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# On the history of the Warsaw Library in Russia, there are interesting documents left by one of the first employees of the Imperial Library, Mikhail Ivanovich Antonovsky
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/kasatelno-istorii-varshavskoi-biblioteki-v-rossii-est-interesnye-dokumenty-odnogo-iz-pervykh-rabotnikov-imperatorskoi-biblioteki-antonovskogo-mikhaila-ivanovicha/
- Published: 2020-04-23T17:46:51.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:42:47.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archive, Books, Heritage, Saint Petersburg

On the history of the Warsaw Library in Russia, there are interesting documents left by one of the first employees of the Imperial Library, Mikhail Ivanovich Antonovsky. A writer, historian and translator, M.I. served the state in posts ranging from the Admiralty and the fleet to diplomatic errands. In 1790 Antonovsky was in Warsaw, where, by an amusing coincidence, he examined the public library of the Załuski brothers with the closest attention, as though sensing that this treasure would soon pass into Russian ownership.

And so it did. After various vicissitudes, including an arrest for improper thoughts about Russia and praise of the French Revolution (a matter Catherine II had to deal with in person, and in the end she acquitted the intellectual), M.I. was assigned to work in the "Imperial Public Library then being fitted out in Saint Petersburg". He is believed to have been the very man who proposed that name for the library.

Antonovsky was engaged in sorting the holdings of the Warsaw Library, systematising, describing, appraising and distributing them, and almost at once began to play a key role here. But within two years his affairs took a turn for the worse, owing to constant conflicts with the director of the library. This post had been given by Paul I, in defiance of his mother, who had criticised this personage and removed him from court, to the fugitive French diplomat Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier. After several years the Frenchman finally drove Mikhail Antonovsky out of the library, and he was dismissed in 1799.

And here begins the most interesting part.

The archive of the library's chancery preserves Antonovsky's file of 1797, from which it follows that Antonovsky had uncovered a criminal chain. M.I. alleged that, under the director's aegis, the most valuable manuscripts were vanishing from the still undescribed Warsaw holdings, and that Gouffier's foreign employees and associates were passing them on to their friends, among them the Pole Czacki, well known at the time.

Auguste Choiseul deliberately slowed the work of surveying the holdings so as to remove the most valuable items from them, and obstructed the drawing up of a plan for the library. By way of comparison: Antonovsky classified 150,000 volumes in 10 months, whereas Choiseul-Gouffier, in 2.5 years, without any plan whatever and with a large staff of highly paid, and specifically foreign, employees, managed to "put in order" a quarter of that volume. When Antonovsky exposed the scheme of manuscript theft and wrote a report on it to the director, he was dismissed on the spot, with the remark that while Choiseul lived he would never be a librarian nor set foot in the library.

Meanwhile the Frenchman, without the slightest fear, told everyone that the Russians had treated the precious Warsaw Library worse than the Hagarenes had treated the Library of Alexandria, and himself went on issuing passes to the library to countless foreigners, who rummaged openly in the repositories and stole the finest specimens they found. Honest staff began to vanish from the library. Rogues flourished. Large sums were allotted for copyists, but from Antonovsky's letter to the procurator we learn that the library had hired no copyists at all, and that there were neither receipts nor books to attest to their work.

Although Procurator General Lopukhin, the former Cabinet Minister Popov and the former Procurator General Prince Kurakin were all aware of the affair, Gouffier kept his post right up to 1800, when the Emperor saw fit to exile him to Lithuania. A. S. Stroganov was appointed the new director of the library, and Antonovsky was restored to service; in all he would work in the Imperial Library for 14 years, though in 1810 he was dismissed once more, this time over another scandal, connected with plagiarism in the published correspondence of Catherine II and Voltaire.