Grand along with comic: the Presidential Library reveals unknown facts from the lives of famous people

The Presidential Library electronic collections, numbering more than 600 thousand units today, are not accidentally called the national treasury of the history of Russia, and documents and books digitized by library specialists - "registered in eternity". Here you can find royal decrees, the first editions of Ivan Fyodorov's printing house, official biographies of prominent statesmen, and little-known facts from their life. In this "history in gigabytes" there was also a place for amusing cases and curiosities, which sometimes occurred with the powerful of this world.  

Here, in particular, one can learn about the well-known lawyer and literary writer A. F. Koni from the sources of the Presidential Library.

One day, when Anatoly Fyodorovich was appointed a senator, one stingy journalist placed an epigram in the press:

"The horse Kalligula was led to the Senate,

He is standing cleaned and in velvet, and in gold.

But I will say: we have the same arbitrariness:

In the newspapers, I read that Koni is in the Senate".

He received a worthy answer:

"I do not like such irony.

How people are unreasonably evil!

After all, the progress that now is Koni,

Where before there were only donkeys.  

This literary duel could not help attracting the attention of all the readers of St. Petersburg in the last quarter of the XIX century. Anatoly Fyodorovich Koni, being a famous lawyer, has always been in the public eye. His speeches in court often came to listen to other writers and public figures: in the speeches of the lawyer there was not a single stereotype or banal thought. He is creative and profound, he always tried to bring the trial to a fair verdict. He, however, was known not only as a brilliant lawyer, a member of the Academy of Sciences and the State Council, but also as a writer who left the exact and capacious literary portraits of Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Korolenko, Nekrasov, Leo Tolstoy, to whom he presented the fable of the novel “Resurrection”, and also colleagues from the field of jurisprudence.

The Presidential Library electronic collections feature materials about the life and professional activity of one of the brightest representatives of the Russian intelligentsia at the turn of the late XIX and early XX centuries, and also with his brilliant literary portraits. The portal of the library presents the work of Koni concerning his activities in the legal field: "The Court - Science - Art", "The Fathers and Children of Judicial Reform (to the fiftieth anniversary of judicial statutes)", etc. In the electronic library of the Presidential Library one can find a fundamental work covering all side of the seething activity of a lawyer: "Anatoly Fyodorovich Koni (1844 - 1924)". This is the anniversary collection published in Leningrad in 1925 the “Athenaeum” publishing house.

In his book of the same year, "Memoirs about A. P. Chekhov", an electronic copy of which is kept in the Presidential Library collections, Anatoly Fyodorovich writes: "In my memory, his image stands as alive - with a sad, meditative look, with an attentive and gentle attitude to the interlocutor and with a seemingly calm word, for which one can feel the beating of a heart that is hot and sympathetic to human sorrow. "As a person working in the penitentiary system, the lawyer especially appreciated the writer for his book "Sakhalin Island", which raises the problems of appalling conditions of detention of exiled convicts.

Koni and Chekhov were in constant correspondence. Anatoly Fyodorovich visited the writer in Yalta, later he described these meetings in his memoirs. His watchfulness, syllable and mild irony were highly appreciated by Chekhov and his colleagues in the literary shop. Therefore, they have an epic of Koni in response to the baseless insolence of a medium-sized journalist did not cause surprise.

And the sniper, according to the stories, creaked his teeth for a long time and did not want to admit that he was defeated; It was deplorably regretted that the times of the duel had passed ...

... Grand and comic, little-known and so popular that they are attributed to folk art, but always the real facts from the history of our country you can find in the unique editions stored in the Presidential Library.