Prague, Feb 2 (CTK) – The Czech National Library (NK) takes part in the creation of a comprehensive catalogue of the Russian press published outside Russia itself within the project Emigre Affairs, the NK has said on its webpage.
The catalogue, available at http://emigrantica.ru, gives the clue of where specific titles can be found in global libraries and which issues are available, the NK said.
The project is an affair of the Slav Library as one of its fields.
Its collection of the periodicals of the Russian and Ukrainian emigrations are unique in the whole world.
In 2016, the Slav Library sent the data on 226 periodicals published by the Russian emigration between 1918 and 1945 to the catalogue.
Now it sent the data on another 2596 titles for processing to it. They have been published since the second half of the 19th century and the present.
In the Western European centre of the Russian political emigration such as London, Paris, Geneva, Zurich, Leipzig, Berlin, Dresden and Brussels, many periodicals were appearing in the second half of the 19th century.
The periodicals of Russian leftist organisations date back to the early 20th century.
Most records sent from the NK are made of valuable periodicals published in the world in the interwar period.
In 2007, UNESCO had the collection listed within its Memory of the World.
The era after World World Two is represented by the titles primarily published in Germany, France and the USA.
However, the collection lacks the titles from the Czechoslovak Communist era (1948-1989), when the acquisition of Western literature was very difficult.
The collection of emigre periodicals in the Slav Library is comprised of roughly 2000 titles of magazines and 2500 newspaper titles.
They reflected the variegated social and demographic structure of the emigration, its mentality, views, disputes and illusions.
There is a wide span from monarchist and fascist tendencies to the Trotskyist opposition in the Russian papers and from the nationalist to the leftist and pro-Communist in the Ukrainian papers.
Along with the collection of periodicals, the Slav Library contains a large valuable collection of books written by emigre Russians and Ukrainians.
The UNESCO Memory of the World Register is designed to save the most precious documents and provide access to it.
The Czech Republic has five items in it, including the collections of the periodicals of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian emigrations.
