I have been invited to speak at a conference in St Petersburg in October
2008 and intend to talk about Russian readers in libraries outside
Russia, especially in Western Europe. I have information about the use
of the British Museum by Herzen, Lenin and others, and about the
mid-18th century Russian students at Glasgow university. I also know
about Dostoevsky and a few others in Florence, and I have the full
report of Sobol'shchikov's tour of European libraries in 1859. But I'd
be very grateful for any other ideas, especially for documented sources,
for any period that can be considered historical! (I'm sure there is
much written about Russian emigrés in Paris and Berlin after 1917, for
example. - and I must brush up on my Nabokov.)
The conference, at the National Library of Russia, has the title
'History iof Libraries through the Ages' and will be held on 14-16
October. It is the fourth in a series organised by the NLR's Division of
Library Science History and the Russian Library Association' s Section
of Library History (I attended the inaugural conference in 1994 and have
one or two contacts among Russian library historians).
Rehgards
Peter Hoare
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Peter Hoare, 21 Oundle Drive, Wollaton Park, Nottingham NG8 1BN
Tel/fax 0115 978 5297 E-mail [log in to unmask]
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