1787. LC had the English translation of this work, entitled Survey of the Russian Empire, published in Dublin in 1792, as well as the 1792 London edition.⁸ Another book related to Russia from the 1812 catalog was the English translation of Count Maurice Auguste Benyowsky's (1746–1786) Memoirs and Travels. Benyowsky was a Central European who had been exiled to Kazan' and Kamchatka for his anti-Russian, Polish nationalism. Other English translations in the 1812 catalog included Johann Christian von Struve's (1768–1812) Travels in the Crimea, Frederic Anthing's (1753–1805) History of the Campaigns of Prince Alexander Suworow, and Jean-Henri Castéra's (1749–1838) Life of Catherine II. Original works in French on the Russian Empire include Jean Benoît Scherer's (1741–1824) Annales de la Petite-Russie [Annals of Little Russia] and his Histoire raisonée du commerce de la Russie [Critical History of Commerce in Russia].⁹ Unfortunately, none of the original copies of the above-mentioned works survive today, for in 1814 there was a devastating fire in the Capitol, an act of war that destroyed most of the building and everything in LC's collection, save one item.¹⁰ LC has since acquired other copies of all titles mentioned above in the same editions except for the works by Anthing and Struve.

The fire in 1814 was not an accident. During the War of 1812, British forces invaded the city of Washington and on August 24, 1814, burned the Capitol and the Library of Congress along with it. Although the outside walls of the building remained, everything inside had been consumed. On September 21, 1814, twenty-eight days after the conflagration, Thomas Jefferson offered to sell his private library, amassed over fifty years of book collecting, to the United States. In his letter to the Library Committee of Congress dated September 21, 1814, Jefferson described his collection and penned his famous words on a universal collection at LC, "I do not know that it contains any branch of science which Congress would wish to exclude from their collection; there is, in fact, no subject to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer."¹¹ His words on universality eventually became the guiding principle for collecting policy at LC.

Jefferson's collection was valued at $23,950 for 3,392 titles in 6,487 volumes. There were some in Congress who opposed the purchase, partly based on price and partly based on content, while some Federalists simply opposed Jefferson himself. Cyrus King (1772–1817), a Federalist member of the House of Representatives from Massachusetts, spoke against the purchase of the collection which contained "irreligious and immoral books, works of French philosophers, who caused and influenced the volcano of the French Revolution, . . . about 6,000 books . . .in languages which many cannot read, and most ought not."¹² In spite of the opposition, Congress approved the purchase and, on January 30, 1815, President James Madison signed the bill. Jefferson's library arrived in Washington in May 1815. Thus we can say for certain that May 1815 is when the first Russian-produced books were added to the LC collections, for Jefferson had in his library three Russian-language titles published in Russia and three French-language titles published in Russia. He also had fourteen titles published about Russia, for a total of twenty titles concerning Russia in forty-three volumes. There was a catalog for LC published in 1815 based on Jefferson's library, but a celebrated annotated bibliography of the library published in 1959 is more detailed and served as the basis for the discussion below of several Russian books in his collection.¹³

We know that Jefferson could not read Russian, so it is interesting to explore why he had Russian books in his collection. Levett Harris (1784–1839?), the U.S. Consul in St. Petersburg from 1803 to 1816, acted as an intermediary between several authors and Jefferson, forwarding books to Jefferson. Harris even sent his client a bust of Czar Alexander I. One example of the books provided by Harris is the three-volume set donated to Jefferson by Comte Nicolas de Romanzoff, i.e., Count Nikolai Petrovich Rumiantsev (1754–1826), entitled Gosudarstvennaia torgovlia 1802 goda v raznykh eia vidakh [State Trade in 1802 in Its Various Forms]. ¹⁴ See Figures 1 and 2. At the time of his gift to Jefferson, Rumiantsev was the Minister of Commerce for Russia. His personal collection of books, documents, coins, and other artifacts eventually became the foundation for the Rumiantsev Museum, now called the Russian State Library, in Moscow. Rumiantsev's dedication to Jefferson appears in French on the fly-leaf of the first volume from 1802:

"Mr. Levet Haris [sic] having expressed to me that it would be pleasing to the President of the United States of America to have a table of Russian commerce, I seize this opportunity with alacrity and I ask the President to be so kind as to accept and keep in his Library the tables of commerce of the years 1802, 1803 and 1804, such as I had them published in Russia; it will please me if he accepts them as a token of the rightful esteem that his merit inspires in me. Count Nicolas de Romanzoff. Petersburg, the 6th of July 1806." ¹⁵

Other titles in Jefferson's library resulting from Harris' posting in St. Petersburg include two different editions of Peter Simon Pallas' (1741–1811) Sravnitel'nyi slovar' vsiekh iazykov i nariechii [Comparative Dictionary of All Languages and Dialects], a dictionary which contains words in two hundred languages, including several Native American ones. Although Pallas was German, he taught at the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg at the request of Catherine the Great.

Jefferson asked Harris to send him the second edition specifically because of the Native American vocabulary, as he was interested in a possible link between the native peoples of North America and Asia. Harris, however, could not purchase the item due to its limited distribution among scholars of the Russian Academy. It was not for sale to the public, because it did not pass muster with Catherine. However, Harris made contact with Rumiantsev, who obtained a copy for Jefferson. In a letter dated March 28, 1807, Jefferson expressed his gratitude:

"I must pray you in a particular manner, to express to his Excellency [Rumiantsev] my sensibility for this mark of his obliging attention, rendered the more impressive from a high esteem for his personal character, and from the hope that an interchange of personal esteem may contribute to strengthen the friendship of the two nations bound together by many similar interests." ¹⁶

Rumiantsev and Jefferson could not have realized at the time that both of their collections would serve as the foundations of their respective national libraries.

Among other titles that Harris also forwarded to Jefferson were three titles by the Polish historian, scholar and travel writer, Jan Potocki (1761–1815), which all had been published in St. Petersburg, Histoire ancienne du Gouvernement de Chèrson [Ancient History of the Government of Kherson], Chronologie de Deux Premiers Livres de Manethon [Chronology of the First Two Books of Manetho], and Principes de Chronologie, pour les Temps Antérieurs aux Olympiades [Beginnings of a Chronology, from the Early Times to the Olympiads]. Regarding the last book mentioned above, Jefferson wrote in a letter to Potocki on May 12, 1811:

"It is a gleam of light flashed over the dark abyss of times past. Nothing would be more flattering to me than to give aid to your enquiries as to this continent . . . but time tells me I am nearly done with the history of the world; that I am now far advanced in the last chapter of my own, & that it's last verse will be read out ere a few letters could pass between St. Petersburg and Monticello." ¹⁷

The final Russian-related work forwarded to Jefferson from Harris was A Picturesque Representation of the Manners, Customs, and Amusements of the Russians, in One Hundred Coloured Plates by the artist John Augustus Atkinson (1775–approx. 1833) and engraver James Walker (1748–1808). Other Russian-related titles in the Jefferson library were gifts by authors, but sent via sources other than Harris, and more were simply purchases. In the back of one title, William Tooke's (1744–1820) The Life of Catharine II, Empress of All the Russias, Jefferson was listed as a subscriber.

Only five of the original twenty Russian-related Jefferson titles remain in LC today, for almost two thirds of the Jefferson library titles were destroyed in 1851 by a fire in the Capitol. The four surviving titles are the three volumes by Rumiantsev, Guy Miège's (1644–1718?) La Relation de trois Ambassades de Monseigneur le comte de Carlisle [The Account of the Three Embassies of His Grace Earl of Carlisle] from 1670, the Convention between His Britannick Majesty, and the Emperor of Russia from 1801, Potocki's Chronologie des Deux Premiers Livres de Manethon, and his Principes de Chronologie, pour les Temps Antérieurs aux Olympiades. In the course of reconstructing the collection, exact editions of Jefferson titles found in other LC collections were transferred to the Jefferson library. In addition, beginning in 1998 rare book curators in LC have been acquiring from dealers exact editions of other destroyed titles using funds donated by Jerry and Gene Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys and his wife. A permanent exhibit of the Jefferson library opened in the Jefferson Building on April 11, 2008. In this exhibit books are marked to indicate provenance: green ribbons protruding from the tops of the books for original books from the Jefferson library, yellow ribbons for acquisitions since 1998, no ribbons for books transferred from another part of LC, and book boxes as placeholders for those works not yet replaced. There are only three Russian-related titles that have placeholders.

The influence of the Jefferson library cannot be overstated, for its broad scope in subject and language eventually determined the future direction of collecting at LC, in particular the collecting of materials in all subject areas, which resulted in universality as a critical component of LC collecting principles. In spite of a strong desire for collecting only useful books of limited subject range, within a decade of the Jefferson library purchase, one can see the expansion of subjects included in the supplements to the LC catalog. ¹⁸ In the 1825 and 1827 LC catalog supplements there were books on diverse subjects out of scope for the previously envisioned legislative library, such as natural history, chemistry, medicine, poetry, and fiction. By 1830 a number of foreign-language titles also had been added to LC, mostly in French, but a handful also in German, Latin, and Spanish. Although the influence of Jefferson on collecting books on all subjects was discernable almost immediately, his influence regarding collecting in foreign languages would come decades later, when the nation was ready to look outward. In the 1820s, however, there was still a desire to avoid adding foreign-language works to LC. From an 1824 report to the Ways and Means Committee, we read:

"The committee are of the opinion that it would be better to purchase English books and English translations of foreign books in all cases where such translations have been made. They would propose only to import such standard works in foreign languages as have not been translated, and of those only such as can not be dispensed with." ¹⁹

Although in the 1820s there were no Russian-language books in LC except for what was in the Jefferson library, books in English about Russian history and geography, as well as a few translations from the Russian continued to be acquired. The 1825 supplement lists nineteen (non-Jefferson) titles about Russia, all in English except one in French. All were written by non-Russian authors except for Letters from the Caucasus and Georgia, translated from the French of Vasilii Ivanovich Freigang, i.e., Wilhelm von Freygang (1783–1849), a Russian of German descent who served a short stint in the Caucasus and later was the Russian consul general in Venice. In the 1827 supplement appear fourteen additional (non-Jefferson) titles about Russia, all in English by non-Russian authors, except for two English translations of Russian authors, and two French translations of another Russian author. Two of the titles were fiction, a translation from the French of Russian Tales, by Xavier de Maistre (1763–1852), a popular French writer who lived in Russia and often used Russian themes in his works, and The Story of a Wanderer, an anonymous fictionalized travelogue about Pugachev, the Time of Troubles and the Caucasus. ²⁰ One Russian author listed in the 1827 supplement, Otto von Kotzebue (1788–1846), was a Russian naval officer born in Estonia to Baltic German parents. A book by his father, August von Kotzebue (1761–1819), appeared in the 1825 catalog, but I did not consider the father Russian because of his more German orientation and his publishing originally in the German language. The younger Kotzebue's travelogue, Voyage of Discovery, into the South Sea and Beering's Straits, was published first in Russian in St. Petersburg in 1821–1823 and later translated into German, English, and Dutch. LC acquired the English version. ²¹ The second Russian author whose books appeared in the 1827 supplement was the Russian admiral, Ivan Fedorovich Kruzenshtern (1770–1846). Although his geographical works originally were published in St. Petersburg, LC added only the French translations of two of them. A title in English translation by Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff (1774–1852), one of the scientists on Kruzenshtern's voyages, also became part of the LC collection in the 1820s. The final Russian author appearing in the 1827 supplement was another Russian admiral, Vasilii Mikhailovich Golovnin (1776–1831), who explored Japanese islands as well as other parts of the North and South Pacific Oceans. Golovnin was held prisoner by the Japanese for several years and subsequently penned a book about his ordeal. LC acquired this work in English translation, Narrative of My Captivity in Japan, during the Years 1811, 1812 & 1813. ²² Books about Russia by non-Russians and occasional works translated from Russian authors would be the pattern of Russian-related acquisitions for many years to follow, as evidenced by examining numerous subsequent LC printed catalogs and supplements.

After the 1815 Jefferson catalog, the next full LC catalog appeared in 1830. Entries for books that were part of Jefferson's library were preceded by the capital letter "J." It is quite clear from these "J" designations that most of the foreign language titles in LC in 1830 had come from Jefferson's library. The 1830 catalog also revealed that LC had started to replace some of the Russian-related volumes lost during the 1814 fire, for example, the works by Benyowsky and Coxe, mentioned above. Overall, however, there was still little growth, with only twenty-three new Russian-related titles since 1827, most falling under the heading of geography or travelogues, and all but five in English by non-Russian authors. The first Russian author was Kruzenshtern. LC added two more of his geographical works, one in German and the other in English translation. The second Russian author was also a naval officer and a friend of Kruzenshtern, Iurii Fedorovich Lisianskii (1773–1837). Together, the two men undertook the first Russian voyage around the world, with Lisianskii also sailing to Hawaii and writing about his discoveries in Voyage round the World. In fact, one of the smaller Hawaiian islands is named Lisianski Island in his honor. The third Russian author was Count Grigorii Vladimirovich Orlov (1777–1826), a Russian senator, scholar, and noted translator of the Russian fabulist Ivan Krylov. In 1825 Orlov published a five-volume work on the history and literature of Naples, the second edition of which LC acquired in French. The fourth Russian author identified in the 1830 catalog was Moritz von Kotzebue (1789–1861), the son of August and brother of Otto. Like his brother, Moritz served as a Russian naval officer, but he later joined the army and eventually became a politician. LC acquired his Narrative of a Journey into Persia, in the Suite of the Imperial Russian Embassy, in the Year 1817. One of the works by a quasi-Russian author was an English translation of Pallas' Travels through the Southern Provinces of the Russian Empire from 1812, originally published beginning in 1771 by the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg in German under the title Reise durch verschiedene Provinzen des Russischen Reichs. Although Pallas, mentioned above, was not a Russian author, he is mentioned because he published versions of this work first in Russia, and he taught in Russia. ²³

The 1840 LC full catalog starts to show some movement with regard to Russian additions to the collections. In the ten years since the last catalog LC added forty-two new Russian-related titles, many of which were in English or French by non-Russian authors. Among the forty-two were translations into French of the most notable works of Russian authors recognizable to scholars today, such as Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin's (1766–1826) Istoriia gosudarstva rossiiskago [History of the Russian Empire]. See Figure 3. A trilingual set of Ivan Andreevich Krylov's (1768–1844) Basni [Fables] in two volumes from 1825 was the first work in Russian added to LC since the acquisition of the Jefferson library in 1815. The fables in the set appeared in Russian, French, and Italian. It was also the first work of Russian literature acquired by LC in any language. ²⁴ See Figures 4 and 5. Literary works belonged to the category of non-utilitarian books, but LC began to collect in this area to serve the entertainment needs of Congressmen and their families. ²⁵ Russian literature, however, was not a priority. Acquired works in translation by several other Russian authors included Iulii Andreevich Gagemeister's (1806–1878) Report on the Commerce of the Ports of New Russia, Moldavia, and Wallachia, Egor Fedorovich Timkovskii's (1790–1875) Travels of the Russian Mission through Mongolia to China, Otto von Kotzebue's New Voyage round the World, and one more each by Kruzenshtern and Pallas. ²⁶

Also included for the first time were three journals published in Russia, albeit in Latin and French, from the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg: Commentarii Academiae scientiarum imperialis Petropolitanae [Commentaries of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg], Novi commentarii Academiae Scientiarum Imperialis Petropolitanae [New Commentaries of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg], and Mémoires de l'Académie Impériale des Sciences de St. Pétersbourg [Reports of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg]. ²⁷ Multiple volumes of each serial were acquired. The acquisition would be surprising if the titles had been published in Russian, but since all three were in the linguae francae of science and scholarship of the day, they would have been intelligible to some scholarly readers in the U.S.

