An article by Dr Stefan Rygiel, director of the Vilnius Library, entitled "The Library of Vilnius. "W Biblioteka Wileńska" published in the periodical "Świat", 1924, no. 37, pp. 6-8 (public domain, reprinted after KUL University Library) tells of the difficult history of the library and its collections due to the repressions it suffered after the outbreak of the November Uprising. He also talks about its reopening and subsequent also not easy fate after Poland regained its independence.

A modernised reading of the text

Library of the Stefan Batory University in Vilnius.

Until recently, Polish society in Vilnius had only resorted to the Public Library, established in 1867, in times of exceptional need, in the distressing awareness that it was, by its very purpose, one of the strongest links in the chain of Russification imposed on the Polish identity of the city. The tradition of the old University bookshop had died out, and a 35-year gap in this area of cultural life, since the former University was closed down and completely deported, had weaned Polish society from the use of official scientific and educational institutions.

As early as 1832, as a political repression and in order to completely cut off the borderland society from the sources of Polish national culture, the university book collection was divided between the Russian universities and the ephemeral successor institutions of the Vilnius University. This means that absolutely everything was taken out of the Vilnius Library, and the present library has nothing in common with the former university library, apart from its name - even though it is housed in different premises.

What we find there today was the result of a series of repressive acts after the fall of the January Uprising, namely the confiscation of monastery, school and private book collections of the so-called North-Western Land, and of a specially assembled humanities section, which again included literature on the borderlands to prove their Prussian culture and to create a specially Russified Bibliotheca Patria. Not surprisingly, the Polish management of the Library has for the past five years been faced with the extremely complex task of modernising it and adapting it to the multifaceted needs of Polish society, and giving it the foundations required by adapting it also to the needs of the University. With this in mind, the purchases made and the numerous donations made over the past five years have amounted to more than 26,000 works. In particular, the donations of a number of our scholars and other individuals and institutions have enriched the Library with a number of select collections of works from various fields of knowledge.

A great deal of work was needed to remove the Museum from the Library building and from the parallel Museum, to adapt the vacated rooms for strictly library purposes, to find out about the inherited book and manuscript holdings, many of which were devoid of card catalogues (hidden under the floorboards by the Russians during the evacuation and only found by accident a few years later), to catalogue these numerous acquisitions, and to assiduously and skilfully incorporate them into the apparently overcrowded storerooms. The development of our institution over the past five years has been extremely adversely affected by three circumstances: the lack of continuity in the management, the general lack of qualified library staff in Poland, and last but not least the widespread poverty of state subsidies for scientific institutions.

Originally, the directorship rested in the hands of the distinguished Polish historian and indefatigable St Petersburg activist, Professor Stanisław Ptaszycki. Unfortunately, he was soon called back to Lublin by other obligations, and from 1920 to the beginning of the current year, the Library worked under a temporary headship, and an inexorable death tore this temporary thread apart: the unforgettable co-founder of the renewed Vilnius University, the late Ludwik Janowski, died already in 1921, and his temporary successor, the irreverent historian Professor Witold Nowodworski, died last autumn.

It is to the credit of the first Polish director and his deceased deputies that they initiated the adaptation of the Library to the needs of the university, and initiated its recovery from the state of chaos in which it had been left by the Tsarist authorities and the Bolshevik and Lithuanian occupiers. The last Russian director of the Library, Mitovidov, evacuated the entire extremely valuable Slavonic-Ruthenian prints section to the Rumyantsev Museum in Moscow in 1915, which contained 250 works, 2,835 manuscripts, of which he primarily selected parchment diplomas and the oldest paper ones, as well as several hundred incunabula and 16th century prints.

The negotiations of our Special Delegation in Moscow for the return of these treasures on the basis of the Riga Treaty have not yet yielded positive results. In spite of this loss, more than 4000 manuscripts have been preserved in the Library (only a third of them have been catalogued, the rest are awaiting scientific study), about 300,000 prints, including tens of thousands of doublets, about 1000 prints of the 16th century, 2000 engravings, 500 valuable maps and atlases, a collection of seal presses, many engraved plates and so on.It is the task of the foreseeable future to make these numerous collections, which are of great value to science, widely available, once they have been properly arranged, described and conveniently and purposefully arranged.

The past academic year has been devoted to reorganisation work, aiming to organise and harmonise the various technical and library attempts made so far, and to base the book movement and the entire library mechanism on the principles of scientific organisation of work. For the time being, a strict division of functions and locations has been achieved, with all agencies directly aimed at readers, such as the public, professors' and periodicals' reading rooms, as well as the lending library and catalogues, concentrated on the ground and first floors, and all functions connected with purely internal work, preparing books for circulation, and the storerooms - on the upper floors.

The soon-to-be-expanded ground-floor premises of the Library will make it possible for a wider public and university to use the Library more extensively than before, on the basis of new regulations recently drawn up and still in the process of being approved by the higher authorities. Only this constitution, which the Library has so far lacked in spite of five years of Polish management, will give it a proper basis for functioning and development. The second obstacle to the proper organisation of the Library is the insufficient number of professional library staff.

This is due to the inadequate scientific endowment from the very beginning of the Library's existence and to its abnormal, and as yet undetermined by statute, relationship to the state's chief library authority (the Library Department of the State M.W.R. and O.P.) on the one hand, and the University on the other. Once again, the principles of austerity and impassability of the current year's budget for the coming financial year do not augur an imminent improvement in the financial and staffing conditions of our library, which could not be put on a firm financial footing before the advent of the Treasury's sanction.