During the celebration of the Great Victory, we return to rare books again – the SSU Scientific Library has unique diaries of the war years – five volumes of type-written bound yellowed sheets. All four years of the war they were conducted almost daily by the scientific secretary of the library, Anna Grozevskaya, who then became the deputy director of the library for research. It was these documents that were used in the And There Was the War ... (Reading Military Diaries) book prepared for the 75th anniversary of the Victory in SSU Publishing House. The book became the winner of the 2020 Best Books regional contest. Readers were struck by how incomprehensibly the history of one small cultural institution in the country, the SSU Scientific Library, reflected the spirit and cultural peculiarities of that time.

The author of the book is Irina Lebedeva, a specialist in interlibrary relations of the SSU Library, who headed the library from 1999 to 2019. Presenting her book, she said, ‘This is an expression of my respect for the history of our library, pride in it.’

On the eve of Victory Day, we asked the author of the book to tell us what had impressed her most in those diaries, which we will return to again and again ... Read the full version of the Believe the Original! article here.

Acting Director of the library Aleksei Zyuzin commented on other projects of the SSU Scientific Library.

‘Every year, preparing for Victory Day, we try to highlight known facts in a new way, or to find something interesting in the published materials. Their search is ongoing. There are projects that “grow out” of anniversaries. For example, the diaries of the war years which were used by Irina Lebedeva in her book entitled And There Was the War ... (Reading Military Diaries). We provided the materials from them with comments and posted them on the website of the SSU Scientific Library for its 100th anniversary.

Last year, musical editions of the war period were collected, they are very rare, but they were published even at that time. The highlight of the project was the fact that although Alexander Alexandrov is considered the official author of the music for the Holy War song, the first sheet music edition of that famous song belongs to the composer Matvey Blanter, which is confirmed by our documents. It is curious that already in 1944 we resumed publishing collections of songs and sheet music by English, French, American, and Czech authors and performers.’

Read the full text of the article, The Book about the War, here.