The 1849 LC catalog showed some slight progress in Russian-area acquisitions, but the pattern of adding only translations or books about Russia had not changed. There were fifty new Russian-related titles, fourteen of them published in Russia or translations of the works of Russian authors. The most famous Russian author added to the LC collection in the 1840s was Princess Ekaterina Dashkova (1743–1810), a lady in the court of Catherine the Great who eventually became the head of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. LC added the 1840 edition of her memoirs in English translation. Four additional geographical books by the above-mentioned Timkovskii also were listed in the 1849 catalog. Another geographical title was the description of the region of Bukhara in present-day Uzbekistan, written by Nikolai Vladimirovich Khanykov (1819–1878), a Russian military translator and later diplomat. In typical fashion LC added the English translation, Bokhara; Its Amir and Its People, from 1845. ²⁸

From the 1849 catalog the LC Russian collection acquired a new discipline — fine arts. In 1823 Count Grigorii Orlov, mentioned above, published a book in French on Italian painting that ended up in the LC collection. Another relatively new subject for the LC Russian collection was Egyptology. Although there was an Egyptological title from St. Petersburg in Jefferson's library (Potocki's Chronologie de Deux Premiers Livres de Manethon), no others connected to Russia were added until the 1840s when LC purchased Ivan Aleksandrovich Gul'ianov's (1789–1841) work on hieroglyphics, Archéologie égyptienne [Egyptian Archaeology]. Gul'ianov was a linguist who challenged the work of Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832), the scholar credited with deciphering hieroglyphs. Also acquired was a new title in the field of meteorology published in Russia, albeit in French, Tables psychrométriques et barométriques à l'usage des observatoires météorologiques de l'empire de Russie [Psychometric and Barometric Tables Compiled for Use in Meteorological Observatories in the Russian Empire] in St. Petersburg in 1841, by Adolf Theodor von Kupffer (1799–1865), a German from Latvia and a professor at the university in Kazan'. LC purchased its copy from the London bookseller Obadiah Rich (1783–1850), one of LC's main European vendors during the mid nineteenth century. ²⁹ In the 1840s LC accessioned its fourth Russian journal into its collections, the Annuaire du Journal des mines de Russie [Yearbook of the Journal of Mines in Russia], published in St. Petersburg from 1835–1842 and which contained articles in French on topics related to geology, metallurgy, mineralogy, and mining. New books on Russian history and politics by Russian authors included works by Vikentii Stanislavovich Pel'chinskii (ca.1790s–ca.1855-1856) and Ivan Gavrilovich Golovin (1816–1890). Pel'chinskii was an economist, an official in the Russian Ministry of Finance, and a secret agent for the Russian government, who composed Système de législation, d'administration et de politique de la Russie en 1844 [The System of Legislation, Administration and Politics of Russia in 1844] under the pseudonym Homme d'Etat Russe [Man from the State of Russia]. See Figures 6 and 7. Golovin was a Russian publicist exiled for his political writings. LC acquired his work, Russia under the Autocrat, Nicholas the First, which was highly critical of the tsar, in English translation, in the 1840s. Like many of the English-language publications added to LC at the time, this title too was purchased from Obadiah Rich. ³⁰

Finally, in the 1849 catalog we find two additional works of Russian literature (Krylov's Fables, mentioned above, was the first), i.e., two anthologies of Russian writers, one in English and the other in French translation. Specimens of the Russian Poets, compiled and translated by John Bowring (1792–1872), presented works by Derzhavin, Zhukovskii, Karamzin, Batiushkov, and others. Anthologie Russe, suivie de Poésies Originales [Russian Anthology, with Poems], compiled by Emile Dupré de Saint-Maure (1772–1854), offered in French poems by the same generation of Russian poets. ³¹

During the first half of the nineteenth century, LC acquired books by purchase based on selection from booksellers' catalogs. The selection was performed not by the Librarian of Congress, but by the Library Committee made up of members of Congress. In many cases the Chair of the Committee was the one who did the selecting, with some input provided by other interested members and the Librarian. ³² One scholar referred to the acquisitions policy for LC during the early decades of its existence as "mediocre direction and planless buying." ³³ Sufficient funding for book buying was always in dispute. In 1834 we read of one interested party's disappointment in the meager $5,000 appropriation.

"This is hardly sufficient to obtain the new works of merit which are generally published, and is altogether inadequate to purchase the many rare and costly books which should be found in every such library. Why, . . .even Harvard University expends $5,000 per annum on its library, and surely we ought to expect a powerful and wealthy nation to make a more liberal appropriation than a mere college." ³⁴

The disagreements over money were central to the debates over the role envisioned for LC. Was it to be for Congress' use only, as some congressmen wanted, or would it become the national library open to all, as others wanted? Only small sums were necessary for a small, legislative library, but for a universal collection that rivaled the world's great libraries as LC would aspire to become after the Civil War, much more would be needed. Those in favor of the universal collection lobbied for the purchase of whole collections amassed by bibliophiles including works in all subjects and languages, instead of individual selection of titles, but they failed to convince Congress of the need. An example of a foreign-language collection not purchased by LC was the collection of Count Dmitrii Petrovich Buturlin (1763–1829), a director of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, who spent the later years of his life in Italy due to respiratory illness.

In 1836 LC was offered the Buturlin collection of 25,000 volumes and over 200 manuscripts of French and Italian belles lettres, works on the fine arts, Greek and Latin classics, and literary scholarship. Although the collector was Russian, his collection apparently contained no Russian books. This offer was significant, for it provoked discussions on what LC should contain and on enviable depository regulations in other countries, with resulting unfavorable comparisons with other national libraries. The Buturlin Collection could have been purchased for approximately $50,000–$60,000, an unimaginable increase in LC expenditures as only $99,950 had been spent on books from 1815–1836. ³⁵ Congress passed on the opportunity to buy this magnificent collection, as well as on other opportunities to acquire large, private collections in the coming decades, preferring to limit purchases to individual titles, and avoiding most foreign language works.

One positive result of the Buturlin offer was that a count of the foreign language holdings of LC in 1836 was made.

"Of the 24,000 volumes thus purchased [for LC from 1815–1836] there were about 6,000 volumes in other languages than English, of which 4,083 were in French, 844 in Latin, 314 in Spanish, 268 in Italian, 281 in Greek and Latin, 66 in Greek, 29 in Chinese, 13 in Saxon, 12 in German, and 52 in all other languages, ancient and modern." ³⁶

As is evident from this assessment, "exotic" languages such as Russian simply were not of interest to Congress and its library. In fact, the Russian-related materials in LC after its first half century of existence amounted only to approximately 164 titles. See Table 1. Only four titles were in the Russian language and only fifteen had been published in Russia. The Russian collection would continue to grow very slowly until a special relationship with the Smithsonian Institution developed, and with it, the growth of international publications exchanges.

On December 24, 1851, a devastating fire broke out in the Library in the Capitol, destroying approximately 35,000 books, well over half of the 55,000 volume collection. The fire was caused by flaws in the chimney flue system. Consumed by the fire were two-thirds of Thomas Jefferson's library as well as most of the Russian-related books. The books had been shelved according to a classification scheme based on broad subjects called chapters. The two chapters that contained the most Russian titles were Chapter Two (European History) and Chapter Twenty-Nine (Geography), both of which were completely destroyed. ³⁷ As a result of the fire, LC resolved to rebuild its collection.

The Library Committee decided to begin the rebuilding by acquiring new copies of titles previously held, as well as continuing to purchase selected titles new to LC, based on "what the booksellers had to offer [rather] than with any planned body of acquisitions." ³⁸ This activity can be traced in the printed catalog supplements from the 1850s. For example, in the 1852 supplement there were twenty-six Russian-related titles, seven of which were entirely new works, but nineteen of which were replacement copies of previously owned titles. ³⁹ In the 1853 supplement this trend continued, with forty-five new Russian-related titles, twenty-nine of which were replacements. Although LC did add some recently published titles, there was no plan in place to actively acquire titles within a year or so of their publication dates. In fact, perusing the supplements from the 1860s proves that LC was still acquiring Russian-related titles published several decades earlier instead of focusing on current titles. For example, in the 1865 supplement thirty-three Russian-related titles were acquired, only three of which had been published in the 1860s.

Until the year 1861, all publications in LC from Russia were from the capital, St. Petersburg, but the 1861 supplement revealed that several Moscow editions had been added to the collections that year. One such title was Zoognosia Tabulis Synopticis illustrata [Illustrated Synoptic Tables of Zoology] by Gotthelf Fischer von Waldheim (1771–1853), a German anatomist who taught at Moscow University. Also added were Découverte sur le Croup [Discoveries about Croup] and Beyträge zu den Zeichen des Croups [Contributions about the Symptoms of Croup], both by Friedrich Joseph Haass (1780–1853), a German doctor practicing in Moscow, whose pseudonym was Sutamilli. See Figure 8. A fourth title was Geschichte der Medicin in Russland [History of Medicine in Russia] by Wilhelm Michael von Richter (1767–1822), a Russian doctor from Moscow who taught at Moscow University. The final Moscow publication was XXI Veterum et Clarorum Medicorum Graecorum Varia Opuscula [Various Brief Works by Twenty-one Ancient and Famous Greek Physicians] by Oribasius, a Byzantine Greek physician from the fourth century. This publication contains in both Greek and Latin his work commonly known as Collecta medicinalia [Collection of Medical Works], an encyclopedic anthology of Greek medical texts. ⁴⁰ Also listed in this supplement were four other Russian scientific titles from St. Petersburg. What is noteworthy about these additions is that all are devoted to science, straying from the pattern of purchasing books predominantly about Russian geography and history. Certainly, books about Russia from those disciplines also were added in 1861, but never before had LC acquired so many books published in Russia or about Russian contributions to science. Unfortunately, this phenomenon did not mark the beginning of a trend. Subsequent years showed that these purchases were a one-time event, with LC acquiring only occasional works about Russia or by Russians and only the occasional Russian scientific title. The pattern of "planless buying" and the emphasis on foreign works in English translation were still in effect in the 1860s. See Table 2 for a count of the Russian collection in 1861 and 1864. The Russian collection was very small in comparison with the LC collections as a whole. In 1861 there were only 223 Russian-related books out of an approximate 63,000 volumes (1860). In 1864 there were 248 Russian-related books, but 82,000 volumes in the entire collection. Less than half a percent of the collection concerned Russia. Most of the books in LC that had been published in Russia were written in French, German or Latin, not in Russian. In fact, in both catalogs there were only eight titles in Russian, and several of these were bilingual grammars and dictionaries, not prose or scholarship.

Trying to verify that the copies of the books currently in LC are the original copies acquired during the first half of the nineteenth century is not always straightforward. I have never come across any specific old markings in these older books to indicate the source or date of acquisition. The best one can hope for is an old LC bookplate or ownership stamp. See Figure 3 for an old ownership stamp frequently found on title pages of works acquired in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

See Figures 6 and 7 for the title page of a work by Pel'chinskii listed in the 1849 catalog and its nineteenth century bookplate showing the old classification system of chapters and numbers scratched out and replaced with the current LC classification. This particular bookplate was in use from 1822–1850. ⁴¹

Sometimes there is an indication that a volume was acquired years after it appeared in one of the printed catalogs. For example, the 1825 set of Krylov's fables currently in LC and depicted in Figures 4 and 5 appears not to be the set received in the 1830s. It is likely that that set was destroyed in the 1851 fire, for the title is not included in the 1861 catalog, the first full printed catalog since 1849, and the LC ownership stamp on the title page bears the date 1871, indicating that it was added to the collection in that year. This is confirmed by a listing for the book in the 1872 supplement. See Figure 5. Likewise, Karamzin's Histoire depicted in Figure 3 was first added to LC in the 1830s, but it reappears in the 1852 supplement, indicating that it was lost during the fire and replaced. Also, the ownership stamp indicates a post–1851 acquisition. ⁴² An invoice book in the LC Archives indicates that the work was purchased in 1852 from Rich Brothers booksellers in London, the sons and successors of Obadiah Rich's business. ⁴³ See Figures 9, 10, and 11 for an example of a volume acquired after the 1851 fire which shows a bookplate in use from 1852 to 1861, as well as a book label on the back cover in use before 1860. There are no ink stamps on the title page. ⁴⁴ This work, which appears for the first time in the 1855 supplement, is the 1853 volume of the Annuaire du Yacht-club impérial de Saint-Pétersbourg [Yearbook of the Imperial Yacht Club in St. Petersburg].

