The Presidential Library will digitize the heritage of Pushkin’s era

The Presidential Library starts to digitize more than 100 unique documents from the archives of the All-Russian Pushkin Museum. The decision was made on the eve of the Russian Day of Pushkin as part of a cooperation agreement between the All-Russian Pushkin Museum and the Presidential Library.

Among the materials delivered for digitizing, there are documents and autographs of famous writers: Jacob Groth, Vasily Zhukovsky, Anton Delvig, letters of Count Francois Xavier de Maistre to Prince Golitsyn, handwritten notebooks of Ivan Panaev, Konstantin Zlobin, Ivan Golenishchev-Kutuzov. It is also planned to digitize a series of maps and plans of the battles of the Russian-Turkish War of 1828. The peculiarity of these and other materials is in their documentary and historical accuracy assessments.

The agreement is also planned to develop cooperation with the Museum-Estate of Derzhavin - a branch of the All-Russian Pushkin Museum. In particular, on the basis of the museum’s electronic library it is planned to open a remote electronic reading room of the Presidential Library

It is worth noting that the cooperation between the Presidential Library and the All-Russian Pushkin Museum has been developing since 2012. The first step was granting by the Presidential Library of a collection of digitized books about the life and work of Pushkin to the museum. In 2013, the Presidential Library in cooperation with the All-Russian Pushkin Museum produced the film "...my address: on Moika, near Konnyushenniy Bridge..." The film tells what the poet was like in everyday life, about his family and friends, friendship with Zhukovsky and the last days of life.

In January this year, in honor of the Year of Literature, the Presidential Library gave the All-Russian Pushkin Museum the first digitized "Charter granted to the Imperial Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum by the Emperor Alexander I, September 22, 1811." This unique historical document became the most important exhibit of the media center opened at the Museum-Estate of Derzhavin. Thanks to modern digital technology and cooperation of the museum and library, this unique document has been saved for the history and was made publicly available.

Thus, the well-established fruitful cooperation between the two major cultural institutions in Russia will develop rapidly in the future.