The Library of Professor Anthony Cross
'The Collection of Professor Anthony Cross' is now housed at the Hillwood Museum, Washington DC, in the United States of America. The collection, built by a leading expert on Russia over the course of sixty years, includes books in Russian, English, French and German on literature, art, architecture, drama, history, freemasonry, history of science, geography, bibliography, St Petersburg, and much else.
The LITERATURE section includes works by, and studies on, all the leading authors of eighteenth-century Russia. It has numerous anthologies and histories of eighteenth-century literature; a complete set of XVIII vek, almost all with multiple author dedications; all the eighteenth-century volumes of the Biblioteka poeta (bol'shaia i malaia serii). Such authors as Fonvizin, Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Radishchev, Dashkova, Zhukovskii are well represented, but it has an especially strong section on Karamzin. The collection includes almost all of the rare nineteenth-century monographs by such as Starchevskii (1849) Pogodin (1866), Sipovskii (1899), the 12-volume French translation of his Istoriia Gosudarstva Rossiiskogo by St Thomas and Jaufret (Paris 1819); the 1804 English translation of his tales; the 1866 edition of his letters to Dmitriev and other rare early publications; and many other such works. There are a number of rare editions published in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, notably Lomonosov's Petr Velikii: geroicheskaia poema, Canto I-II (1760), Kniazhnin's Smert' Pompeeva (1775), Derzhavin's Sochineniia, part 3 (1831) and Karamzin's Novye Marmontelevy povesti (1822). Several volumes of the Izvestiia Rossiiskoi akademii (1817).
There are good sections on the ENLIGHTENMENT and FREEMASONRY. Particular notable are first editions of monographs by Pypin, Longinov, Vernadskii, Barskov as well as the huge Istoriia masonstva v ego proshlom i nastoiashchem (1917).
Among the books on Russian eighteenth-century LANGUAGE and linguistics, there is the very rare two-volume Novyi leksikon by Ivan Sots (Moscow 1784 - Novikov press) and vol. 2 of Heim's Dictionnaire russe-francois-allemand (Riga, 1804) with the ownership inscription of the Earl of Guildford, Frederick, Lord North.
The HISTORY section is also very strong, probably in excess of 400 volumes. Particularly well represented are particularly the reigns of Peter I (120 volumes) and Catherine II (90). Also lots of monographs on individuals like Menshikov, Potemkin and the Vorontsov family. Among the rarities on Peter are: several eighteenth-century editions of English works on Peter I, i.e. Mottley (1740) and Banks (1744). There are eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century editions of Voltaire (English, 1769 and French), Ségur (1825) and Perin's Abrégé (1808), with numerous later nineteenth-century works, such as Venevitinov's Russkie v Gollandii (1897), and later Bogoslovskii's Oblastnaia reforma (1902), On Catherine II, William Tooke's Life of Catharine II (3 vols. 1800), Authentic memoirs of Catharine II (1797), the Herzen edition of Catharine's Memoirs (London, 1859), and a first edition of Brikner's 3-vol history of Catherine, among others. There are quite a number of catalogues of exhibitions on Peter and Catherine.
The FINE ART section covers not only painting and engraving but also architecture, sculpture, gem stones, ceramics, numismatics, museums,heraldry, genealogy. There are basic monographs on many of the leading eighteenth-century artists, e.g. Borovikovskii, Losenko, Levitskii, as well as on the Baroque, Classicism etc. Similarly on architects including foreign masters such as Cameron and Quarenghi. it also contains the full four-volume set of P. Petrov's Sbornik materialov dlia istorii Imp. Akademii khudozhestv (1864) and some other very rare items.
There is an excellent section on the history of ST PETERSBURG, which includes many nineteenth-century studies but also a great many small-edition booklets and brochures.
In addition there are complete sets of Velikaia reforma (6 vols, 1911) and Tri veka (6 vols, 1912).
Finally, Professor Cross has included in the donation hundreds of offprints and several metres of his personal files on individual authors and subjects.