The first documented Russian gift to LC can be identified, like previous examples, through a combination of catalog supplement verification and bookplates. It is a two-volume set on military tactics entitled Uchebnyia rukovodstva dlia voenno-uchebnykh zavedenii. Taktika [Manual for Military Education Institutions. Tactics], by Nikolai Vasil'evich Medem (1796–1870), a Russian general who taught at the military academy. See Figure 12. It appeared in the 1858 supplement, which was one of the few LC catalogs to indicate titles received as gifts. The bookplate on the inside cover was in use from 1852 to 1861. The book was a gift from the author via John H. B. Latrobe (1803–1891) of Baltimore, Maryland. Latrobe was Counsel of the B&O Railroad, and he had socialized with Medem and his wife while in Russia on a consulting trip regarding railroads. ⁴⁵ In his correspondence Latrobe called General Medem "an authority on military affairs." ⁴⁶ Unfortunately, many of the early books about Russia have been rebound with library buckram and lost their early bookplates in the process, eliminating one of the only types of physical evidence that could be used to date the acquisition.

Another way to determine if volumes currently held are originals is through a process of elimination based on book plates, markings or accession numbers of known later acquisitions such as the Yudin Collection purchase in 1906 or one of the Smithsonian transfers discussed later. For instance, the volumes held today by LC of the first four Russian serials added to the collection (Commentarii Academiae scientiarum imperialis Petropolitanae, Novi commentarii . . ., Mémoires de l'Académie Impériale des Sciences de St. Pétersbourg, and Annuaire du Journal des mines de Russie) are not the ones acquired in the 1830s. Based on the bookplates, ownership stamps on the title pages, bindings, and the Smithsonian Deposit catalog, all LC volumes of these titles came via the Smithsonian Deposit discussed below. Perhaps the originals were destroyed in the 1851 fire or were discarded at a later time as duplicates, for only one of the titles is listed in the 1861 catalog (Annuaire . . .), indicating either that the originals survived the fire or that replacements had been purchased before 1861.

After the fire and into the 1860s, the Library continued to purchase books based on recommendations from the Library Committee, usually using a British book agent, ⁴⁷ such as Obadiah Rich and successors, although materials in French were acquired by LC's book agent for the Continent, Hector Bossange (1795–1884), who was appointed to his position in 1854. We can identify at least one French title by a Russian author as coming from him. ⁴⁸ The policy of "planless buying" continued, with LC's collection in 1865 described as "a haphazard and ill-formed collection of some eighty-three thousand volumes and . . .entirely lacking in those elements of distinction, either of rarity or of planned selection, that have dignified many smaller libraries." ⁴⁹ However, a new Librarian of Congress and former bookman, Ainsworth Rand Spofford (1825–1908), whose tenure as librarian lasted from 1864 to 1897, ushered in two significant developments in the 1860s and 1870 that had implications for the future growth of the Russian collections and that would set LC on its path to becoming a national library. The first was the Smithsonian Deposit and its corresponding advancement of international exchanges. The second was the passage of expanded copyright laws. Both of these events are discussed below.

One of the most significant additions to LC throughout its history was the Smithsonian Deposit which began in 1866 after a fire the previous year in the Smithsonian Institution (SI) revealed once again the vulnerabilities of maintaining a library collection in a non-fireproofed building. The deposit was the first step in the transfer of SI's library holdings to LC, in keeping with Smithsonian Secretary Joseph Henry's (1797–1878) goal of making SI the national museum and Spofford's aim of making LC the national library. The fire just added more fuel to the transfer plans already being discussed, for, while SI was not housed in a fireproof building, the reconstructed Library of Congress rooms in the Capitol included fireproofing measures to minimize the chance of future fires like the one that had taken place in 1851. The deposit program continued until the mid-twentieth century. The initial deposit consisted of 40,000 volumes, and although the total number of items added to LC via SI over the decades has been estimated at over one million volumes, no firm figure has been calculated. Before 1866 foreign exchanges were not a factor in the development of the Russian collections at LC, but the vast majority of materials of the Smithsonian deposit were SI exchange receipts from international sources, such as foreign scholarly academies, museums, societies, and educational institutions, including many from the Russian Empire. After SI initiated exchanges of foreign official publications in 1867 and became the official exchange agent for LC in 1870, publications of foreign governments, including some from Russia, also started to arrive with more regularity. Ultimately, exchange was the primary method of Russian collection building for the period under study; not even purchases brought in as much and as high-quality Russian material as international exchange.

Even before the founding of SI and its exchange service, LC had had a fitful foray into international exchanges with France in 1837, but nothing from Russia was received. These early attempts at exchange of duplicates and French official publications were tolerated by Congress "because of their utility and the relatively small amount of funding they required." ⁵⁰ In the printed supplements of the 1840s LC recorded its first receipts via exchange, mostly from France. The 1848 supplement listed the first Russian-related items received on exchange. They came from three Frenchmen. One title was notable — the French translation of Timkovskii's Puteshestvie v Kitai chrez Mongoliiu, v 1820 i 1821 godakh [Travels to China through Mongolia, in the years 1820 and 1821]. ⁵¹ This volume was received from Alexandre Vattemare (1796–1864) himself, one of the earliest proponents of international exchanges with the U.S.

SI began exchanging its publications with foreign scholarly institutions in 1849. When SI distributed on exchange the first volume of its Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, it sent copies to six institutions in the Russian Empire: the Academy of Sciences; the Imperial Public Library; and the Imperial Mining Department, all in St. Petersburg; the Imperial Observatory in Dorpat (now Tartu, Estonia); the Imperial Society of Naturalists in Moscow; and the Imperial Observatory in Pulkovo. The first Russian institution to reciprocate by sending copies of its own publications to SI was the Imperial Society of Naturalists in Moscow; SI took delivery of three volumes of the Society's Bulletin from 1849 on June 17, 1850. Also in 1850, SI received its first publication from the Imperial Academy of Sciences, a volume entitled Résumés des Observations Météorologiques [Summary of Meteorological Observations] dated 1846. In early 1851 SI received from the Academy its Bulletin de la classe Physico-mathématique [Bulletin of the Phyisical-Mathematical Class] and Bulletin de la Classe Historico-philologique [Bulletin of the Historical-Philological Class]. ⁵² All of these titles eventually ended up in LC via the Smithsonian Deposit in 1866. By 1852 the number of Russian institutions receiving SI publications had increased to eleven, including institutions outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg such as Kazan' University. A list of all SI exchange correspondents published in 1885 showed that there were 189 recipients of SI publications in the Russian Empire, of which 131 were in Russia proper. Some of these correspondents reciprocated by sending their publications to SI. In its lists of foreign correspondents, SI defined the meaning of being in correspondence with SI as: "It [the list] embraces the names of all the Institutions that have come to its [SI's] knowledge having for their object the increase or diffusion of knowledge, or from which serial publications have been received." ⁵³

SI materials destined for institutions abroad were sent to an exchange agent, who then distributed the materials to the appropriate recipients. In turn, foreign institutions sent their materials to the agent for shipment to the U.S. The first agent for Russia was Dr. Johann Gottfried Flügel (1788–1855), working out of Leipzig. Indeed, the receipt ledgers show that the first Russian receipts listed above were forwarded to the U.S. by Flügel. Flügel was a noted lexicographer and grammarian, who had immigrated to the U.S. in 1803 and lived in New Orleans for sixteen years before returning to Germany. He retained his U.S. citizenship and, in 1838, when the position of U.S. Consul in Leipzig was vacated, "the consulate was transferred to Dr. Johann Gottfried Flügel as the foremost American citizen of this town." In 1847 when SI began to set up its international exchange service, Flügel was called upon to serve as both Consul and the exchange agent. ⁵⁴ In 1856, after the death of Flügel, the position of exchange agent was awarded to his son Felix Flügel (1820–1904), the U.S. Vice-Consul in Leipzig. Not only was the younger Flügel a scholar and lexicographer like his father, he too was fluent in English. Both the elder and younger Flügels' main task as exchange agents was to facilitate American exchanges with institutions and individuals in Germany and other countries of Central Europe, but both ended up handling exchanges from the Russian Empire as well. Felix Flügel frequently expressed his frustration with the Russian correspondents and the Russian postal system. In an 1863 letter to the assistant secretary of SI, he wrote, "It is very difficult to squeeze any information out of Russian correspondents; the mail seems to be a very unsafe conveyance there. Thieving must flourish to a great extent in the land of the knout." ⁵⁵ In a letter from 1869 he mentioned the strict oversight at the frontier of all packages entering Russia. ⁵⁶ Finally, in 1870 in a long letter to SI, Flügel gave more details about the Russian problem and suggested that SI award the position of agent to someone else:

"Regarding the Russian parcels in general, I have wished for many years to get rid of them altogether because it is almost impossible to get any answers or any satisfactory conviction that the objects sent have ever been received: dishonesty seems to be the rule of the day there among the lower officers of the post-office . . . I have, in fact, still a number of Russian parcels on hand, which I now and then look upon with sinister aspect, the booksellers refusing to take them off my hands without direct permission from the recipients (in order to ensure the refunding of their outlay in forwarding), which latter again do not choose to answer my letters. All these difficulties are now heightened by the intense hatred of the Russians against everything German, so that even their own German provinces on the Baltic are cut off from Germany as by a Chinese wall.

I should long ago have proposed what seems to me the most natural mode of distributing in Russia, i.e. by sending parcels to some intelligent bookseller — say, Mr. Watkins — in St. Petersburg, the literary centre of the country — there all the frontier difficulties . . .would scarcely exist, . . .as the greatest part of the parcels belong to St. Petersburg, the distribution would there be comparatively easy." ⁵⁷

He made one exception to his complaints about Russian correspondents, the Imperial Society of Naturalists in Moscow, "the intercourse with whom has always been most regular and satisfactory." ⁵⁸ SI heard his complaints and in 1871 the Russian job was assigned to L. Watkins & Co. in St. Petersburg, who held the position until 1881 when the Russian Commission on International Exchanges at the Imperial Public Library took over the management of the exchange with SI. Presumably, problems with postal delivery continued throughout the nineteenth century, for in the 1890s SI was sending its Russian parcels to the Russian Consul in Hamburg, a major port city, to be forwarded to the exchange commission in St. Petersburg, rather than sending them directly to an agent. This certainly reduced postage costs as well as facilitating movement of packages across borders.

By 1866, when the first part of the Smithsonian Deposit took place and a printed catalog of the initial deposit was published, ⁵⁹ SI had accumulated 142 publications in 856 volumes from thirty-two institutions in the Russian Empire. Excluding publications and institutions no longer part of Russia today such as works from Finland and Estonia, a total of ninety-six titles from twenty institutions were added to LC. ⁶⁰ Of those titles, thirty-two were published in Russian, forty-nine were serials, and forty-seven were books or reports. Many of the publications were in French, German and Latin, rather than in Russian. In comparison with the Russian titles listed in the 1864 author catalog, the full catalog published closest in time to the Smithsonian Deposit, one can see a tremendous growth in the number of Russian titles added to LC, and that is just for the first year of the deposit. See Table 2. In 1864 there were thirty-one titles total from Russia, whereas in just the first year of the deposit, there were ninety-six titles from Russia, three times the amount accumulated over the first sixty-four years of LC's existence. Most of the new titles, however, would not be recorded in the printed supplements or the next major catalog in 1869.

Although Russian science was barely represented in the earliest decades of LC, after the Smithsonian Deposit, many Russian scientific periodicals were added to the collection. Examples included Sel'skaia letopis' [Agricultural Yearbook], one volume, Etnograficheskii sbornik [Ethnographic Magazine], four volumes, Trudy Mineralogicheskago obshchestva v Sankt-Peterburge [Transactions of the Mineralogical Society in St. Petersburg], two volumes, and Gornyi zhurnal [Mining Journal], three volumes. Other scholarly or government periodicals included, for example, Morskoi sbornik [Nautical Magazine], sixty volumes, Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnago prosveshcheniia [Journal of the Ministry of Public Instruction], two volumes, Zapiski gidrograficheskago depo [Memoirs of the Hydrographical Depot], three volumes, and Trudy Imperatorskago Vol'nago ekonomicheskago obshchestva [Transactions of the Imperial Free Economic Society], forty-five volumes. The subjects of the Russian materials deposited in 1866 ranged from statistics and geology to geography and history. See Figures 13 and 14 for an example of a work added to LC as part of the original 1866 deposit according to the printed catalog.

The 1869 subject catalog was the first full LC catalog published after the Smithsonian Deposit, but it does not include most of the Smithsonian titles. Thus, the first significant development in the growth of the Russian collections at LC, which occurred toward the end of the printed catalog era, is not truly documented in any of the printed catalogs except the very specific Smithsonian Deposit catalog from 1866, and not at all after that. ⁶¹ The 1869 subject catalog has 136 titles listed under the subject of Russia, but there are many more Russian-related titles scattered throughout the catalog. Each title could appear in more than one place in the catalog, but usually only did so under the dominant subject. For example, a book entitled Lives of Eminent Russian Prelates appears under the rubric Ecclesiastical Biography, but not under Russia. An approximate count from the 1869 catalog reveals the number of Russian-related titles to be 400, with the number of Russian serials as two, the number of books published in Russia as thirty-five and the Russian language books as eight. This shows only very slight growth in the Russian collection except for the books about Russia, which grew significantly, 152 titles added over the five year period. Some of this growth is deceptive, for analytics were included in the subject catalog and counted as entries. Subtracting thirty-two analytics shows that the Russian-related titles grew by 120 or, on average, twenty-four titles per year. A possible explanation for the higher than typical growth was LC's change in mindset during the 1860s, from being a congressional library to a national library, a development aided by the hiring of Ainsworth Rand Spofford, an energetic Librarian of Congress with a national vision, and his support for the growth of international exchanges and enhanced copyright laws. Previous Librarians of Congress had limited their actions in deference to the Library Committee, rather than taking a true leadership role regarding the Library. Another possible contributing factor was a new interest in Russia after the 1867 purchase of Alaska, resulting in more purchases of books about Russia.

