The Rossi Library

The library was designed and built by the architect Carlo Rossi in 1822–1824 in symmetry to the Picture Gallery above the open gallery, which appeared in the 1790s when Vincenzo Brenna was engaged in the reconstruction and expansion of the palace. In those years, Brenna added a second story with a covered loggia balcony over the one-story Cameron galleries on the south and north sides. On the north side, only a wall was erected. In the early 1800s, the Italian decorator Pietro Gonzaga painted it from the side of the park with the image of five architectural compositions, so it was named after him. In 1822, Carlo Rossi began the construction of a library above the Gonzaga Gallery at the request of Empress Maria Feodorovna. Using the technique of large arched windows, Rossi successfully combined the Library and the Gallery into a single ensemble. To get to the Library from the Dressing Room of Emperor Paul I, Rossi built a small two-light passage study, the windows of which overlook both the Parade Ground and the park. Decorator Barnaba Medici painted the plafond in the grisaille technique per the project of Carlo Rossi. The furniture of the Library is a unique phenomenon in the history of Russian furniture art of the 1st quarter of the 19th century, the rarest example of built-in furniture. Along the curved central wall and the end walls, there was a solid line of bookcases about 4 meters high. This line continued along the windows, where bookcases of the same height stood in the pillars. Thus, in total there were 19 bookcases: 15 large double ones and 4 single ones. Five display cases were installed under the windows. In the center of the library, there was a large oval table for 20 people and two arched half-bookcase-tables. In addition, the furniture set included 36 chairs upholstered in green morocco and banquette stairs for the convenience of using bookcases. The furniture was designed by Carlo Rossi and made of curvy birch with carved overlays painted in antique bronze (the workshops of the Saint Petersburg furniture maker V. Bobkov). Along with the richest book collection, the Great Palace Library contained drawings, engravings, watercolors, manuscripts, collections of medals and coins, a mineralogical collection (including carved stones), and a botanical collection (herbariums). The decoration of the library was complemented by works of sculpture and decorative art. The Rossi Library was completely lost in the fire of 1944, with only two chairs survived of all the furnishing. The Library interior was recreated in the 1960s with some additions in the 1990s. As of now, most of the furniture has been recreated. The objects of applied art have taken their place, and the books are arranged in the bookcases following the catalogs and topography of the time of the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna.

The Great Palace Library of the Pavlovsk Palace is one of the largest private book collections in Saint Petersburg. The centerpiece of this library is the Road Library collection of Catherine II (33 books) presented to Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich. Later, he and his wife, Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna, added to the library independently, as well as with the help of their agents. As the Dowager Empress, Maria Feodorovna continued to extend the library with not only books but also periodicals by subscription. The books were located in the state and residential rooms of the palace: the Library of Paul I, the Carpet Study, the Lantern Study, the Common Study, and then, from 1824 in the Great Palace Library. The books were distributed among the bookcases in a certain systematic order using 22 sections. In 1828, the Library counted 20,895 books in total. Here is how they were distributed according to the card file of 1827:

- "Mathematics" (127 titles, 185 copies): Analytical Essay, the work of the academician Leonhard Euler in Latin, 1783 edition; Fortification by the French marshal Vauban in the original language, published in 1694 and owned by Frans Timmerman, teacher of Peter I;

- "Natural history" (333 titles, 2,000 volumes): Natural History by Comte de Buffon, the famous French naturalist and director of the Paris Botanical garden;

- "Botany" (88 titles, 750 copies): a rare 1817 edition of Zur Naturwissenschaft überhaupt by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe;

- "Geography. Travels" (774 titles, 1,890 copies): Earth Description and Universal Geography by the German scientist Anton Friedrich Büsching, in German, 1764 and 1768 editions; the works about travels in Russia and seafaring by Peter Simon Pallas, Ivan Lepyokhin, Kotzebue, Nikolay Rychkov, etc;

- "History of Russia" (342 titles, 520 copies of volumes), among them, according to the card file of 1827, there were editions of chronicles, the entire Old Russian Vivliofika" by Nikolay Novikov; Notes on Muscovite Affairs by Sigismund von Herberstein, in two editions, 1563 and 1567; Memoirs of Russia by Christoph Hermann von Manstein, in manuscript and printed edition, 1771 and 1772; Diary... by Johann Georg Korb, 1700; Voltaire's works on Russia;

- "Modern history" (349 titles, 1,218 volumes): Historical and Critical dictionary by Pierre Bayle, presented to the owners of Pavlovsk by Catherine II;

- "Ancient history" (133 titles, 485 volumes): The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a classic work by Edward Gibbon;

- "Memoirs. Biographies": according to the card file, in this section were 628 titles of books that made up 1421 volumes. Among them were the memoirs of Marguerite of Valois, Cardinal Richelieu, the Marquise of Pompadour, Voltaire and Montesquieu, the letters of the Abbot Galiani. Goethe's autobiographical work From my Life. Poetry and Truth was also here, published in Stuttgart in 1814;

- "History of France" (218 titles, 703 copies): among various publications, there was a rare selection of French printed and handwritten brochures, pamphlets, reports, etc. of the period of the Revolution and Restoration;

