Virtual tour of the Bestuzhev Courses Library available on the Presidential Library’s portal

The Presidential Library offers to visit one of the most beautiful libraries in St. Petersburg, which has preserved the atmosphere of pre-revolutionary Russia. The institution’s portal provides a virtual tour of the Bestuzhev Courses Memorial Library, which is part of the Gorky Scientific Library of the St. Petersburg State University. The tour is based on the virtual tour of the historical premises of the Bestuzhev Courses Library.

The Bestuzhev Courses Library is a unique monument of library culture of the 19th-20th centuries, created by many years of work of employees, teachers and students, and the only working library of a pre-revolutionary higher educational institution in Russia, which passed through all the cataclysms of the 20th century and survived in its original form. In this library, as in a mirror, one can see the short, only forty years old, but very bright history of the St. Petersburg higher women's (Bestuzhev's) courses.

St. Petersburg Higher Courses for Women, or Bestuzhev Courses - as they were called after the first director, historian Konstantin Nikolayevich Bestuzhev-Ryumin, is a unique phenomenon of Russian scientific and cultural life in Russia in the last quarter of the 19th - early 20th centuries.

The courses were organized in 1878 with the aim of giving women a full higher education. Subsequently, some of the graduates became scientists, doctors of sciences and professors, and even academicians. Others - by writers, artists, actors. Still others - and most of them - have worked their entire lives as school teachers, librarians, and technical workers. Together they formed the image of an educated Russian woman.

The Presidential Library's portal, as part of a virtual tour accompanied by the curator of the Bestuzhev Courses Library Alexei Vostrikov, reveals the historical halls, the details of the rich architectural and interior decoration and a lot of new interesting information about women's education in pre-revolutionary Russia.

The Bestuzhev Courses Library arose simultaneously with the courses themselves and over time turned into one of the largest libraries of educational institutions.

It is located on Vasilievsky Island in the historic building of the Bestuzhev Courses, in a specially built room for it, which can be called a real masterpiece of interior art, designed by the academician of architecture A. F. Krasovsky. An extensive hall, bookcases that completely fill the walls, a balustrade on the second floor was built using bog oak and polished walnut and decorated in the style of northern pseudo-Gothic.

The room outwardly resembles the library of Emperor Nicholas II in the Winter Palace, built according to the project of the same Krasovsky. At the same time, it was optimally adapted to the requirements of the educational and scientific process. The cabinets were designed in such a way that the distance between the shelves was set taking into account the size of the books. Today the Bestuzhev Library preserved the publications that were kept here a hundred years ago, even the arrangement of the collections has not changed.

The library made an indelible impression of an all-encompassing celebration of knowledge not only for the listeners, but also for the professors and guests of the courses, emphasizing the importance that was attached to the library in the courses.

The book collection was fundamental and served as a full-fledged base for both training and independent scientific work of the listeners. The topics of the publications were not limited to specialties studied at three faculties (history and philology, physics and mathematics and law), covering also related disciplines and fiction.

One of the features of the Bestuzhev Courses Library is that it was mainly completed from donated book collections. The donors of the book collections were not only professors-teachers and graduates of the Women's Higher Courses, but also the widest circle of people who supported women's education. Since the mid-1880s, the Bestuzhev Courses library introduced the practice of placing the most valuable donations in named cabinets and named libraries.

A visitor to the library has opportunity to see the life of the Bestuzhev Courses themselves. It is reflected in numerous editions prepared for the courses: these are annual reports and memorable books of graduates, teaching programs and teaching aids. A special place is occupied by the jubilee edition marking the 25th anniversary of the courses, published in 1903. It is in it that the history of the courses is presented chronologically consistently and in detail, starting with the prehistory.

Virtual projects are an actively developing area of the Presidential Library's activity, thanks to which the electronic repository, along with paper, photo, audio and video materials, is replenished with exhibits from the exhibitions and items from museum collections.

Today there are more than fourty virtual tours and excursions available for remote visits. They are now available on the Presidential Library’s portal in the Exhibitions section at the link https://www.prlib.ru/about_exhibition.