In 1867, one year after the Smithsonian Deposit, Congress passed a resolution ordering that fifty copies of all U.S. documents be published and made available to SI for the exchange of foreign government documents. This marked the official beginning of LC's collection of Russian official publications, for the Russian government responded affirmatively to the request by SI to initiate such an exchange. ⁶² By the end of 1868 Russia had begun sending its documents to LC. ⁶³ Official publications consist of laws, statistics, government reports, parliamentary proceedings, and other published works funded by some government agency, including journals. Like the items from the Smithsonian Deposit and subsequent scholarly exchanges, the materials received from the official publications exchanges also did not appear in the 1869 subject catalog. ⁶⁴

From the beginning all foreign government materials received on exchange were designated for deposit in LC, but the exchange details were managed by SI. SI already had experience with managing exchanges and overseas shipping since 1849, whereas LC lacked such experience. ⁶⁵ In distinction from the government publications, the materials that came in via scholarly exchanges were designated for the Smithsonian Collection within LC. For decades the Smithsonian Collection was maintained as a separate entity in LC, but clearly after both exchanges had been in progress for a number of years, the distinctions faded. Memos between SI and LC discuss the mix-up of materials destined for the general LC collections or the Smithsonian Collection. ⁶⁶ This mixing of collections and the fact that SI managed both exchanges makes it somewhat more difficult to trace whether exchange titles received during the nineteenth century came via scholarly or official exchanges. Some volumes, usually the scholarly publications, bear the Smithsonian ink stamps on the title pages or binding impressions, whereas others, usually the governmental publications, do not. Another wrinkle is that even before the advent of the government publications exchanges in the late 1860s, SI acted as the agent for various U.S. government agencies, such as the U.S. Hydrographic Department, that wanted to receive the publications from and distribute theirs to foreign counterparts. Although these kinds of materials are official Russian government publications, technically they did not arrive at LC via the official publications exchange. Regardless of the venue of exchange, I assume that most Russian government titles somehow came via SI, for LC did not begin to actively manage its own exchanges until 1900.

The exchange of official publications initially suffered from the lack of reciprocity on the part of the U.S., for, although Congress authorized the printing of fifty copies of U.S. documents for exchange purposes, the Government Printing Office was slow to fulfill this demand. It took several years after the initiation of the official exchanges for the U.S. to begin complying, but the situation eventually reversed itself, with the U.S. sending far more titles than it received from its international partners. Russia was one of those countries which tapered off its shipments to SI in the coming decades. In a report from 1900 SI specifically mentioned Russia as one of the countries that was receiving far more than it was sending. ⁶⁷ Because of the growth of international exchanges worldwide, several congresses were held in Europe in the 1870s and 1880s to try to establish guidelines for conducting exchanges. These congresses recommended that each country establish an exchange bureau. Russia complied with this standard in 1880 by setting up the Russian Commission on International Exchanges at the Imperial Public Library, to be headed by Afanasii Fedorovich Bychkov (1818–1899). At this point SI appointed the Commission to be its official exchange agent for Russia in place of the private bookseller L. Watkins & Co. Attesting to the explosive growth of exchanges, the number of SI correspondents in the Russian Empire had grown from six in 1849 to 189 in 1885 to 1,839 in 1906, the final year under consideration in this article. These correspondents were scholarly or government institutions ranging from naval libraries in Arkhangel'sk and Kronshtadt, meteorological observatories in Ekaterinburg and Ekaterinoslav, to universities in Kazan' and Moscow, as well as many public libraries, museums and scholarly societies. Correspondents also included many individual scholars, but their names were not included in the correspondents' lists published by SI. In addition to supporting the dispatch of packages back and forth, the agreement with the Russians stipulated that the Russian government would produce an annual list of official publications including those of statistical committees and scholarly institutions. ⁶⁸ Presumably LC or SI could select from these lists, which were still available at least through the late 1880s, ⁶⁹ or at least gauge the effectiveness of the exchange in terms of quantity published versus quantity received. No estimates exist for the number of official or scholarly publications received from Russia, ⁷⁰ but all indications point to continual problems, at times exacerbated by wars such as the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). In 1886 Spencer Baird, Secretary of SI, wrote:

"In nearly all cases where a change [from a private party to an official exchange bureau] has been made, notably in France and Russia, there have been energetic complaints of inefficiency and carelessness; the officers of learned societies and the scientific men of those countries, stating that under the new arrangement they fail to receive what they know has been sent to them, and that their applications for information are always met with the most careless indifference." ⁷¹

In 1900 LC established a Division of Documents to manage its collection development of U.S. and foreign documents. At the same time LC began to take a more active role in its exchanges. SI continued as the shipping agent, but LC more frequently participated in correspondence and began to prepare want lists to fill in gaps in its holdings. In addition, the number of complete sets of U.S. documents printed for the purpose of international exchange increased in 1901 from the original fifty copies to sixty-two, reflecting a greater need and interest in obtaining foreign publications. In 1901 the Smithsonian Division within LC made a great effort to organize and bind its periodicals from scholarly institutions, identify gaps, and ask SI to obtain missing issues from exchange partners. This increased activity on the part of LC and its international exchanges came toward the end of our period of study and had an unknown impact in terms of numbers of items acquired on the development of the Russian collection before the Yudin purchase. However, based on physical examination of many Russian government periodicals in LC's collection, one can find some volumes from this period that bear Division of Documents stamps from the first few years of the twentieth century. This increased activity on the part of LC, with its likely concomitant increase in receipts from Russia, reflected the change in mindset at LC that ultimately led to the purchase of the Yudin Collection. This change was inaugurated by Librarian of Congress Spofford and carried out by Librarian Herbert Putnam (1861–1955), who served as Librarian from 1899 to 1939. LC was to become a national library with a universal research collection, with deep holdings of foreign language publications.

Some of the earliest government publications that arrived from Russia on the official exchange included Artilleriiskii zhurnal [Artillery Journal] and Oruzheinyi sbornik [Ordnance Magazine], both for 1870, and Sbornik statisticheskikh sviedienii o Kavkazie [Statistics on the Caucasus] from 1869.⁷² See Figure 15. Later exchange receipts included such diverse titles as Katalog biblioteki Statisticheskago kabineta Imperatorskago S.-Peterburgskago universiteta [Catalog of the Library of the Statistical Office of the Imperial St. Petersburg University] and Russkii torgovyi flot. Spisok sudov [Russian Merchant Marine. List of Vessels], among others. Some exchange receipts merited special mention in the Librarian's annual report. For example, in 1905 the Division of Documents reported a large "gift" of 191 volumes and fifty pamphlets from the Imperial Free Economic Society in St. Petersburg, an institution that had been participating in the exchanges with SI for many decades prior to 1905. ⁷³

In 1881 SI began to publish statistics on the number of parcels of exchange materials received by the International Exchange Service by country of receipt. Unfortunately, I was unable to find figures for the number of volumes or titles received from Russia via exchange, only parcels. Although one must bear in mind that not all parcels were destined for LC (some ended up at U.S. educational institutions), the growth of exchanges with Russia over several decades can be documented with these numbers. ⁷⁴ In a decade and a half the amount of material received from Russia had increased tenfold. See Table 3. International exchanges were the predominant method for the development of the Russian collections at LC during the nineteenth century. Although the titles received did not appear in any of the printed catalogs or supplements, a perusal of the union catalog List of Serial Publications of Foreign Governments 1815–1931, combined with subsequent examination of materials on the shelves, as well as examination of Russian items with LCCNs from 1901 to 1907, documents the growth of this part of the Russian collection, but with far more titles being received under the rubric of scholarly exchange than official exchange. ⁷⁵

Although there had been several U.S. copyright laws beginning in 1790, it was not until 1870 that LC truly benefitted from such a law. An example of an ineffective law was the copyright law passed on August 10, 1846 requiring that publishers deposit one copy each of their works with LC and SI. This was an attempt to increase LC's and the newly established Smithsonian's library holdings, but it brought only a trickle of U.S. publications into LC. These additions to LC began to appear in the printed supplements to the catalog with a notation of receipt via copyright, but even a casual observer can see that very few titles were deposited. Many of the items deposited were considered to have little research value at the time. Examples included "Sunday school texts, juveniles, indifferent prints, engravings, and other classes of current material least likely to serve immediate purposes of research." ⁷⁶ Also deposited were ephemera like product labels. This ineffective law was repealed in 1859. Although Copyright deposit seems so logical today, in the early to mid 1800s the Library Committee was skeptical, because it wanted LC to remain a congressional library with "useful" books hand-selected by its members. Acquisitions by copyright represented a lack of control, for it would add items to the collection in a sweeping, unselective manner.⁷⁷ In addition, collecting the complete publishing output and heritage of the U.S. was not yet a high priority, resulting in the promulgation of a series of ineffective copyright laws.

The 1870 law was a landmark piece of legislation for LC, for it not only provided for the deposit at LC of two copies of each published item printed in the U.S. but also supplied the critical legal factor of ensuring publishers' compliance, which had been largely absent from previous laws. The intent was also different regarding LC. This law "aimed to assemble a complete body of American literature not in cold storage but properly serviced for general use." ⁷⁸ The effects of the 1870 law were immediately apparent in the printed supplements. The supplements for 1869 and 1870 are approximately the same length, but the supplements for 1871 and 1872 are each almost 200 pages longer. The final supplement, issued in 1876, was shorter, but it covered only selected additions from the years 1873–1875. ⁷⁹ A subsequent plan to publish a full alphabetical catalog fell short, with only two volumes covering A-Cragin being issued in 1878–1880. The undertaking just became too unwieldy because of the amount of material being received and the cost. After that, printed catalogs were abandoned in favor of small, specialized bibliographies and finally a card catalog beginning in 1898. To fill in the gap of bibliographic coverage created by the lack of printed supplements and catalogs, from 1891 onward, LC issued a weekly catalog of items received via copyright.

For the period under study (1800–1906), most titles related to Russia that LC received via copyright were English-language publications issued in the U.S. Almost none were from the Russian-American community. If robust copyright and depository legislation had been in place for LC, American publications about Russia would have come in fairly automatically throughout the nineteenth century, but as it was, LC had to purchase such materials for many decades. One example is a book published in New York in 1854, Russia As It Is, by Polish political activist Count Adam Gurowski (1805–1866). LC purchased two copies from the Washington bookseller Franck Taylor (1811–1873) in 1854. They cost one dollar each. LC frequently purchased American publications from Taylor, who was the Library's American book agent from 1843 to 1863. ⁸⁰ The 1870 law improved the acquisitions situation dramatically in terms of the English-language titles published in the U.S. about Russia, but not in terms of Russian-American publications. That would have to wait for the growth of Russian-American publishing in the 20th century.

Russian-American book publishing began in 1868, one year after the U.S. purchased Alaska from Russia, with the publication in San Francisco of a Russian-American phrasebook by Agapius Honcharenko (1832–1916), but continued only very slowly until after the turn of the century. The first Russian periodical to appear in the United States was issued by the same publisher also in 1868. ⁸¹ According to the various LC printed catalogs and supplements up to 1876, no Russian-American publications were received by LC from any source. Those publications from this time in LC today were acquired at much later dates. I was able to identify only one Russian-American book that made it into the LC via copyright during the time under discussion, an English grammar published for Russian immigrants. ⁸² See Figure 16.

The paltry Russian-American receipts at LC for this time period are not surprising considering the character of the Russian immigration during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Most Russians who came to the United States prior to 1917 had received little formal education. It was not until after the 1917 revolution that large numbers of educated émigrés, who were more likely to read, write, and publish, arrived in the U.S. A glance at a bibliography of pre–1917 Russian-American publications reveals that most of the titles published from 1868 to 1906 were either primers or religious publications produced by the Orthodox Church in America. ⁸³ Although the bibliography is probably not comprehensive (it does not include the item depicted in Figure 16), it nevertheless documents a very small Russian-American publishing industry. During the period under study, only twenty-eight titles are listed, none of which were deposited at LC via copyright.

Purchases of Russian language materials or materials from Russia were few and far between during the period under study. Most purchases were for individual titles or just a small group at a time. One exception, the purchase of the Hattala Library en bloc, is discussed below. There is also no easy way to discover the smaller purchases, as catalogs ceased to be printed in the mid-1870s. As we have seen, before the mid–1870s, there were only a handful of Russian-language titles in LC, with the exception of what was held in the Smithsonian Deposit and what started to arrive via official publications exchange. The question is how to identify any Russian purchases between the 1870s and 1906. Serendipity has been the best method. For example, beginning around the turn of the nineteenth century, LC started to record accession numbers and years of accession on the verso of title pages of purchased materials. These accession numbers can be searched in the LC archives for purchase orders revealing from whom an item was received and the price. By examining older Russian books in the collections and their accession numbers, one may occasionally stumble across a purchase from before 1907; however the vast majority of the older Russian books have the Yudin accession number. One such serendipitous discovery was Correspondance diplomatique des ambassadeurs et ministres de Russie en France et de France en Russie avec leurs gouvernements de 1814 à 1830 [Diplomatic Correspondence of the Ambassadors and Ministers of Russia in France and of France in Russia with Their Governments from 1814 to 1830], published in St. Petersburg and purchased in 1902 from Emile Terquem (?–1909), a French bookseller. The purchase order for accession number 24507 shows that this title was the only Russian book among many French titles acquired at the same time. ⁸⁴ These serendipitous discoveries have shown that Russian books, when purchased during this time period, came from Western European booksellers, and not from Russian bookdealers.

