Trial – East View Russian digital archives: Niva and Vestnik Evropy

We are trialling East View’s digital archives of two Russian periodicals – Niva and Vestnik Evropy – until 12 December 2021.

Niva was a popular journal of late 19th-century Russia.

Niva an illustrated weekly journal of literature, politics and modern life, was published from 1870 to 1918 in St. Petersburg, before being shut down by the Bolsheviks after the Russian revolution. The journal was widely read by an audience that extended from primary schoolteachers, rural parish priests, and the urban middle class to the gentry. It was especially popular among the middle class in the Russian provinces. Niva contained large coloured prints of art by famous Russian artists, works of famous Russian authors, as well as articles on science, politics and culture. It also had a special children’s section as well as a section on Russian classical writers: Gogol, Lermontov, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and many others. The Taylorian has only a few issues of Niva in our holdings (stored offsite).

The Vestnik Evropy digital archive, covering the years 1802-1830, complements our printed set of Vestnik Evropy (Viestnik Evropy) held at the Taylorian which starts in 1866 and continues up to the Revolution. The journal Vestnik Evropy is among the earliest and most influential literary and political journals of Russia. The founder of the journal was the writer and historian Nikolai Karamzin. We have a set of Vestnik Evropy (1866-1917) (in over 300 individual volumes) in the Taylorian Basement.

Please send any feedback on the trials to nick.hearn@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.