From great to ridiculous: unknown facts from the lives of famous people are revealed by the Presidential Library

The Electronic Fund of the Presidential Library, numbering more than 600 thousand units today, is not accidentally called the national treasury of the history of Russia, and documents and books digitized by library specialists - "registered in eternity". Here you can find royal decrees, first editions of Ivan Fyodorov's printing house, official biographies of prominent statesmen, and little-known facts from their life. In this "history in gigabytes" there was also a place for amusing cases and curiosities, which sometimes occurred with the powerful of this world.

Here, in particular, one can learn about the first emperor of Russia from the resources of the Presidential Library.

... One day Peter I "left the pier of Arkhangelskaya to the ocean, and such a terrible storm arose, that all of the former came in extreme terror", I. Golikov writes in a book from the Electronic Fund of the Presidential Library "Supplement to the Acts of Peter the Great. V. 17. Contains anecdotes relating to this great sovereign" (1796). - Only the sovereign seemed insensitive to the rage of a raging sea. He went to the coachman, the local Nyughon peasant Antilu Panov; when the sovereign began to point out where the ship should go, he answered with rudeness: go, perhaps, away, I know where I rule. He steered the ship between the underwater rocks and pinned to the shore, then the Monarch approached Antilou: do you remember, brother, what words on the ship I was repaired? The peasant, in fear, fell at the feet of the monarch, confessed his rudeness and asked for pardon. The great sovereign raised him and, three times kissing his head, said: you are not to blame for anything, my friend; and I still have to thank you for your answer and your art. And he determined his annual pension to death".

Peter I was on foreign trips more often than any of his companions, but it is difficult to suspect the Russian Tsar in blind love for everything foreign: he went by sea and land to foreign lands one of the desire to enlighten and modernize his state. In 1690, a decree was promulgated allowing the nobility to travel outside the Fatherland and ordering everyone to appear before the trip to the Tsar for instruction: "by his state and ability to notice what to learn the most".

In 1717, Peter the Great visited Paris. Not at all in pursuit of the beauties and adventures described by the Epicurean Lefort, whom the retinue whispered behind the back of the emperor. From an electronic copy of M. Poludensky's book "Peter the Great in Paris" (1865) from the Presidential Library, one can find out what the emperor was most interested in this city: "At ten o'clock in the evening Peter and Marshal Tesse accompanying him came to Paris and stopped at the Louvre , in the rooms of the late widowed queen. Here Peter stayed with three quarters of an hour, looked at two tables, covered for 60 people, asked for bread and radish, drank two glasses of beer and went to the house of Marshal Veilleroy, in which he intended to live. He refused the Louvre and asked that he not be constrained in his actions; apparently, he thought the premise in the Louvre was too magnificent, and he left".

On the first day after his arrival, the tsar's majesty deigned to be at the manufactures, "where they make trellises, he was in anatomy, in glass factories ... The tsar honored with his visit the academy, looked with interest at all the cars presented to him. Master of mathematical tools Buterfield spoke with Peter in Dutch, without an interpreter; the king ordered him several instruments ... Upon his return to Russia, Peter received the news of his election as a member of the Paris Academy of Science".

Being in Paris, the Emperor ordered to make a bath for the grenadiers on the banks of the Seine, "so that they could bathe". Such an extraordinary sight attracted a lot of onlookers. The French watched in astonishment as the soldiers, heated by the steam bath, rushed into the river, swam and dived. Royal officer Verton, attached to the Russian emperor, asked Peter "it's a disgrace to forbid it, otherwise they'll all die". The Emperor, having laughed, answered: "Do not be afraid, monsieur Verton. Soldiers from the French air somewhat weakened - and so they temper themselves with a Russian bath. We have it in winter - we have a habit of that ...".

... Comic and dramatic, little known and so popular that they are attributed to folk art, but always the real facts from the history of our country you can find in electronic copies of unique publications stored in the Presidential Library.