Purchases tended to involve certain categories of Russian books, such as reference books or works of history, for at that time there was no attempt at comprehensive collecting of all subject areas such as exists today for Russian materials. In 1902, probably based on a sales catalog, LC ordered 161 Russian reference titles from the bookseller Brockhaus in Germany. Of the titles ordered, 108 were received. Examples included Dramaticheskii slovar' [Dramatic Dictionary], Opyt slovaria psevdonimov russkikh pisatelei [An Attempt at a Dictionary of Pseudonyms of Russian Writers], Bibliografiia zhelieznodorozhnago voprosa v Sibiri [Bibliography of the Railroad Question in Siberia], and several famous bibliographies by Mezhov and Lisovskii. ⁸⁵ The annual reports of the Librarian of Congress for 1903 and 1904 included select lists of purchases made by LC in those years, revealing that the only titles acquired by Russian authors were in French, German or English translations. ⁸⁶ The old pattern of Russian collecting essentially was still in place at the beginning of the twentieth century with the exception of exchange receipts. In 1900 LC was receiving several Russian newspapers (Russkie vedomosti [Russian Gazette], Novoe vremia [New Times], Journal de St. Pétersbourg [Newspaper of St. Petersburg]). ⁸⁷ I could not identify the source of acquisition, but they could have been purchases. An organized program for the development of the foreign newspaper collection at LC did not begin until 1901, but several years earlier money had been made available to begin subscriptions to important foreign newspapers. ⁸⁸ Although Librarian of Congress Spofford, a former newspaper editor, had pushed for the development of the American newspaper collection during his tenure, the new Librarian of Congress, John Russell Young (1840–1899), also a journalist as well as a diplomat before becoming the Librarian, promoted the development of the foreign newspaper collection when he held the post from 1897 to 1899. Young was noted for his "international outlook" and for encouraging the Library to acquire foreign publications systematically. ⁸⁹ In 1898 he asked U.S. diplomats and consuls to send to LC foreign newspapers and other materials from the countries to which they were posted, so it is possible that the three Russian newspapers mentioned above came via the State Department, and not via subscription. He also greatly improved future acquisitions by establishing an Order Department in 1898 to regularize and track purchases.

A note on LC personnel is necessary. The first LC staff member who had any Slavic language expertise was Louis C. Solyom (1836–1913), a Hungarian immigrant from Galicia. Solyom worked in the Catalog Division at LC from 1867 to 1913. ⁹⁰ He apparently was brought to LC because of his Slavic-language skills which were in demand after 1867, most likely because of the Russian and other Slavic titles being added to the collections via the Smithsonian Deposit and the international documents exchanges. Although his role in the development of the Slavic collections is not documented (he is remembered for his work on the Hungarian, Turkish, and Asian collections), he cataloged Russian materials and advised on purchases. LC was still a rather small library compared to today, with only twelve employees in 1870, forty-three in 1897, but 289 by 1902. Perhaps the most renowned Slavic staff member in LC's history, Alexis Babine (1866–1930), was employed in 1902, during a hiring program instituted by Herbert Putnam, who was looking for staff with higher levels of education and foreign-language expertise as part of his drive to make LC a great national and research library. ⁹¹ The increase in employees reflected not only Putnam's vision for LC, but the need to staff the spacious new LC building that opened in 1897. When he came to LC, Babine was a professional librarian with experience in other U.S. libraries. His most notable achievement for LC was the negotiation and purchase of the Yudin Collection from 1903 to 1906, but besides that, he certainly would have made some recommendations for purchases of Slavic materials for LC. In fact, he served as the middleman on behalf of LC regarding the purchase of the Hattala Library discussed below. ⁹² Unsurprisingly, the presence of staff who knew Russian coincided with the periods of development of the Russian collection beginning in the late 1860s.

In 1904 LC purchased approximately 1,500 volumes on Slavic linguistics and philology. The collection was the personal library of Martin Hattala (1821–1903), a distinguished early Slavic linguist, who was also a Catholic priest. Hattala was a Slovak from Trstená, a small town in what was Austro-Hungary, now in Slovakia. ⁹³ From 1854 to 1891 he taught Slavic philology at the Philosophical Faculty at Charles University in Prague. He also was a member of the scholarly academies in Prague, St. Petersburg, Zagreb, and Rome. He is remembered for his comparative grammar of Czech and Slovak, his grammar of Slovak, and especially for his role in codifying the Slovak literary language.

The purchase was significant, for it brought many classic Slavic philological works to LC at a time when the Slavic collections were still very small. In the LC archives there is neither a list of titles nor any correspondence related to the acquisition, except for the purchase order and a brief description in the Librarian's annual report for 1904. The purchase order shows that LC paid 3,100 Austrian crowns to Mr. Urbain J. Ledoux (1874–1941), U.S. Consul in Prague, who facilitated the purchase for LC along with Alexis Babine. ⁹⁴ Hattala died on December 11, 1903 and his library was already in LC by the end of June 1904, so clearly no time was lost in the negotiations. The purchase order also shows that Herbert Putnam personally approved the order. According to the annual report, the Hattala purchase violated LC's practice of avoiding en bloc purchases, but this one was allowed because of the weakness of LC's holdings in the area of Slavic philology and a presumed lack of duplication. It also was a reflection of the new Putnam era at LC, during which collection policies regarding the acquisition of foreign-language materials would definitively change. From the annual report:

"Professor Hattala had been collecting this library for over forty years. As a member of two foremost Slavic academies he received many of their publications. His collection also contains philological and literary publications of other Slavic academies and a large number of pamphlets and separates which could be brought together only by a man of Hattala's scholarly attainments and reputation among the Slavic scholars of Europe." ⁹⁵

In addition to books and pamphlets, Hattala's collection contained runs of many important Slavic academy serials. From Russia these serials were the Zapiski Imperatorskoi akademii nauk [Transactions of the Imperial Academy of Sciences] and the Sbornik Otdieleniia russkago iazyka i slovesnosti Imperatorskoi akademii nauk [Collection of the Section of Russian Language and Literature of the Imperial Academy of Sciences]. Volume Sixty-Six of the latter serial has on its cover page a mailing label addressed to Hattala in Prague. See Figure 17.

Despite the lack of a list, some of the monographic titles have been identified by accession number and provenance notes added to their bibliographic records in the LC online catalog. As of October 9, 2012, in the online catalog there were eighty-five titles with such notes, all related to Czech and Slovak language and literature. Hattala Library volumes contain an accession number written on the verso of the title page — 53839 '04. By scanning the shelves of the Slavic language and literature class of PG and using this accession number, I was able to identify many other non-Czech and non-Slovak titles that were part of the Hattala collection. Only nine Russian monographs were located, but one must assume that in a 1,500 volume collection of works about Slavic philology, there must have been more than nine in Russian. Some of the Russian items are discussed below.

Hattala owned several works by the Russian linguist Fedor Ivanovich Buslaev (1818–1897). One example is his O prepodavanii otechestvennago iazyka [On the Teaching of the Native Language] from 1867, which has on the title page an inscription from Buslaev in 1867 to Hattala. Buslaev must have sent Hattala a copy upon its publication. See Figures 18 and 19 for the inscription and the verso of the title page with the Hattala accession number. Another Buslaev work in the Hattala Library was the fourth edition of his Istoricheskaia grammatika russkago iazyka. Etimologiia [Historical Grammar of the Russian language. Etymology] from 1875. Although this book does not have a personal inscription, it is a good example of another phenomenon, that is, LCs approach to its Russian collections in the early part of the twentieth century. After the purchase of the Yudin Collection in 1906, LC staff appear to have made the decision to add newly-acquired Russian books to the Yudin Collection, regardless of origin of acquisition. This Buslaev volume with the Hattala accession number ended up incorrectly affixed with an LC-produced Yudin bookplate, not one of Yudin's personal bookplates. The first edition of Buslaev's historical grammar from 1858 has Hattala's name written on the title page in his very distinctive handwriting and did not receive a Yudin Collection bookplate. See Figure 20. ⁹⁶

Another work by a noted Russian linguist in the Hattala Library was Pervobytnye slaviane v ikh iazykie, bytie i poniatiiakh po dannym leksikal'nym [Ancient Slavs in Their Language, Daily Life and Ideas According to Lexical Data] by Anton Semenovich Budilovich (1846–1908) and published in 1878. Hattala wrote a few notes in Czech on the inside cover, but they have been obscured due to trimming by the bindery. Both Buslaev and Budilovich worked in the field of old Slavic written monuments and historical grammar, so it is no surprise to find their titles represented in Hattala's library. In fact, Hattala even wrote reviews of Buslaev's publications. ⁹⁷

Another Russian title owned by Hattala is Istoriia slavianskago perevoda simvolov viery [The History of the Slavic Translation of Symbols of Faith], written by Avgust Matveevich Gezen (1817–1892) and published in 1884 by the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. Like the work mentioned above, this volume also has a Yudin plate incorrectly assigned to it, but was identified as part of the Hattala acquisition due to the accession number. Hattala's copy of Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Kotliarevskii's (1837–1881) Drevniaia russkaia pismennost'. Opyt bibliologicheskago izlozheniia istorii eia izucheniia [Ancient Russian Literature. An Attempt at Bibliological Exposition of the History of Its Study] from 1881 is notable for two reasons — on the front cover it has an inscription from the author to Hattala and on the inside front cover it has a note in Czech in Hattala's hand about Vatroslav Jagic's (1838–1923) opinion of Kotliarevskii's book. Jagic both praised and criticized the Russian perspective expressed in the work. See Figure 21.

Hattala also owned volumes of the collected works of the great scientist Mikhail Vasil'evich Lomonosov (1711–1765), a copy of Nestor Memnonovich Petrovskii's (1875–1921) O sochineniiakh Petra Gektorovicha [On the Works of Petar Gektorovich], a Czech translation of the Igor Tale, as well as Aleksei Evgen'evich Smirnov's (1842–1905) 1877 book about the Igor Tale. ⁹⁸ All of these titles make sense for inclusion in the library of a professor who was interested in the development of Slavic literatures and literary languages. Hattala had a particular interest in the Igor Tale, for he published his own translation of it with commentary in 1858. ⁹⁹

Like many named collections purchased by LC, the Hattala Library was dispersed throughout the Library by subject without special bookplates. Regarding Slavic materials, the Yudin Collection purchased in 1906 is the largest example of the dispersal of a collection, albeit some of its materials did receive special bookplates. Like the materials from the Yudin Collection, if duplicates were discovered at some later point, the volumes from the named collection could have been deaccessioned as "surplus duplicates" from LC. One glaring example of deaccessioning from the Hattala Library is an 1880 pamphlet in Russian from Odessa about Hattala himself. This booklet was given as part of an exchange to the University of Wisconsin Library in November, 1951. Unfortunately, the second copy of the work that LC retained is now lost. ¹⁰⁰

In 1901 the Library of Congress estimated its Russian-area holdings, excluding those from the Smithsonian Deposit, at 569, The annual report noted that the Russia collection "[has] few of the original authorities, and is weak in modern descriptive works. On the history of Russia and on the Crimean war [there are] only a few of the principal authorities." ¹⁰¹ No discussion was provided of how and what was counted, in fact, there were many caveats issued about the estimates. Based on the description, it seems as if the collection of Russian official publications also was not included in the estimate. The count must have included only works about Russia regardless of language, with only a very few actually in Russian. In 1869 there were 400 Russian-related books, so an increase of 169 over three decades would not seem amiss, especially in light of the dramatic increase in copyright receipts in those same decades. The mention of the Crimean War is also another clue as to what was counted. In the printed catalogs and supplements, there were a number of Russian-related books on Crimea in English, but no Russian-language titles. As we have seen, Russian-language materials only trickled into LC until the Smithsonian Deposit of scientific and scholarly works in 1866 and the development of international exchanges for governmental publications beginning in 1867, but the accumulations from both of these sources were for the most part not recorded. The estimate most likely was made from the card catalog (established in 1898, only three years before the 1901 survey) by counting titles with subject headings related to Russia. Thus not even all works by Russian authors in Western languages would have made it into the count. Examples of this could be Orlov's book on Italian painting mentioned above, or many of the geographical titles that had Russian authors but not Russian content. Although Russian governmental publications received on exchange were integrated into the general collections, unlike the Smithsonian collection, we have to assume that they were not yet included in the card catalog or the 1901 estimate. Otherwise the numbers do not make sense. Given the difficulties mentioned above in identifying nineteenth century exchange receipts, I will not venture an estimate on the size of the Russian language collections before 1907.

As we have seen, copyright deposit was not a factor in the growth of the Russian collections during the time under study, with the exception of materials written in English about Russia and published in the United States. Russian did not emerge as an important ethnic publishing language in the U.S. until after 1917. Purchases were more of a factor in the development of the collection, but on a very small scale, with individual selection of titles as opposed to purchases of large collections, the Hattala Library being the first to break the pattern. LC's psychological and physical transformation from a congressional library to a national library was the necessary precondition for an interest in developing extensive collections of foreign publications. This process began in the mid nineteenth century and picked up speed after Spofford became Librarian of Congress in 1864, for he pushed for the Smithsonian Deposit, better copyright laws, a separate building for LC, and the development of international exchanges. With these programs in place, LC could then concentrate its purchases on special materials and filling the enormous gaps in the foreign collections. At the close of the century LC evaluated its collection strengths and weaknesses, with the foreign collections considered to be a considerable weakness. The annual report for 1897 reported, "In foreign literature and vernacular works much remains to be done." ¹⁰² And in 1898 the Librarian wrote,

"The Library would be justified in spending as much money on continental literature as upon that of Great Britain. This is the home of many races coming and still to come, who are welcomed with undiminished hospitality to our ultimate citizenship. A national library can have for them no feature of more enduring interest than that which tells them of their history, literature, and ancestry." ¹⁰³

Russia was mentioned in both of these reports as one of the places on which LC needed to focus. The first 106 years of book collecting at LC, with its lack of a true acquisitions policy, resulted in a Russian collection that was both diffuse in subject and yet strangely specialized by type of publication, encompassing only books in translation or Western languages about Russia or Russian-language titles from scholarly or governmental institutions. With this history as a backdrop, the purchase of the 80,000 volume Yudin Collection in 1906 can be seen as a truly remarkable phenomenon, but one which had to wait for the right conditions to emerge, namely a new twentieth-century Librarian of Congress, Herbert Putnam. Putnam had a vision of greatness for LC and ideas for implementing such change, including establishing a Division of Documents, a new classification scheme, hiring of more educated staff and professionally trained librarians, and taking an active role in purchases for the collection, such as overseeing the Yudin acquisition. The Yudin purchase completely upended tradition and parochial practice and set the stage for the tremendous growth of the LC international collections that began in the early part of the twentieth century, and especially for the growth of the Russian collections, which skyrocketed after World War II.

The author would like to express her gratitude to the following people for their help in reviewing the text: Barbara Dash, Harold Leich, Michael Neubert, Kenneth Nyirady, and Susan N. Smith. A special note of thanks is due to Anne Simonnet for her translation of a difficult French passage.

Address correspondence to Angela Cannon, MA, MLS, Reference Specialist for Russian and South Slavic, the Library of Congress, European Division, Washington, DC 20540–4830, USA. E-mail: [email protected].

