while Charles was preoccupied in Poland. In July 1704 the Russian army returned to besiege Narva, held by a small Swedish garrison under general Horn. On August 20, 1704, Narva fell to Peter’s generals, Sheremetev, now field marshal, and the Austro-Scottish general Baron Georg Ogilvy. This victory strengthened Russia’s hold on the Baltic provinces and further weakened Sweden in its struggle with Peter. See also: GREAT NORTHERN WAR; PETER I; SWEDEN, RELATIONS WITH
The first battle of Narva on November 30, 1700, was Peter the Great’s first major defeat in the Great Northern War. Immediately after the Russian declaration of war in August 1700, Peter marched his army into Swedish territory to try to capture the port town of Narva in northeastern Estonia, and on September 16 laid siege to the city with some 34,000 men. Meanwhile Charles XII, the King of Sweden, defeated Peter’s ally Denmark and brought his army to Estonia to relieve the siege. By November 27 the Russians heard that the Swedes were approaching, and the next day Peter left the army to join the approaching Russian reinforcements. The Russian army deployed in a curved line running from south to northwest of Narva under the command of the recently arrived Belgian officer Duke Eugene de Croy. The traditional Russian gentry cavalry under the boyar Boris Sheremetev held the left (southern) flank near the Narova river. Generals Adam Weyde (a Dutchman) and prince Ivan Trubetskoy held the center, and general Avtomon Golovin the right with the guards regiments, also by the river. After approaching the Russian line in a blinding snowstorm, Charles attacked the Russian center about one o’clock in the afternoon, his right under general Welling smashing Weyde’s troops and the Swedish left under General Carl Gustaf Rehnsk?ld overrunning Trubetskoy. Only some of Golovin’s and Sheremetev’s men were able to escape, with Russian losses at least eight thousand killed. Peter’s army, only recently created along European lines, was smashed. The battle established the eighteen-year-old king of Sweden’s military reputation.
Peter returned to Novgorod with the remains of his army, which he rebuilt in the ensuing years
NARYSHKINA, NATALIA KIRILLOVNA
(1652-1694), second wife of Tsar Alexei (r. 1645-1676); mother of Peter I.
Natalia was the daughter of a minor nobleman who served for a time in Smolensk, but was related by marriage to the up-and-coming official Ar-tamon Matveyev, later head of the Foreign Office, who may have brought her to the attention of the recently bereaved Tsar Alexei. In 1671 she became the tsar’s second wife, giving birth to Peter (1672-1725), Natalia (1673-1716), and Fyodora (1674-1678.) Widowed in 1676, during the early years of the reign of her stepson Theodore Alex-eyevich (1676-1682), Natalia and her children were marginalized; however, when Theodore died in 1682, nine-year-old Peter was elected tsar with the patriarch’s support, and Natalia prepared to act as regent. She was thwarted by Tsarevna Sofia Alex-eyevna and her party, who secured the election of Tsarevich Ivan Alexeyevich as Peter’s co-tsar. The fact that Natalia feared for her son’s life during the riots of 1682 and felt vulnerable during Sofia’s regency may have made her over-protective. After Sofia was ousted in 1689 and the Naryshkins and their clients assumed leading posts, there was a clash of wills between mother and son over such issues as Peter’s sailing expeditions and his failure to attend official receptions. The only known portraits show Natalia in nun-like widow’s garb with head modestly covered. She exerted the traditional influence of a tsaritsa, raising the fortunes of her clan and their clients, operating her own patronage networks, and undertaking public activities such as alms-giving, visiting shrines, and attending appropriate court ceremonies, but the business of government remained in male hands. Natalia
NATIONAL LIBRARY OF RUSSIA
died in January 1694 and was laid to rest in the Ascension Convent in the Kremlin. She remains a shadowy figure. See also: ALEXEI MIKHAILOVICH; PETER I
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Longworth, Philip. (1984). Alexis: Tsar of All the Russias. London: Secker and Warburg. Thyret, Isolde. (2000). Between God and Tsar: Religious Symbolism and Royal Women of Muscovite Russia, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.
