On your teacher portal Gadoterate.Russia recalls one of her students – head of the children’s room “of a Foreigner”, a translator who specializes in Scandinavia Olga Maeots, which considers it unfair that the Creator remained partly in the shadow of his creation.
Margarita Rudomino called his creation “my eldest child”. And starting from scratch for 50 years that she headed the Library for foreign literature, she turned her into a worldwide known unique repository of books with more than four million volumes on more than one hundred languages. Academician Dmitry Likhachev called Rudomino “great librarian”. And everyone else thought her a legend still, after her so many times managed to do the impossible!
Margarita Rudomino have created a Library as a repository of books, “special Deposit”, and as an open source of knowledge. Already in the 1920-ies the Foreigner begins to look for a new reader – not only among the “bourgeois” intellectuals and academic scholars, but also to prepare a new “readers ‘ personnel” – workers who may more recently, and in their native language, something not know how to read.
the Mini-libraries are created in factories and even in city parks! The librarians travelled to the parks with their gramophones and twisted dialogues from textbooks. Then it was brand new. Even Krupskaya praised me: “You happen to be a lot of work to do! You do our people learn a foreign language! Well done you!”. The work of librarians-teachers was so successful that the courses in the “Foreigner” became the basis for the creation of the new University – Institute of foreign languages.
Surprising: the country is singing “If tomorrow war, if tomorrow a campaign…” then, a decade later, begins to erect an “iron curtain”, and a handful of librarians, headed by its indefatigable Director in Moscow collects books from all over the world. How important were meetings with foreign writers, giving the opportunity for live chatting over all iron curtains! Richard Aldington, Pablo Neruda, James Aldridge, John Steinbeck, Herluf Bidstrup, Jean Richard Bloch.
in the 1930s “the Foreigner” received international recognition. As a result of this valuable collection: “the Gift of the Spanish people”, given to the Spanish Republic by the Soviet Union in 1937, and then the collection of documents of the French Resistance, Georges collected by Novel, books sent by the American organization “Society of Russian aid in the war” – each with the bookplate of the “Heroic people of the Soviet Union from the people of America.”
For the reconstruction of the great Patriotic war national economy was necessary specialists who have mastered modern science and technology. And “the Foreigner”, conceived as “neuphilologische library” (it appeared-initially at the same�� Institute, founded the native aunt Rudomino – E. Y. Kester), dramatically changes your profile and opens the natural science hall, where experts of different fields could find relevant information. That gave a real breakthrough in the work of Soviet scientists for a long time was in isolation.
After the war, Margarita Ivanovna Rudomino was sent to Germany to work with cultural values – search for exported from the Soviet book collection and dismantling of remaining unattended in the devastated country of the library’s collection. Much was then taken to the USSR as reparations, but much was saved and returned to Germany, for which German libraries, by the way, were thanked M. I. Rudomino. So, in the number taken out was the famous Gutenberg Bible. This valuable monument of world culture in Soviet years was kept in a secret safe in the Lenin library. About the tragic fate of the Bible know a few. And no one dared not to protest – even to recall. But Margarita dared to stand up for the prisoner: once at the beginning of the perestroika ideological grip in the country, she appealed to the CPSU Central Committee and reminded of the need to produce the Gutenberg Bible from captivity to return it to the cultural context. Alas, got the eternal answer: “Margarita, wait. Not time yet…” I had to Wait another 20 years.