- "Religion. Morality. Education" (824 titles, 1,601 copies): among other books on this topic, are the works of Pestalozzi and Lancaster, Lives of Saints, teachings, and sermons published in the second half of the 18th–early 19th century, there was a New Testament in French, edition of 1559, Psalms of David, arranged in French rhymes by Clément Marot and Théodore de Bèze, edition by François Estienne, 1568;

- "Linguistics": 109 titles, 146 copies of books;

- "Arts and crafts": among 100 different titles (165 volumes) were kept full sets of the Works of the Free Economic Society and Spectacle of Nature and the Arts;

- "Novels": 2,422 volumes, including lifetime editions of Goethe and Walter Scott;

- "Fine arts" (145 titles, 346 volumes): books on the theory and history of art and the works of Leonardo da Vinci, descriptions of ancient monuments of Egypt, Greece, Rome and the East, and the Napoleon Museum;

- "Archaeology" (100 items, 190 volumes): the publications of academician Heinrich Karl Ernst Köhler, one of the curators of the Hermitage; first editions with the description of works of art of Ancient Egypt;

- "Ancient writers" (197 titles, 566 volumes): works by Greek and Roman authors in the French translation;

- "Political science": a small number of books and brochures (326 titles, 650 copies), the most interesting were published works by Henri-Benjamin Constant, Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi, François-René de Chateaubriand, and François Guizot;

- "Poetry and theatre" (733 titles, 1,190 copies): among other things, lifetime editions of Antiochus Kantemir, Ivan Chemnitzer, Ivan Dmitriev, Nikolay Gnedich, Alexander Pushkin, etc., and French works of Racine, Moliere, Voltaire;

- Italian poetry was represented by the works of Dante Alighieri (1804), Torquato Tasso (1771), Ludovico Ariosto (1773);

- "Philology": 234 names and 700 copies, of greatest interest, is the handwritten newspaper by Friedrich Melchior von Grimm, containing his letters to Catherine II;

- "Miscellaneous" (99 titles, 318 books): among others, there were illustrated editions of French fashion and costume albums

- "Encyclopedia" (58 titles, 1,887 volumes). This section united not only lexicons but also periodicals of a scientific and reference nature, the copy of the Encyclopédie by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert (1751) was the most interesting.

- “Collected works”: 203 titles in 1,320 copies, basically a multi-volume collection of works by French, to a lesser extent German, and quite a bit of Russian classic authors;

- "Anthologies": a small (124 titles, 308 copies) section of various French, German, and Russian collections of the literary works and different information from the sciences, mythology, history, etc.

The books were bound in morocco of dark red and green colors with gold ornamental embossing around the perimeter of the covers and the spine, in silk, moire, silver glazet. The bookplates represented a monogram of the intertwined letters M and P, or two Latin R's in a wreath, or the coat of arms of the Russian Empire. Many copies of the books had a gilded supralibros of Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna: a double-headed eagle with three oval armorial shields on it, surrounded by a laurel wreath.

In the early 19th century, the book collection was expanded thanks to the efforts of the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna and her librarians, among whom were Friedrich von Adelung, the mentor of Grand Dukes Nicholas and Mikhail, and Heinrich Friedrich von Storch, vice-president of the Academy of Sciences and history and statistics teacher of the Grand Duchesses; the closest adviser in the matters of completing the library was Baron Ludwig Heinrich Freiherr von Nicolay, the long-term personal secretary of the Empress Maria Feodorovna, president of the Academy of Sciences since 1798.

After the death of Maria Feodorovna, the expansion of the library was almost entirely stopped, except for the incoming multi-volume and periodicals, ordered during the lifetime of the Dowager Empress; by the end of 1830, there were no new books anymore. The subsequent owners kept the library as a memorial to Maria Feodorovna. This did not exclude the possibility of subsequent owners of the palace having their personal books, but these single copies, which, moreover, roamed with their owners, did not affect the composition of the Library. Under Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich, the collection of books retained its composition formed until 1830. There were some additions to other collections of the library. For example, drawings and engravings related to the publication of Mikhail Semevsky's book Pavlovsk and reproductions from the magazine Russian Antiquity were added to the collection of graphics, and documents by general Mikhail Andreyevich Miloradovich were added to the collection of manuscripts. The collection of drawings was supplemented with nineteen drawings by Pietro Gonzaga. During the 19th century, members of the Academy of Sciences, the Public Library, the University, and individual researchers repeatedly turned to the collection for scientific information, including Mikhail Semevsky and Evgeny Shumigorsky, authors of many publications on the history of Russia.

In 1918, the Pavlovsk Palace became a museum by the decision of the People's Commissariat of Education. Under the first director of the museum, Vladimir Taleporovsky, a lot of work was done on the inventory of the library. However, in 1929–1932, when a grand sale of museum collections was carried out, about 3,000 valuable publications were seized from the Palace Library.

At the beginning of World War II, when most of the palace collections were evacuated, because of the rapid Nazi advance, there was no time to evacuate the books. Pavlovsk was occupied, and during the Nazi retreat, they captured the book collection and sent it to the west. It was found in Austria after 1945 and returned to Russia. Currently, the collection of the Imperial library counts 11,600 copies of books. Work is underway to publish the library's catalogs. The first catalog, Illustrated Book of the 15th–18th Centuries, was published in 2010.