After Suvorov's capture of Warsaw in 1794, among the other trophies that fell to Russia was one of the richest libraries in Europe, known as the Warsaw Library and by the name of the Załuski Library, assembled in the eighteenth century by the eminent Poli

After Suvorov's capture of Warsaw in 1794, among the other trophies that fell to Russia was one of the richest libraries in Europe, known as the Warsaw Library and by the name of the Załuski Library, assembled in the eighteenth century by the eminent Polish patrons of learning, the brothers Józef Andrzej and Andrzej Stanisław Załuski. At that time the Warsaw library stood in the same rank as the library of the British Museum and the royal library in Paris: it held 400,000 volumes. When these treasures were brought to Saint Petersburg, the collection formed the foundation of the holdings of the Imperial Public Library. I should say at once that little of the Załuski Library survives today. In the 1920s Lenin returned 50,000 volumes from its holdings to Poland, and in 1944 it was first plundered amid the fires of the Warsaw Uprising and then burned by the Nazis. Only a part of the library has survived in Warsaw to our own day.