1. David Kraus's unpublished paper "The Development of the Russian Collections at the Library of Congress before World War II" is available in this guide to the Russian collection. Back to text
2. E. G. Pivovarov, Formirovanie kollektsii slavianskikh materialov Biblioteki Kongressa SShA (1800–1933 gg) [The Formation of the Slavic Collections at the Library of Congress, USA (1800–1933)] (Sankt-Peterburg: Izd-vo SPbII RAN "Nestor-Istoriia," 2005). Back to text
3. Edward Kasinec, "Slavianskie izdaniia v amerikanskikh kollektsiiakh [Slavic Publications in American Collections]," Novyi zhurnal [New Review] no.231, (2003): 284–293. Back to text
4. Carl Ostrowski discusses the concept of useful books versus books that were considered luxuries in the first two chapters of his Books, Maps, and Politics: A Cultural History of the Library of Congress, 1783–1861 (Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, 2004). Back to text
5. Details about the first purchase are from The First Booklist of the Library of Congress. A Facsimile (Washington: Library of Congress, 1981), and John Y. Cole, For Congress and the Nation: A Chronological History of the Library of Congress (Washington: Library of Congress, 1978). Throughout this article, when deciding which books to include in the category of "books concerning Russia," the author followed the borders of current day Russia, not those of the Former Soviet Union or the Russian Empire, unless the titles indicated Russia or a Russian author was involved. Thus, works about Poland or by Poles were not included unless Russia is mentioned in the title. The same holds true for former Soviet republics such as Armenia or Georgia. The definition of "Russian authors" was also at times a quandary. For example, some authors discussed may not be ethnic Russians, but worked in Russia. Others may have had some ties to Russia, but the body of their work was written in German and published outside of the Russian Empire. Ultimately, this determination is highly subjective. For instance, I counted a book about Cossacks from Ukraine because of the importance of Cossacks in Russian history. Regardless, even if all Slavic related titles and authors had been counted during the various sections of this article, they would still be insignificant in number. Back to text
6. William Dawson Johnston, History of the Library of Congress. Volume 1, 1800–1864 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904): 36. Back to text
7. Catalogs mentioned in this discussion are: Supplemental Catalogue of Books, Maps, and Charts, Belonging to the Library of the Two Houses of Congress, (Washington City: Printed by James D. Westcott, October, 1803); Catalogue of Books, Maps, and Charts, Belonging to the Library of the Two Houses of Congress ([Washington], 1804); The 1812 Catalogue of the Library of Congress. A Facsimile (Washington: Library of Congress, 1982). Back to text
8. A note on the spelling of names is needed due to the different renderings of various Slavic names before Romanization schema were established. In this article the names in the text and the notes appear as listed in the LC catalog, not necessarily as they appear in the original publications. For example, Pleshcheev is the LC Romanization, whereas on the title page it of the 1792 publication it appeared as Pleschééf. If a name appears in the title of a work, it is unchanged from the title. Back to text
9. The complete list of Russian-related books listed in the 1812 catalog follows in the order in which they appear in the catalog: Jean Benoît Scherer, Annales de la Petit-Russie; ou Histoire des Cosaques-Saporogues et des Cosaques de l'Ukraine, ou de la Petite-Russie [Annals of Little Russia; or History of the Zaporozhian Cossacks and the Cossacks of the Ukraine, or of Little Russia] (Paris : Cuchet, 1788); Henry Card The History of the Revolutions of Russia, to the Accession of Catharine the First, 2nd ed. (London: T.N. Longmans and O. Rees, 1804); Jacques Lacombe, Abrégé chronologique de l'histoire du nord [Brief Chronology of the History of the North] (Paris: J.-T. Herissant, 1762); Sergei Ivanovich Pleshcheev, Survey of the Russian Empire, according to Its Present Newly Regulated State, Divided into Different Governments 3rd ed. (Dublin: J. Moore, 1792); Sergei Ivanovich Pleshcheev, Survey of the Russian Empire, according to Its Present Newly Regulated State, Divided into Different Governments 3rd ed. (London: J. Debrett, 1792); Frederic Anthing, History of the Campaigns of Prince Alexander Suworow Rymnikski, Field-Marshall-General in the Service of His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor of all the Russias (New York: Printed by G. and R. Waite, for Wm. Cobbett, 1800); William Tooke, History of Russia, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rurik, to the Accession of Catharine the Second (London: T.N. Longman and O. Rees, 1800); Jean-Henri Castéra, The Life of Catharine II, Empress of All the Russias: with an Elegant Portrait of the Tzarina, and a correct Map of the Russian Empire (Philadelphia: Published by William Fry, no. 36, Chestnut Street, 1802); William Coxe, Account of the Russian Discoveries between Asia and America (London: Printed by J. Nichols, for T. Cadell, 1780); William Coxe, Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark, Interspersed with Historical Relations and Political Inquiries (Dublin: Printed for S. Price, 1784); Maurice Auguste Benyowsky, Memoirs and Travels of Mauritius Augustus, Count de Benyowsky . . . Consisting of His Military Operations in Poland, His Exile into Kamchatka, His Escape, and Voyage from That Peninsula through the Northern Pacific Ocean (London: G.G.J. & J. Robinson, 1790); Johann Christian von Struve, Travels in the Crimea: a History of the Embassy from Petersburg to Constantinople in 1793 (London: Printed for G. and J. Robinson, 1802); Jean Benoît Scherer, Histoire raisonnée du commerce de la Russie [Descriptive History of Commerce in Russia] (Paris: Cuchet, 1788); Joshua Jepson Oddy, European Commerce, Shewing New and Secure Channels of Trade with the Continent of Europe: Detailing the Produce, Manufactures, and Commerce, of Russia, Prussia . . . (Philadelphia: J. Humphreys, 1807).Back to text
10. An Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of the United States for the Year 1810 (Washington.: A. & G. Way, printers 1812). Back to text
11. The details on the Jefferson purchase come from three sources: John Y. Cole, For Congress and the Nation: A Chronological History of the Library of Congress (Washington: Library of Congress, 1978); the historical sketch printed in the Report of the Librarian of Congress for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1901 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1901); and Johnston, History of the Library of Congress. The Jefferson quote is found on p. 71 of Johnston. Back to text
12. Johnston, History of the Library of Congress, 86. Back to text
13. E. Millicent Sowerby, ed., Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, (Washington: The Library of Congress, 1952–59). 5 vols. The following is a list of all the Russian-related titles from the Jefferson Library. Peter Simon Pallas, Linguarum totius Orbis Vocabularia comparativa [Comparative Dictionary of Languages of All the World] (Petropoli: Typis Iohannis Caroli Schnoor, 1786, 1789). 2 volumes; Peter Simon Pallas, Sravnitel'nyi slovar' vsiekh iazykov i nariechii, po azbuchnomu poriadku raspolozhenii [Comparative Dictionary of All Languages and Dialects, in Alphabetical Arrangement] (V Sankt-Peterburge, 1790, 1791). 4 volumes; Nikolai Rumiantsev, Gosudarstvennaia torgovlia 1802 goda v raznykh eia vidakh [State Trade in 1802 in Its Various Forms] (V Sankt-Peterburgie: Pri Imperatorskoi Tipografii, 1802–1804). 3 volumes; Jan Potocki, Histoire ancienne du Gouvernement de Chèrson, pour servir de suite à l'histoire primitive des peuples de la Russie [Ancient History of the Government of Kherson, to Serve as an Early History of the Peoples of Russia], (St. Pétersbourg: Imprime à l'Academie Imperiale des Sciences, 1804). 3 volumes; Jan Potocki, Chronologie de Deux Premiers Livres de Manethon [Chronology of the First Two Books of Manetho] (A St. Petersbourg : De l'Imprimerie de F. Drechsler, 1805); Jan Potocki, Principes de Chronologie, pour les Temps Antérieurs aux Olympiades [Beginnings of a Chronology, from the Early Times to the Olympiads] (A St. Petersbourg : De l'Imprimerie d'Alexandre Pluchart et Comp., 1810); Guy Miège, La Relation de trois Ambassades de Monseigneur le comte de Carlisle, de la part du Serenissime Tres-puissant Prince Charles II. Roy de la Grande Bretagne, vers leurs Serenissimes Majestés Alexey Michailovitz Czar & Grand Duc de Moscovie, Charles Roy de Suede, & Frederic III. Roy de Dannemarc & de Norvege, commencées en l'an 1663 & finies sur la fin de l'an 1664 [The Account of the Three Embassies of His Grace Earl of Carlisle, on behalf of His Highness Charles II, King of Great Britain, to their Highnesses Alexei Mikhailovich, Czar and Grand Duke of Muscovy, King Charles of Sweden, and Frederick III, King of Denmark and Norway, Beginning in the Year 1663 and Ending in the Year 1664] (Sur l'imprimé à Amsterdam, a Rouen: chez L. Maurry, 1670); Convention between His Britannick Majesty, and the Emperor of Russia (London: printed by. A. Strahan, 1801). Bound with six other pamphlets under the heading European Pamplets 1801–4; Charles François Philibert Masson, Mémoires secrets sur la Russie, et particulièrement sur la fin du règne de Catherine II et le commencement de celui de Paul I [Secret Reports on Russia, and in Particular on the End of the Reign of Catherine II and the Beginning of That of Paul I], (Amsterdam, 1800). 2 volumes; Jean Henri Castéra, Histoire de Catherine II, Impératrice de Russie [History of Catherine II, Empress of Russia] (Paris : chez F. Buisson, 1800). 3 volumes; William Tooke, The Life of Catharine II, Empress of All the Russias (Philadelphia: Published by William Fry. H. Maxwell, Printer, 1802). 2 volumes; Nicolas Jean Hugon de Bassville, Précis Historique sur la Vie et les Exploits de François Le Fort, Citoyen de Genève, Général & Grand-Admiral de Russie, Président de tous les Conseils de Pierre-Le-Grand, Empereur de Moskovie [Historical Summary of the Life and Achievments of François Le Fort, Citizen of Geneva, General and Grand-Admiral of Russia, President of the Council of Peter the Great, Emperor of Muscovy] (A Lausanne: chez Grasset et Comp., 1786); Claude-Carloman de Rulhière, Histoire de l'Anarchie de Pologne, et du Démembrement de cette République, par. Cl. Rulhière. Suivie des Anecdotes sur la révolution de Russie, en 1762, par le même auteur [History of the Anarchy of Poland, and the Dissolution of the Republic, by. Cl. Rulhière. With Anecdotes on the Revolution in Russia in 1762, by the same author] (Paris: Desenne, 1807). 4 volumes; Constantin François Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney, Considerations sur la Guerre actuelle des Turcs [Reflections on the Current War with the Turks] (A Londres, 1788); Histoire des Decouvertes faites par divers savans Voyageurs dans plusiers contrées de la Russie & de la Perse [History of the Discoveries Made by Various Experienced Travellers to Several Regions of Russia and Persia] (A Berne et Lausanne, 1781–84). 4 volumes; Gerhard Friedrich Müller, Voyages et Découvertes faites par les Russes le long des côtes de la Mer Glaciale & sur l'Océan Oriental, tant vers le Japon que vers l'Amérique [Voyages and Discoveries Made by the Russians Along the Coasts of the Arctic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, as well as on the Way to Japan and America] (A Amsterdam : chez Marc Michel Rey, 1766); Adam Olearius, Relation dv Voyage d'Adam Olearivs en Moscovie, Tartarie, et Perse [An Account of the Journey of Adam Olearius to Muscovy, Tartary, and Persia] (A Paris : chez Iean dv Pvis, 1666). 2 volumes; John Augustus Atkinson, and James Walker, A Picturesque Representation of the Manners, Customs, and Amusements of the Russians, in One Hundred Coloured Plates (London: Printed by W. Bulmer and co., 1803–04). 3 volumes; Joseph Marshall, Travels through Holland, Flanders, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Lapland, Russia, The Ukraine, and Poland, in the Years 1768, 1769, and 1770 (London: Printed for J. Almon, 1773). 3 volumes; Serious Enquiries into the Motives of Our Present Armament against Russia (London: J. Debrett, 1791). Back to text
14. Nikolai Rumiantsev, Gosudarstvennaia torgovlia 1802 goda v raznykh eia vidakh [State Trade in 1802 in Its Various Forms] (V Sankt-Peterburgie: Pri Imperatorskoi Tipografii, 1802–1804). 3 volumes. Back to text
15. Dedication translated by Anne Simonnet. Back to text
16. Sowerby, Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, 61–62. Back to text
17. Sowerby, Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, 3. Back to text
18. The catalogs and supplements consulted for this section include: A Supplement to the Catalogue of the Library of Congress (Washington: Printed by Davis & Force (Franklin's Head), 1825); A Supplement to the Catalogue of the Library of Congress (Washington: Printed by Peter Force, 1827); Catalogue of the Library of Congress. December 1830 (Washington: Printed by Duff Green, 1830); Catalogue of the Library of Congress in the Capitol of the United States of America, December 1839 (City of Washington: Printed by Order of Congress, 1840); [Catalogue of the Library of Congress, June 30, 1849] (Washington, 1849) [no title page]. Back to text
19. Johnston, History of the Library of Congress, 162. Back to text
20. Xavier de Maistre, Russian Tales (Philadelphia: H.C. Carey and I. Lea, 1826); [Robert Dyer], The Story of a Wanderer; Founded upon His Recollections of Incidents in Russian and Cossack Scenes (London: Knight, 1826). Back to text
21. Otto von Kotzebue, Voyage of Discovery, into the South Sea and Beering's Straits, for the Purpose of Exploring a North-east Passage, Undertaken in the Years 1815–1818, at the Expense of His Highness the Chancellor of the Empire, Count Romanzoff, in the Ship Rurick, under the Command of the Lieutenant in the Russian Imperial Navy, O. Von Kotzebue (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1821). The citation for the original publication in Russian is Otto von Kotzebue, Puteshestvie v IUzhnyi okean i v Beringov proliv dlia ot"iskaniia sievero-vostochnago morskago prokhoda, predpriniatoe v 1815, 1816, 1817 i 1818 godakh izhdiveniem Nikolaia Petrovicha Rumiantsova, na korablie Riurikie (Sankpeterburg: V tip. N. Grecha, 1821–1823). Back to text
