History and Culture: Sarapul to host the "Brockhaus and Efron. The History of the Encyclopedic Dictionary" exhibition

Until the end of 2020, the Academician Nikolai Melnikov Memorial House-Museum in Sarapul (Udmurt Republic) hosts an exhibition project marking the 130th anniversary of the release of the first volume of the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary. The encyclopedia was the first and very successful publication of this kind in Russia.

The multivolume dictionaries and encyclopedias included scientific knowledge of several centuries. The Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary is a real treasury of knowledge published in Russia in the late XIX - early XX centuries.

The Brockhaus and Efron printing house, which existed in Saint-Petersburg from 1889 to 1930, is famous for its encyclopedias. It was established by the Saint-Petersburg publisher and typographer Ilya Efron and the German F. A. Brockhaus printing house (Leipzig) on the initiative of the literary critic, historian, bibliographer Semyon Vengerov. They aimed to publish the Encyclopedic Dictionary. A total of 82 main and 4 additional volumes had been issued from 1890 to 1907.

The original idea of the dictionary was to repeat the German edition, but then the concept changed. It was decided to create a more readable Russian dictionary. In the beginning, the encyclopedia contained mainly Russian translations of the articles from the German encyclopedia, with a small adaptation for the Russian reader. Professor Ivan Andreevsky was the chief editor of the first eight volumes. These volumes provoked a lot of criticisms about the quality of the translation.

A new period in the history of the encyclopedia began when the editorial board included many prominent scientists and philosophers of that time: chemist Dmitry Mendeleev, literary historian Semyon Vengerov, botanist Andrei Beketov, philosopher Vladimir Soloviev and others. From this moment on, the encyclopedia launched its original articles. The attention was paid to issues related to Russian history, culture and geography. Translated articles were replaced by original papers. The dictionary engaged new authors, which altered the very nature of the publication. A banal encyclopedia turned into a collection of the latest achievements and discoveries in all fields of science and technology.

The Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary was respected as one of the world's best universal encyclopedias. It was not only an analogue of the German Brockhaus, the French Larousse or the English Britannica. The Russian dictionary surpassed them, distinguished by the diversity of topics and the depth of scientific information.

The Academician Nikolai Melnikov Memorial House-Museum arranged a new exhibition project on the second floor. The exposition features several volumes of the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary. It also presents other Russian encyclopedic publications issued in the pre-revolutionary and Soviet years. Among the exhibits are: "Reference Encyclopedic Dictionary" by Albert Starchevsky - the first completed Russian encyclopedia; "Big Encyclopedia. Dictionary of Public Information on All Branches of Knowledge" by Sergei Yuzhakov and Pavel Milyukov - the multivolume encyclopedia of pre-revolutionary Russia; "The Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Granat Russian Bibliographical Institute"; "Great Soviet Encyclopedia" - the most famous and complete universal publication.