NATIONAL LIBRARY OF RUSSIA
The oldest state public library in Russia, the National Library of Russia is the second largest library in the Russian Federation, after the Russian State Library, with holdings of more than thirty-three million volumes, and a national center of librarianship, bibliography, and book studies.
Founded in St. Petersburg in 1795 by Empress Catherine II as the Imperial Public Library, the origins of the National Library of Russia lie in Catherine’s devotion to the philosophy of the Enlightenment in the early period of her reign. She envisioned a library that would serve as a repository for all books produced in the Russian empire, books published in Russian outside the empire, and books about Russia published in foreign languages, and that would be open to the Russian public for the purpose of general social enlightenment. The library officially opened to the public on January 2, 1814. The nucleus of the original collection was the collection, brought to St. Petersburg from Warsaw in 1795, of Counts J?zef Andrzej and Andrzej Stanislaw Zaluski, eminent Polish aristocrats and bibliophiles. In 1810 Tsar Alexander I signed a special statute designating the library as a legal depository entitled to receive two mandatory copies of imprints produced in the Russian empire. Throughout its history, the library has had an enormous influence on the political, cultural, and scientific life of Russia.
From 1845 to 1861 the library administered the Rumyantsev Museum that was later moved to Moscow and eventually became the Russian State Library. In March 1917 the Imperial Public Library was renamed the Russian Public Library. With the consolidation of Soviet power its status was redefined, and in 1925 its name changed to State Public Library in Leningrad, as it was designated the national library of the RSFSR, while the V. I. Lenin State Library of the USSR (later the Russian State Library) assumed the function of all-union state library. In 1932 it was renamed Saltykov-Shchedrin State Public Library, and a Soviet title of honor was added to its name in 1939. The library continued to function during the siege of Leningrad from 1941 to 1944, despite the evacuation of valuable materials. The Zaluski collection was returned to Poland between 1921 and 1927 and destroyed during World War II. In 1992, after the dissolution of the USSR, the facility acquired the name Russian National Library and became one of two national libraries in the Russian Federation.
The library possesses the world’s most complete collection of Russian books and periodicals. Among the highlights of the collections are Slavonic incunabula and other early printed works produced within and outside of Russia, including two-thirds of all known sixteenth-century Cyrillic imprints, and all the known publications of Frantsysk Skaryna; the largest collection of books from the Petrine era printed in civil script; and the Free Russian Press collection of approximately 15,000 illegal publications dating from 1853 to 1917. The Manuscript Division holds the world’s richest collection of Old Russian and Slavonic manuscripts from the eleventh to the seventeenth century. The number of its manuscripts exceeds 400,000, in more than fifty languages. Among the library’s other treasures are some 250,000 foreign imprints about Russia produced before 1917, approximately 6,000 incunabula reflecting the growth of printing in western Europe in the fifteenth century, and the personal library of Voltaire, consisting of some 7,000 volumes. It possesses archives of more than 1,300 public figures, writers, scholars, artists, composers, architects, and others, including Peter I, Catherine II, Nicholas II, Mikhail Kutuzov, Alexander Suvorov, Gavriil Derzhavin, Ivan Krylov, Vasily Zhukovsky, Alexander Griboyedov, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Vissarion Belinsky, Alexander Herzen, Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Blok, Zinaida Gippius, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Joseph Brodsky, Ivan Kramskoy, Boris Kustodiev, Ilya Repin, Vasily Stasov, Mikhail Glinka, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Peter Tchaikovsky, Fyodor Chaliapin, and Michel Fokine.
The main building, completed in 1801 on the corner of Nevsky Prospect and Sadovaya Street, was designed in the classical style by Yegor Sokolov.
NATIONALISM IN THE ARTS
Additions to the building were made over the years, and a large facility was completed in 1998 on Moskovsky Prospect. By virtue of its longstanding role as custodian of Russia’s cultural heritage, the library holds a unique place in Russian history and is recognized as one of the foremost cultural institutions of the Russian Federation. See also: ARCHIVES; CATHERINE II; EDUCATION; GOLDEN AGE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE; RUSSIAN STATE LIBRARY
