In the celebration of 250 years of the Russian Academy of Arts

Postcards of photographs by A. Pavlovich, who worked on the Community of St. Eugenia for many years, first appeared in 1911. They showed interiors of the Academy and, in particular, its Library.

A. Pavlovich. The bottom of the front staircase. 1911	A. Pavlovich. The sculpture on the staircase. 1911	A. Pavlovich. The Library. 1911	A. Pavlovich. The reading room at the library. 1911

Reading rooms of the academic library can be also seen on postcards by other publishers. One of them keeps alive the memory of the Society for Library Science that had became organized and operated exactly at the academic library since 1908.

Postcards, dedicated to the Academy, continued to come out in Petrograd (the city's name between 1914 and 1924) before the revolution of 1917. As a result of straitened circumstances of war years, they are distinguished from previous copies for fuzzy printed image and cardboard of poor quality.

The Academy of Arts [between 1914 and 1917]	The Library of the Imperial Academy of Arts [between 1914 and 1917]	The Library of the Imperial Academy of Arts [between 1914 and 1917]

Views of the Academy on postcards again appeared only in the second half of the 1920s, when publishing were beginning to be restored in the country. The view, shown on the postcard Petrograd. The Academy of Arts, was published by A. Kononov under the title Leningrad. The State Academy of Arts. Howerver, it was naturally impossible to only reproduce historic photographs under modern titles. In the late 1920s - early 1930s, «GIZ» (standing for «State Publisher») issued a postcard, similar in composition to the previous version — a view of the Academy from the opposite bank of the Neva Riva. At the same time «GIZ» published other postcards with different colour tints and reprint them more than once.

The State Academy of Arts [between 1924 and 1929]	The Higher Art and Technical Institute [between 1929 and 1932]	The Academy of Arts, the principal entry. 1929

The postcard, showing a view of the principal entry to the Academy, contains an funny misprint: it was mistakenly called «The Anichkov Bridge One of sculptures by Peter Klodt» in a run of OGIZ-IZOGIZ.

The Academy on the photograph by V. Presniakov serves just as a background for city-dwellers, while both the photographer and a spectator is very much interested to look at people, gathering on granite steps leading down to the water. If we give credence to figures on the reverse side, this postcard was published, at the least, five times in a large run of 35,000 copies and once in a run of 15.000 copies (at that, the photograph was named only in one of the six runs). So the total quantity of copies in print amounts to an unthinkable number.

V. Presniakov. The Neva River Embankment and the building of the Academy of Arts of the USSA [1929]	The Neva River Embankment at the building of the Institute of Proletarian Arts [between 1929 and 1932]

The collection of the National Library of Russia reflects a variety of photographic postcards featuring the Academy of Arts, issued in Russia during the period of the first three tens of the twentieth century. They depict the many different sides of the Academy from the architecture of its facade and interiors, views of reading rooms to work of arts from the holdings of the Museum of the Academy. In addition to this, postcards dating from the soviet period are notable for their historical content. They bears a vivid imprint of the time of structural reconstructions and renamings of the Academy: The Former Academy of Arts, now VKhUTEIN, and The Former Academy of Arts of the USSA, and The Institute of Proletarian Arts (the Former the Academy of Arts of the USSA)… - all these titles can been seen on the reverse side of the same postcard published in divers runs.

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