The Zaluski Library ( Polish Biblioteka Załuskich ) is the first public library in Rzeczpospolita and one of the first in Europe. She occupied the building of the Danilovich Palace in Warsaw . Since 1774 - one of the first national libraries in the world. After the sections of the Commonwealth dispersed in other meetings.
Content
Private library
The library opened on August 8, 1747 . It was assembled by brothers Joseph Andrzej (1702-1774) and Andrzej Stanislav (1695-1758) of Zaluskis . The brothers collected a unique collection, which even as a personal library was completed on a strictly scientific basis with literature from various European countries.
Beginning in 1742, Jozef Zaluski, one of the founders of the library, worked on the creation of a national bibliography called Bibliotheca Polona magna universalis , which comprised 10 handwritten volumes.
Public Library
After the death of Jozef Zaluski in 1774, the library became the property of the state, having received the official status of the state library, and became known as the Zaluski Library of the Commonwealth.
In 1780, the Sejm of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth issued a resolution granting the Zaluski Library the right to receive a binding copy of all the works of the country's press, and by the end of the 1780s the library became not only the first public library in Rzecz Pospolita, but also assumed the functions of the national library.
According to the wealth of their funds and their number, the Zaluski Library could be compared with the three largest libraries in Europe of that time: the library of the British Museum in London , the Royal Library in Paris and the Royal Library in Munich . It was an outstanding phenomenon in the history of the Polish Enlightenment .
The fate of the library
After the uprising led by Tadeusz Kosciuszko in 1794 and the capture of Warsaw by Suvorov was suppressed, the library consisting of 400 thousand volumes was declared the property of the Russian government and was transferred as a war trophy by P. Divov to St. Petersburg , where it became the basis of the Imperial Public Library .
The Russian authors of the 19th century saw the Warsaw period of the Zaluski Library as a prehistory of the Imperial Public Library itself in St. Petersburg, but in the 1920s, the bulk of the Zaluski Library funds (50 thousand volumes) were returned to Poland by order of Lenin.
During the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, the library was plundered and partly destroyed by the Nazis. The surviving part of the collection (1,800 manuscripts and 30,000 books) is kept in the National Library of Poland .
Famous Books
- Sforciade with a portrait of Bella Principessa (attributed to Leonardo da Vinci )