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Contact information • History • Access & Facilities • Bibliography
ArcheoBiblioBase: Archives in Russia: E-28Last update of repository: 15 March 2020Institut russkoi literatury (Pushkinskii Dom) RAN (IRLI/PD)Previous names
Pushkin House (Pushkinskii Dom) was established in 1905 by the Commission for Publishing the Writings of A.S. Pushkin (founded in 1898) and the Commission for Constructing a Memorial to A.S. Pushkin (founded in 1899). It combined the functions of a museum, archive, and research center which gathered, researched, and popularized archival, memorial, and literary materials relating to Pushkin and his contemporaries. Pushkin’s private library, purchased from his heirs in 1906, formed the basis of its holdings, which were later enlarged with collections of documentary materials acquired from various organizations, such as the Division of Russian Language and Literature (ORIaS) of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, the Literary Foundation, the Society for the L.N. Tolstoi Museum (Tolstovskii muzei), and the Brokgauz-Efron Publishing House; as well as with materials from personal collections, such as those of P.Ia. Dashkov, P.A. Efremov, Princess Z.I. Iusupova, P.A. Pletnev, and M.I. Semevskii, among others. In 1918 Pushkin House came under the Russian Academy of Sciences, and its archival holdings were concentrated in a specially established Manuscript Division. During and immediately after the Revolution, it acquired many groups of personal papers and important manuscript collections. In 1928 it acquired many valuable materials from the Pushkin Museum organized in Paris by A.F. Onegin (Otto). Reorganized as a scientific research institute in 1930, the Institute subsequently received from the Library of the Academy of Sciences (BAN) many of the archival materials relating to Russian literature and social thought that were held there. Its present name dates from 1931, although from 1935 through 1949 it was known as the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences. In 1948 the manuscript holdings from the State Museum of A.S. Pushkin in Moscow, which had been established in 1938 on the basis of the All-Union Pushkin Exhibition, were transferred from Moscow, and that museum itself was consolidated with Pushkin House; with these accessions, the Institute became the principal repository for the entire manuscript heritage of A.S. Pushkin. Following reorganization of the Institute of World Literature (IMLI) in Moscow in 1951, all of its prerevolutionary holdings, including early manuscript book collections, were transferred to Pushkin House. The Manuscript Division is now considered a “scientific branch archive” with the right to retain archival materials permanently. The wealth and variety of its world-class holdings extend not only to modern Russian literature of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, but also to collections of early Slavonic-Rus' manuscript and early printed books from the eleventh through nineteenth centuries, and collections of folklore recordings and documentation for the history of folklore studies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Acquisitions have been augmented by IRLI field expeditions, donations, and other acquisition activities. A Division of Folklore of the Peoples of the USSR (now the Division of Folkloric Poetic Works) was organized within the structure of the Institute in 1939, which accordingly absorbed the folklore collections and the phonographic archive of the Folklore Section under the Institute of Anthropology and Ethnography (IAE) of the Academy of Sciences, which were transferred to IRLI in 1938. The Phonograph Archive, which had been founded within the Academy of Sciences in 1931 as a unique folklore and ethnographic repository, at that point ranked third in the world (after the phonographic archives of Berlin and Vienna). Most of the sound recordings involved were previously held in the First Division of the Library of the Imperial Academy of Sciences (BAN) (1911–1917)—the so-called BAN collection—including collections of the Music Ethnography Commission of the Russian Geographic Society, dialect recordings, and copies of recordings from the Phonograph Archive of the Psychological Institute of Berlin University and other sources. These collections also included the phonographic collection from the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences (which had been consolidated in BAN in 1930), collections of the Cabinet of Music Ethnography of the Leningrad Conservatory (founded in 1927), and other materials (acquired by BAN in 1931) that had been gathered by the folklore sections of the State Institute of the History of Art (GIII), the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences, and the Central Museum of Ethnology (narodovedenie) in Moscow (the former collections of Museum Ethnographic Commission of the Society of Friends of Natural Science, Anthropology, and Ethnography of Moscow University), along with phonographic fonds of the Folklore Sector of the Institute for Study of the Peoples of the USSR (IPIN) of the Academy of Sciences (acquired in 1933). The Institute has subsequently enlarged its folklore and phonographic fonds with materials acquired on expeditions of IRLI itself, and with collections received from the Karelian Scientific Research Institute, the Academy of Sciences of the Belorussian SSR, and various other higher educational institutions throughout the country, as well as rich personal collections. At present the Phonograph Archive is part of the Division of Folkloric Poetic Works, while the folklore archival materials on paper form a structural part of the Manuscript Division, although they are now held in a separate storage area. A separate Repository of Antiquities (Drevlekhranilishche) for Slavonic-Rus' and other Cyrillic manuscript books was established in 1949 on the initiative of the well-known scholar Vladimir Ivanovich Malyshev (1910–1976), on the basis of the manuscript book collections in the Manuscript Division, Library, and Museum of IRLI. It also contained collections of early Slavonic-Cyrillic manuscripts and manuscript books gathered by IRLI expeditions. In 1951 it acquired an important collection of early manuscript books transferred from the Institute of World Literature (IMLI), which also included the private collection of V.N. Peretts. Collections have also been received from the Karelian Branch of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1954) and from the Philological Faculty and Scientific Library of Leningrad State University which had been donated or acquired from private collectors. The sector was renamed in honor of Malyshev after his death in 1976. The Literary Museum had its origin in the Pushkin Exhibition of 1899, organized in the Great Conference Hall of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences by the Academy Commission for the Centennial of Pushkin’s Birth. The Museum was formally organized within Pushkin House in 1905. It also acquired materials from the Lermontov Museum in the Nicholas Cavalry School (Nikolaevskoe kavaleriiskoe uchilishche), the Pushkin Museum in the Alexander Lyceum (Aleksandrovskii litsei), and the Tolstoi and Nekrasov Museums, and other collections. A burst heating pipe in January 1990 caused considerable water damage to the building of Pushkin House, including the Museum and Manuscript Division reading room and some library collections, forcing curtailed access to the facilities and shortened hours. As of 1998, the Academy has still been unable to find more satisfactory alternative facilities for its priceless manuscript and archival holdings. Pushkin House was added to the federal register of the most valuable monuments of the cultural heritage of the peoples of the Russian Federation in 1995. N.B. The administrative records of Pushkin House (1899–1952) are now held in the St. Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SPbF ARAN, E–25, fond 150). Brief annotation of this fond available electronically on the electronic informational system of ARAN: http://isaran.ru/isaran/isaran.php?pa.... |