22. Ivan Fedorovich Kruzenshtern, Atlas de l'Ocean Pacifique [Atlas of the Pacific Ocean] (St. Pétersbourg: Publié par ordre de Sa Majesté impériale, 1824); Ivan Fedorovich Kruzenshtern, Recueil de mémoires hydrographiques (St. Pétersbourg: Impr. du Dèpartemente de l'instruction publique, 1824); G. H. von Langsdorff, Voyages and Travels in Various Parts of the World, during the Years 1803, 1804, 1805, 1806, and 1807 (London, H. Colburn, 1813–1814). 2 volumes; Vasilii Mikhailovich Golovnin, Narrative of My Captivity in Japan, during the Years 1811, 1812 & 1813 (London: Printed for H. Colburn, 1818). 2 volumes. Back to text
23. Ivan Fedorovich Kruzenshtern, Reise um die Welt, in den jahren 1803, 1804, 1805, und 1806 [Voyage around the World in the Years 1803, 1804, and 1806] (St. Petersburg: Gedruckt in der Schnoorschen Buchdruckerey, 1810–1812); Ivan Fedorovich Kruzenshtern, Voyage round the World in the years 1803, 1804, 1805, & 1806, by Order of His Imperial Majesty Alexander the First, on Board the Ships Nadeshda and Neva, under the Command of Captain A.J. von Krusenstern (London, Printed by C. Roworth for J. Murray, 1813); Iurii Fedorovich Lisianskii, A Voyage round the World, in the Years 1803, 4, 5, & 6; Performed, by Order of His Imperial Majesty Alexander the First, Emperor of Russia, in the Ship Neva (London, Printed for J. Booth, 1814); Grigorii Vladimirovich Orlov, Mémoires historiques, politiques et littéraires sur le royaume de Naples [Historical, Political and Literary Reports on the Kingdom of Naples] (Paris: Treuttel & Wortz, 1825). 5 volumes; Peter Simon Pallas, Travels through the Southern Provinces of the Russian Empire, in the Years 1793 and 1794 (London: Stockdale, 1812); Peter Simon Pallas, Physicalische Reise durch verschiedene Provinzen des Russischen Reichs im 1768 und 1769sten Jahre [Journey through Various Provinces of the Russian Empire in the Years 1768 and 1769] (St. Petersburg: Kayserliche Acad. der Wissenschaften, 1771); Moritz von Kotzebue, Narrative of a Journey into Persia, in the Suite of the Imperial Russian Embassy, in the Year 1817 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1819); Moritz von Kotzebue, Reise nach Persien mit der russisch-kaiserlichen Gesandtschaft im Jahre 1817 [Journey into Persia, with the Imperial Russian Embassy, in the Year 1817] (Weimar: Hoffmann, 1819). Back to text
24. Nikolai Karamzin, Histoire de l'Empire de Russie [History of the Russian Empire] (Paris: Impr. De A. Belin, 1819–26). 11 volumes; Ivan Krylov, Fables russes [Russian Fables] (Paris: Bossange, 1825). 2 volumes. Back to text
25. Ostrowski, Books, Maps, and Politics, 19, 69–70. Back to text
26. Iulii Gagemeister, Report on the Commerce of the Ports of New Russia, Moldavia, and Wallachia (London: E. Wilson, 1836); Egor Fedorovich Timkovskii, Travels of the Russian Mission through Mongolia to China (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1827); Otto von Kotzebue, New Voyage round the World, in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26 (London, H. Colburn & R. Bentley, 1830). 2 volumes; Ivan Fedorovich Kruzenshtern, Planches [Plates] (St. Petersburg, 1813); Peter Simon Pallas, Voyages du professeur Pallas, dans plusieurs provinces de l'empire de Russie et dans l'Asie septentrionale [Journey of Professor Pallas, through Some of the Provinces of the Russian Empire and Northern Asia] (Paris, Maradan, 1794). 8 volumes. Back to text
27. Commentarii Academiae scientiarum imperialis Petropolitanae [Commentaries of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg] (Petropolis, Typis Academiae, 1728–1751); Novi commentarii Academiae Scientiarum Imperialis Petropolitanae [New Commentaries of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg] (Petropolis : Typis Academiae Scientiarum, 1750–1776); Mémoires de l'Académie Impériale des Sciences de St. Pétersbourg [Reports of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg] (St. Petersbourg Impr. de l'Academie, 5.Sér. 1.1803/06(1809) – 11.1822(1830). Back to text
28. Nikolai Vladimirovich Khanykov, Bokhara; Its Amir and Its People (London, J. Madden, 1845). Back to text
29. LC Archives. Library in the Capitol. Invoice Book 1841–1862. Back to text
30. LC Archives. Library in the Capitol. Invoice Book 1841–1862. Back to text
31. Ekaterina Romanova Dashkova, Memoirs of the Princess Daschkaw, Lady of Honour to Catherine II (London: H. Colburn, 1840). 2 volumes; Egor Fedorovich Timkovskii, Voyage à Péking, à travers la Mongolie, en 1820 et 1821 [Journey to Peking and across Mongolia in 1820 and 1821] (Paris: Dondey-Dupré père et fils, 1827). 2 volumes + atlas (Two copies of this work and its accompanying atlas were added. The 1848 supplement claimed this title and its atlas were received on exchange from M. Vattemare. One set was probably purchased while the other was from exchange.); Grigorii Vladimirovich Orlov, Essai sur l'histoire de la peinture en Italie depuis les temps les plus anciens jusqu'a nos jours [Essay on the History of Painting in Italy from Ancient Times up to Our Day] (Paris: Galerie de Bossange père, 1823). 2 volumes; Ivan Aleksandrovich Gul'ianov, Archéologie égyptienne [Egyptian Archaeology] (Leipsic: J.A. Barth, 1839). 3 volumes; Adolf Theodor von Kupffer, Tables psychrométriques et barométriques à l'usage des observatoires météorologiques de l'empire de Russie [Psychometric and Barometric Tables Compiled for Use in Meteorological Observatories in the Russian Empire] (St. Pétersbourg , 1841); Annuaire du Journal des mines de Russie [Yearbook of the Journal of Mines in Russia] (Saint Pétersbourg: Paris: Imprimerie de Fain et Thunot, 1835–1842). 9 volumes; Vikentii Stanislavovich Pel'chinskii, Système de législation, d'administration et de politique de la Russie en 1844 [The System of Legislation, Administration and Politics of Russia in 1844] (Paris. Comptoir des imprimeurs-unis, 1845); Ivan Golovin, Russia under the Autocrat, Nicholas the First (London, H. Colburn, 1846). 2 volumes; John Bowring, Specimens of the Russian Poets (London: Printed by R. and A. Taylor, 1821–1823). 2 volumes; Emile Dupré de Saint-Maure, Anthologie russe: suivie de poésies originales [Russian Anthology, with Poems] (Paris: Chez C.J. Trouvé, imprimeur-libraire ..., 1823). Back to text
32. Johnston, History of the Library of Congress, 223–224. Back to text
33. Dan Lacy, "The Library of Congress: A Sesquicentenary Review. I. The Development of the Collections," The Library Quarterly 20, no. 3 (1950): 157. Lacy (1914–2001) was a deputy chief assistant Librarian at the Library of Congress from 1950–1951. Back to text
34. Johnston, History of the Library of Congress, 227–228. The quote has been attributed to Francis Lieber (1800–1872), an American educator. Back to text
35. Johnston, History of the Library of Congress, 230, 239. Back to text
36. Johnston, History of the Library of Congress, 239. Back to text
37. The most detailed list of subjects not consumed by the fire was in David C. Mearns, The Story Up to Now: The Library of Congress, 1800–1946 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1947): 64. Back to text
38. Mearns, The Story Up to Now, 85. Back to text
39. The catalog supplements employed for the discussion in this section are: Supplement to the Catalogue of the Library of Congress, December 1850 ([Washington: 1851]); Supplement to the Catalogue of the Library of Congress, December 1851 ([Washington: 1852]); Additions Made to the Library of Congress since the First Day of December, 1851. November 1, 1852 (Washington: Printed by Lemuel Towers, 1852); Additions Made to the Library of Congress since the First Day of November, 1852. November 1, 1853 (Washington: Printed by Lemuel Towers, 1853); Additions Made to the Library of Congress since the First Day of November, 1860. December 1, 1861 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1862); Catalogue of the Library of Congress (Washington: Lemuel Towers, printer, 1861); Catalogue of Additions Made to the Library of Congress from December 1, 1864, to December 1. 1865 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1865); Alphabetical Catalogue of the Library of Congress: Authors (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1864); Catalogue of the Library of Congress Index of Subjects in 2 Volumes (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1869). Back to text
40. Gotthelf Fischer von Waldheim, Zoognosia tabulis synopticus illustrata [Illustrated Synoptic Tables of Zoology] (Mosquae: Typis Nicolai S. Vsevolozsky, 1813–1814). 3 volumes; Friedrich Joseph Haass, Découverte sur le croup [Discoveries about Croup] (Moscou: Impr. N.S. Vsevolojsky, 1817); Friedrich Joseph Haass, Beyträge zu den Zeichen des Croups [Contributions about the Symptoms of Croup] ([Moskau : Moskowische universitätsbuchdr.], 1818); Wilhelm Michael von Richter, Geschichte der Medicin in Russland [History of Medicine in Russia] (Moskwa: Gedruckt bei N.S. Wsewolojsky, 1813–1817). 3 volumes; Oribasius. XXI Veterum et Clarorum Medicorum Graecorum Varia Opuscula [Various Brief Works by Twenty-one Ancient and Famous Greek Physicians] (Mosquae: Litteris Caesareae Universitatis, 1808).  Back to text
41. Johnston, History of the Library of Congress, Plate 17, after page 238.  Back to text
42. I found no official documentation about the dates of use of particular LC ink stamps, but after perusing the many catalogs and supplements and examining the physical volumes on the shelves, have come to the conclusion that the diamond-shaped stamp was in use only after the 1851 fire. The appearance of the diamond-shaped stamp on the book from the Jefferson library depicted in Figure 2 was probably added to the surviving Jefferson books after the 1851 fire.  Back to text
43. LC Archives. Library in the Capitol. Invoice Book 1841–1862.  Back to text
44. Johnston, History of the Library of Congress, Plate 17, after page 238; Plate 22, after page 338. The work depicted in Figures 9, 10, and 11 is Annuaire du Yacht-club impérial de Saint-Pétersbourg [Yearbook of the Imperial Yacht Club in St. Petersburg] (Saint-Pétersbourg: Imprimerie du Journal de Saint-Pétersbourg, 1853).  Back to text
45. Nikolai Vasil'evich Medem, Uchebnyia rukovodstva dlia voenno-uchebnykh zavedenii. Taktika [Manual for Military Education Institutions. Tactics] (Sankt-Peterburg: v Tipografii II Otdieleniia Sobstvennoi E. I. V. Kantselarii, 1837–1838); The acknowledgment of the gift was located in the LC Archives, Librarians of Congress Letterbooks, Reel 4, Jan 5, 1857–Oct 3, 1859, Image 465; Latrobe's trip to Russia is described in John E. Semmes, John H.B. Latrobe and His Times 1803–1891 (Baltimore, MD: The Norman, Remington Co, 1917).  Back to text
46. Maryland Historical Society, John H.B. Latrobe Family Papers, 1796–1853, MS.523, Box Two, Russian Correspondence, 1857–1858: 189.  Back to text
47. Lacy, The Library of Congress, 158.  Back to text
48. The Invoice Book from 1841–1862 in the LC Archives reveals that in 1856 LC acquired from Bossange a work in French by the Russian archaeologist Count Aleksei Sergeevich Uvarov (1825–1884), Recherches sur les antiquités de la Russie méridionale et des côtes de la mer Noire [Studies on the antiquities of southern Russia and the coasts of the Black Sea] (Paris: V. Didron, 1855).  Back to text
49. Lacy, The Library of Congress, 157. Back to text
50. Ostrowski, Books, Maps, and Politics, 143.  Back to text
51. Egor Fedorovich Timkovskii, Voyage à Peking, à travers la Mongolie, en 1820 et 1821 [Travels to China through Mongolia, in the years 1820 and 1821] (Paris: Librairie orientale de Dondey-Dupré père et fils, 1827). 2 volumes; Supplement to the Catalogue of the Library of Congress. December, 1848 ([Washington: GPO, 1849]) [no title page].  Back to text
52. The data on early Russian receipts was located in Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 61, Smithsonian Institution, International Exchange Service, Records, Box 18, Record of Publications Received, 1849–1852. Back to text
53. List of Foreign Correspondents of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1882). The quote is taken from the unnumbered verso of the title page. Back to text
54. The quotation and details of both Flügels' lives were found in Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 31, Smithsonian Institution, Office of the Secretary, Correspondence, Box 26, Folder 6, F. Flügel, untitled biographical sketch. Back to text
55. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 7002, Baird, Spencer Fullerton, 1823–1887, Spencer Fullerton Baird Papers, Private Incoming and Outgoing Correspondence, 1846–1887, Box 20, Folder 20, Flügel, Felix, Letter from Flügel dated November 18, 1863, to Spencer Fullerton Baird. Back to text
56. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 7002, Baird, Spencer Fullerton, 1823–1887, Spencer Fullerton Baird Papers, Private Incoming and Outgoing Correspondence, 1846–1887, Box 20, Folder 21, Flügel, Felix, Letter from Flügel dated June 2, 1869, to Spencer Fullerton Baird. Back to text
57. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 7002, Baird, Spencer Fullerton, 1823–1887, Spencer Fullerton Baird Papers, Private Incoming and Outgoing Correspondence, 1846–1887, Box 20, Folder 21, Flügel, Felix, Letter from Flügel dated June 6, 1870, to Spencer Fullerton Baird. Back to text
58. Flügel to Baird, June 6, 1870. Back to text
59. Catalogue of Publications of Societies and of Periodical Works Belonging to the Smithsonian Institution, January 1, 1866, Deposited in the Library of Congress (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1866). Back to text
60. Odessa was counted as Russian since all of its publications were in Russian. Back to text
61. Catalogue of the Library of Congress. Index of Subjects in Two Volumes (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1869). Back to text
62. Report of the Librarian of Congress for the Year Ending December 1, 1867 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1867): 5. Back to text
63. Report of the Librarian of Congress for the Year Ending December 1, 1868 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1868): 6. Back to text
64. I found no explanation for why the receipts of the official publications exchanges did not appear in the printed catalogs. I can only speculate that since most of the items were in foreign languages, LC probably did not have sufficient staff with foreign language expertise to catalog the materials at the time of receipt. Just Solyom had Russian expertise and he was hired only in 1867. Solyom is discussed in the section "Purchases of Russian Material 1875–1906." Back to text
65. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 509, Smithsonian Institution, International Exchange Service Records, 1868–1918, Box 5, Miscellaneous Correspondence — Library of Congress, 1901–1980. Back to text
