Slavic and East European Studies Collection

The original nucleus of the Slavic and East European collection consisted of 2,300 Russian books, published between 1860 and 1901, on a variety of subjects, donated to Penn at the turn of the twentieth century by Ambassador Charlemagne Tower. There is a catalogue of the collection entitled Katalog russkikh knig prinesennykh v dar universitetu v Pennsilvanii. The collection was gradually enlarged through the efforts of faculty members in history, literature, and Balto-Slavic linguistics. 

In earlier decades, Penn was a leader in Baltic collecting. In 1952 the Library acquired the library of Dr. Jurgis Saulys. Lithuanian collecting was particularly strong from the 1960s-1980s, and Penn’s Lithuanian holdings from that era are significant.

The primary language currently collected is Russian. Areas of focus include history, political science, medieval studies, art, poetry, cultural history, and literary criticism. Recent changes include the acquisition of more non-Russian materials with an emphasis on certain key areas: Ukrainian works (especially poetry and materials related to the war), works from the Baltic states (especially Latvian and Lithuanian poetry), and works by and about indigenous and minority peoples in the Russian Federation, especially works from Siberia and the Far North (including Yakut, Komi, Udmurt, Chuvash, Evenk, Mari, and Kalmyk). Building on Penn's rich holdings of Russian children's books, we are now acquiring children's books in Russian and Ukrainian, both contemporary and antiquarian. New access to hundreds of periodicals (from the nineteenth-century to the present) has also recently been made available through the East View digital subscription databases.