Cornell University Library

Representative: Robert Davis

In 2019, Cornell University Library marked 135 years of Slavic language collecting, making it among the very first American academic libraries to collect in this field.  

This early interest in the Slavic lands is attributable in part to the interests of Cornell’s founding president Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918), who served as a U.S. diplomat in St. Petersburg just ten years before founding Cornell in 1865, and as U.S. Minister to Russia from 1892-1894.

One of the earliest mentions of Cornell’s collection-building is an article dating from 26 January 1885 in the Cornell Daily Sun, acknowledging the diplomat, historian, and translator (of Turgenev and Tolstoy) Eugene Schuyler’s (1840-1890) multiple benefactions of predominantly Slavic and East European materials to the Cornell Library: the occasion of this article was a gift of more than 600 volumes.   

It should also be recalled that Russian-born Alexis Babine (Cornell Class of 1892) worked for the Cornell Library, and later was responsible for bringing the 80,000-volume Yudin Library from Siberia to Washington, as head of the Slavic Section of the Library of Congress. 

Today, Cornell’s Slavic and East European holdings continue to grow, serving both a campus community (particularly in the Departments of Comparative Literature, and History), and a national audience via BorrowDirect and traditional ILL networks.   While virtually all Slavic and East European languages are represented in the collection, particularly strong holdings are in Russian, Serbian, and Romanian materials in the humanities and social sciences.  

Cornell’s Kroch Library, Division of Rare & Manuscript Collections holds excellent holdings of Nabokoviana (Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov taught at Cornell from 1948 to 1959), the 2,500-item Lindseth Collection of Russian Fable Literature, archival and rare print and photographica materials on the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1919, and important collections on human sexuality published or printed in the Slavic countries during the interwar period.  These, too, are growing collections, supplemented regularly.

The Librarian for Slavic & East European Studies, based at Columbia University, provides reference services and collection development support to Cornell students and faculty on an ongoing basis.