Princeton University Library holds the seventh largest collections of Slavic, East European and Eurasian materials in the United States — the fifth largest in the Northeast. These collections include many rare and unique materials, a selection of which are remotely accessible to interested researchers through the Library’s digital portals. Princeton’s most intensive collecting foci in Slavic are Russian and Soviet literature; performing arts in Russia and the Soviet Union; Russian and Soviet visual culture; political, social, and intellectual history of Eastern Europe, Russia, and the other territories of the former Soviet Union, including the history of science and pseudoscience; Soviet illustrated periodicals; and contemporary politics and society.

Among the collections’ brightest gems now made freely accessible via digitization are the papers of Russian poet Osip Mandel’shtam, annotated volumes of Russian poetry from the library of Vladimir Nabokov (including the working copy of Eugene Onegin he used when preparing his famous translation), and selections from the Cotsen Children’s Library’s holdings of Soviet-era children’s books.

Other components of the collections include a collection of Stagnation and Perestroika-era posters, and ephemera related to Moscow mayoral politics, and the ongoing Ukraine crisis.