66. Memos discussing this situation appeared in the following record units: Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 61, Smithsonian Institution, International Exchange Service, Records, Box 18, Letters Sent, September 6, 1889–March 28, 1890; Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 31, Smithsonian Institution, Office of the Secretary, Correspondence, Box 98, Library of Congress, 1891–1906, Folders 1–4. Back to text
67. Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution Showing the Operations, Expenditures, and Condition of the Institution for the Year 1900 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1901): 33. Back to text
68. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 31, Smithsonian Institution, Office of the Secretary, Correspondence, Box 79, Office of International Exchanges, 1878–1890, Folder 1, translation of a letter dated May19/31, 1880, from G. Willamov, Secretary of the Legation of Russia in the U.S. Back to text
69. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 61, Smithsonian Institution, International Exchange Service, Records, Box 18, Letters Sent, August 25, 1887–May 9, 1888. A letter acknowledging a list from the Central Statistical Committee was sent on December 29, 1887. Back to text
70. One figure has been cited repeatedly, that from 1870–1877 SI received annually 150–160 volumes from Russia, but I could not verify the data. G. K. Tserava was the first to mention these numbers in his article, "Iz istorii russko-amerikanskikh nauchnykh sviazei v XIX v.: Dzhozef Genri i Aleksandr Ivanovich Voeikov," [From the History of Russian-American Scholarly Relations in the Nineteenth Century: Joseph Henry and Aleksandr Ivanovich Voeikov] Priroda [Nature], no. 7, (1979): 80. He claims that the numbers are "institution data" from SI, but does not cite his source. The numbers do not seem unreasonable if you consider that one volume could be a loose periodical issue. Back to text
71. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 31, Smithsonian Institution, Office of the Secretary, Correspondence, Box 79, Office of International Exchanges, 1878–1890, Folder 1, letter dated June 10, 1886, from Spencer Baird, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution to Hon. S.J. Randall, Chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations. Back to text
72. Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution Showing the Operations, Expenditures, and Condition of the Institution for the Year 1871 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1873): 21. Back to text
73. Report of the Librarian of Congress . . . for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1905 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1905):19. Back to text
74. The numbers are taken from the Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington: Government Printing Office), for the appropriate years. Back to text
75. Without lists of titles received on exchange, determining exactly how a given late nineteenth century Russian official publication arrived at LC can be difficult. First, one looks for markings that would eliminate known accessions. For example, accession numbers, which did not start being used until the turn of the century, indicate purchases. Bookplates and accession numbers identifying them as part of the Yudin Collection are also a clue, as are bookplates, bindings or ink stamps from the Smithsonian. A Division of Documents stamp, a device begun in the early twentieth century, indicates an exchange receipt, but all of them are dated, so one can easily tell when the item arrived. Some items have markings indicating that they were transfers from another federal library. Since Russian government publications were received sporadically, I examined the collection of Austrian parliamentary proceedings to determine the use of various markings indicating exchange during the nineteenth century. Austria was commended in the Smithsonian annual report for 1889 for being a good official exchange partner and for sending a complete run of its parliamentary proceedings. These volumes were marked either with a Smithsonian Deposit ink stamp and date or with an oval Library of Congress, City of Washington stamp. Later volumes bore the Division of Documents stamp. Some had bookplates marked "Official Donation." For the examples of official Russian publications given here, the items had either a Division of Documents stamp for the time period under study, or a dated "International Exchange" stamp with a receipt date for the time period under discussion. Many also had an "LC" or "Library of Congress" perforation on the title page. Back to text
76. Ostrowski, Books, Maps, and Politics, 162–163. Back to text
77. Ostrowski, Books, Maps, and Politics, 26–28. Back to text
78. Mearns, The Story Up to Now, p.94. Back to text
79. The catalog supplements referred to in this discussion are: Catalogue of Books Added to the Library of Congress from December 1, 1868, to December 1, 1869 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1870); Catalogue of Books Added to the Library of Congress from December 1, 1869, to December 1, 1870 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1871); Catalogue of Books Added to the Library of Congress during the Year 1871 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872); Catalogue of Books Added to the Library of Congress during the Year 1872 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1874); Catalogue of Recently Added Books, Library of Congress, 1873–75 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1876). Back to text
80. LC Archives. Library in the Capitol. Invoice Book 1841–1862. Two copies of this publication were listed in the 1854 supplement on page 111 and the invoice book shows two copies purchased. Adam Gurowski. Russia As It Is (New-York, London: D. Appleton, 1854). Back to text
81. N.V. Vishniakova, Istoriia russkoi knigi v SShA (konets XVIII veka–1917 god) [History of the Russian Book in the USA (From the End of the Eighteenth Century to 1917)] (Novosibirsk: Sibirskoe otdelenie RAN, 2004): 130–133. The first book was Honcharenko, Agapius. Russko-angliiskie razgovory. Russian and English Phrase-book, Specially Adapted for the Use of Traders, Travelers and Teachers. San-Frantsisko: A. Roman & Co, 1868. The first periodical was the Alaska Herald, published with both English and Russian segments, in San Francisco in 1868. Back to text
82. This item was identified by a combination of WorldCat searches and using the Catalogue of Title–Entries of Books and Other Articles Entered in the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington under the Copyright Law. This item is listed in Number 80, January 9–14, 1893, but it appears only under its English title A Manual of the English Language. The weekly copyright lists are a less than ideal method for identifying Russian-American publications, because the entries are abbreviated, often not reflective of the title that appeared on the title page, and, in this case, because it lacked any mention of Russian language content. If this title had not been identified previously as Russian-American, it would have been overlooked in the copyright lists. Back to text
83. The bibliography is Appendix 13 in Vishniakova, Istoriia russkoi knigi v SShA. I checked LC holdings for all of the cited titles and determined that none of them had been acquired via copyright deposit. In fact, LC lacked many of them. Back to text
84. Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Polovtsov, Correspondance diplomatique des ambassadeurs et ministres de Russie en France et de France en Russie avec leurs gouvernements de 1814 à 1830 [Diplomatic Correspondence of the Ambassadors and Ministers of Russia in France and of France in Russia with Their Governments from 1814 to 1830] (Saint-Pétersbourg : Société impériale d'histoire de Russie, 1902). The purchase order was located in the LC Archives, Order Division, Control File, Reel 3, July 2–November 29, 1902. Back to text
85. Dramaticheskii slovar' [Dramatic Dictionary] (S. Peterburg : Izd. "Novago Vremeni", 1880); Vasilii Sergieevich Kartsov, and Mikhail Nikolaevich Mazaev, Opyt' slovaria psevdonimov russkikh pisatelei [An Attempt at a Dictionary of Pseudonyms of Russian Writers] (S.-Peterburg, Tip.-lit. I.A. Efrona, 1891); S. N. Mameev, Bibliografiia zhelieznodorozhnago voprosa v Sibiri [Bibliography of the Railroad Question in Siberia] (Tobol'sk : Tip. Tobol'skago eparkhial'nago bratstva, 1895); V.I. Mezhov, Bibliografiia evreiskago voprosa v Rossii, s 1855 po 1873 god [Bibliography of the Jewish Question in Russia from 1855 to 1873] (Sankt-Peterburg: Tip. A. E. Landay, 1875); N.M.Lisovskii, Russkaia periodicheskaia pechat', 1703–1894 gg. [Russian Periodical Press, 1703–1894] (S.-Peterburg : A.F. TSinzerlinga, 1895). Back to text
86. Report of the Librarian of Congress for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1903 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1903); Report of the Librarian of Congress for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1904 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904). Back to text
87. Report of the Librarian of Congress for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1900 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1900): 35. Back to text
88. S. Branson Marley, Jr., "Newspapers and the Library of Congress," Library of Congress Quarterly Journal of Current Acquisitions (July 1975): 207–237. This article provides an overview of the development of the American and foreign newspaper collections at LC. Back to text
89. John Y. Cole, "The Library of Congress Becomes a World Library, 1815–2005," in Libraries & Culture: Historical Essays Honoring the Legacy of Donald G. Davis, Jr., ed. Cheryl Knott Malone, 166 (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2006). Back to text
90. Elemer Bako, "Louis C. Solyom. Collector of Languages," The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 22, no. 2 (1965): 105–115. In this article, Bako claimed that Solyom was brought to LC to handle an influx of Russian materials generated by the purchase of Alaska in 1867. I found an influx of Russian materials at this time only due to the Smithsonian Deposit, not to Alaska or related to Alaska. Back to text
91. Jane A. Rosenberg, "Patronage and Professionals: The Transformation of the Library of Congress Staff, 1890–1907," Libraries & Culture 26, no. 2 (1991): 251–268. Back to text
92. E.G. Pivovarov, A.V. Babin (1866–1930 gg.) (Sankt-Peterburg: Izd. Petropolis, 2002): 44. Back to text
93. There are many articles written about Hattala and his scholarly contributions. For more information, see the following selected works: Entries in Biografický lexicón Slovenska [Biographical Dictionary of Slovakia] (Martin: Slovenská národná knižnica, 2007), tom 3, 377–378, and Representacný biografický lexicón Slovenska [National Biographical Dictionary of Slovakia] (Martin: Matica slovenská, 1999), 104–105; Eugen Jóna, "Martin Hattala 1821–1903" Jazykovedný časopis [Linguistic Journal] 9, no. 1 (1953): 15–33; and the item cited in Note 100. Back to text
94. LC Archives. Order Division, Control File, Reel 7, June 16, 1904–January 31, 1905. Back to text
95. Report of the Librarian of Congress for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1904 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904): 27. Back to text
96. Fedor Buslaev, O prepodavanii otechestvennago iazyka [On the Teaching of the Native Language] Izd. 2. (Moskva: Izdanie Brat'ev Salaevykh, 1867); Fedor Buslaev, Istoricheskaia grammatika russkago iazyka. Etimologiia [Historical Grammar of the Russian Language. Etymology] Izd. 4. (Moskva: Izdanie Brat'ev Salaevykh, 1875); Fedor Buslaev, Opyt istoricheskoi grammatiki russkago iazyka. Chast' 1. Etimologiia [An Attempt at an Historical Grammar of the Russian Language. Part 1. Etymology] (Moskva: V Universitetskoi tipografii, 1858). The author would like to thank Nina Zanegina for her help in deciphering the dedication appearing in Figure 18. Back to text
97. Martin Hattala, "Úvaha o Th. Buslaeva Opytie istoricheskoi grammatiki russkago iazyka [Review of F. Buslaev's Opyt istoricheskoi grammatiki russkago iazyka]," Časopis Musea Království cěského [Journal of the Museum of the Czech Kingdom] 36 (1862): 85–89, 133–160, 323–; Martin Hattala, "Výsledky historického jazykozpytu o mluvnice ruská [Problems of Historical Linguistics Concerning Russian Grammar]," Casopis Musea Království cěského [Journal of the Museum of the Czech Kingdom] 38 (1864): 187–212, 227–249 Back to text
98. The books mentioned in this paragraph are: A.S. Budilovich. Pervobytnye slaviane v ikh iazykie, bytie i poniatiiakh po dannym leksikal'nym [Ancient Slavs in Their Language, Daily Life and Ideas According to Lexical Data]. Kiev: Tip. M.P. Fritsa, 1878; A. M. Gezen. Istoriia slavianskago perevoda simvolov viery [The History of the Slavic Translation of Symbols of Faith]. Sanktpeterburg : Tipografiia Imperatorskoi akademii nauk, 1884; A. A. Kotliarevskii. Drevniaia russkaia pismennost'. Opyt bibliologicheskago izlozheniia istorii eia izucheniia [Ancient Russian Literature. An Attempt at a Bibliological Exposition of the History of Its Study]. Voronezh': [V tipografii Gubernskago pravleniia], 1881; M.V. Lomonosov. Sochineniia M. V. Lomonosova [The Works of M. V. Lomonosov]. Sankt-Peterburg: Tipografiia Imperatorskoi akademii nauk, 1891–1948; N. M. Petrovskii. O sochineniiakh Petra Gektorovicha (1487–1582) [On the Works of Petar Hektorovic (1487–1582)]. Kazan': Tipo-litografiia Imperatorskago universiteta, 1901; Václav Hanka. Slovo o plku Igorevie [The Igor Tale]. V Prazie, Iadiveniem izdatelevym, 1821; Aleksei Smirnov. O Slovie o polku Igorevie [About the Igor Tale]. Voronezh : V Tip. Gubernskago pravleniia. 1877. Back to text
99. Martin Hattala. Slovo o polku Igoreve [The Igor Tale]. V Praze: Nákladem Bedricha Tempského, 1858. Back to text
100. Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Kochubinskii. Kratkii ocherk dieiatel'nosti Professora Martina Gattaly (1850–1879) [Brief Sketch of the Activity of Professor Martin Hattala (1850–1879)]. Odessa: Tip. G. Ul'rikha, 1880. My thanks to Andrew Spencer, Slavic Bibliographer at the University of Wisconsin Library, for providing me with a copy of this pamphlet and his interpretation of the Wisconsin markings in the book after I noticed the LC accession number for the Hattala Library on its title page verso. Back to text
101. Report of the Librarian of Congress for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1901. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1901, p. 303. Back to text
102. Report of the Librarian of Congress. 1897. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1897: 48. Back to text
103. Report of the Librarian of Congress. 1898. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1898: 5. Back to text