Alexey Valerievich Zyuzin, Acting Director of the V.A. Artisevich Zonal Scientific Library:
– Every year, preparing for Victory Day, we strive to highlight known facts in a new way, or find something interesting among the published materials. Their search is ongoing. There are projects that "grow out" of anniversaries. For example, the diaries of the war years, on which Irina Vladimirovna Lebedeva's book "And there was a war ... (flipping through military diaries)" is based. We have provided comments on the articles from them and posted them on the website of the ZNB SSU for the 100th anniversary of the library.
For the 70th anniversary of the Victory, we have prepared and collected all Saratov editions of the Second World War that are in the library's collection, digitized them and presented them in open access.
Last year, we collected the musical editions of the war period, 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 song "Holy War", 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, Czech authors and performers.
A separate project of our library was dedicated to military childhood. The library received mandatory copies of postcards that were published on the territory of the USSR during these years, among them directly addressed to children. Some of the postcards were in black and white, they had to be colored themselves, and closer to Victory, colored ones began to come out.
We also showed posters from the war period, with a story about how they roamed through wartime printed publications.
Another project actually became the "Immortal Regiment" campaign in the walls of the library: in it, the staff of the ZNB SSU told about their relatives-veterans, on the second floor of the library they posted front-line photographs and short stories about war veterans and home front workers. The Saratov Frontline project was also based on photo illustrations and local history books. We were lucky, because at that time photographers were still working in the library, and in the post-war period, the famous photographer Valentin Chereshnev.
And the exhibition They Fought for the Motherland included the biographies of 12 employees of the scientific library who participated in the Great Patriotic War. We also presented the collected album in electronic form. The same stands were prepared about the Saratov heroes of the war years. Everyone remembered the vivid exposition about the history of military songs.
Another project reflected materials related to our legendary Vera Artisevich, who devoted 67 years to "science", and in particular, her correspondence during the war years. Among them we found a letter from a graduate student Nikolai Kuzmin, who tells the rector of the university about his front-line affairs. In this position, 34-year-old Vera Alexandrovna replaced Rector D.I. Luchinin, who left for the front line. It was 11 long months of hard work in a new position, which included the evacuation of Leningrad University and the struggle against the decision of the State Defense Committee to locate a defense plant within the walls of the university.
The stay of the evacuated Leningrad University in Saratov became the theme of a separate exhibition. She brought together the materials prepared by the staff of the ZNB of SSU, the Faculty of History and the Museum of SSU. Then in 1999, the materials of the exposition turned into a book ("St. Petersburg State University (LSU) – SSU: to the 275th anniversary of St. Petersburg State University"), which was presented to the anniversary of St. Petersburg State University (LSU). Separate expositions were devoted to the fates of two rectors – Artisevich and Luchinin, as well as scientists from two universities.
I would like to mention the work on the project on the scientific work of the library during the war years. It would seem that what kind of scientific work could there be in these years? But the university even hosted a scientific conference, which was attended not only by the staff of our library and other libraries in the city, but also by teachers and professors of Leningrad University. Special invitations were sent out. The topics of the reports were devoted, among other things, to the work of libraries in hospitals, library requests. At this conference, Vera Alexandrovna Artis'evich made her report on the 25th anniversary of scientific activity in librarianship - a work written at home, by the light of a wick. Since it was very cold in the reading room, Vera Alexandrovna received permission to hold a conference in the rector's office. There was also an exhibition of publications related to librarianship, which regularly arrived by mail even during the war years.
At the exhibition dedicated to the anniversary of Vera Alexandrovna Artisevich, which was celebrated last year, a link to an entry was available through a QR code, where she tells how the evacuated Leningrad University arrived in Saratov. Everyone also remembered the exhibition about the repressed teachers of Leningrad and Saratov universities.
We have prepared a large exposition and several reports on how during the war library staff sought to preserve books from the library of the German Pedagogical Institute of the Republic of Germans of the Volga region.
Well, this year the topic of SMERSH, the most effective special service of the Second World War, came to the attention of our colleagues, since April marked the 80th anniversary of the creation of the Main Directorate of Counterintelligence of the People's Commissariat of Defense of the USSR.
We had our own counterintelligence department in Saratov, and its activities were very relevant in the frontline city. Various authors have written books about SMERSH's work in our region, presented them to the library, and we will definitely present them at the exhibition.
Text by Tamara Korneva, photos by Dmitrii Kovshov
Translated by Lyudmila Yefremova
Additional links to the ZNB projects:
He fought with Verse and Song. Poets of the 1941-1945 War
