Russian Collection
JNU Central Library has a whole floor assigned to Russian language reading materials. The eighth floor of the JNU Central Library has collection of only Russian materials including Textbooks, Books, Journals, Newspapers, etc. It has a collection of more than 70,000 books, which includes Textbooks for beginners, Grammar Books, Dictionaries from Russian to English and English to Russian, as well as Hindi to Russian and Russian to Hindi and Russian to some other Indian languages like Bengali, Tamil, etc., in a multiple of subjects like Scientific dictionaries which include Dictionaries of Biological Terms, Dictionaries of Technical Terms, Dictionaries of Chemical Terms; Dictionaries of Literary Terms; Dictionaries of Basic Terms; Encyclopedias, etc. The Dictionaries that are available on the eight floor are very rare collections because such Dictionaries are not available in markets anymore, neither in India nor abroad. Even if one manages to find such a Dictionary in market, it is very costly.
Eighth floor of JNU Central Library has books on literary works of Russian writers right from XVIIIth century onwards, and some literary works even predate these. In Literature Section there are books which are kept chronologically as per the Century and Decade they belong to, as well as in the alphabetical order of the writers Surnames, like Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Dostoevsky and so on. It has collected and selected works of the famous Russian writers in Volumes. Some of these collections have up to fifty volumes. Also, there are translated versions of these famous literary works in English as well as Hindi like Gorky’s “Mother”, which helps the students who are new to Russian language and are just beginning this course, to read and understand the vastness and greatness of Russian Literature.
The Russian Section of JNU Central Library also has collection of books on Linguistics, Grammar, Morphology, Lexicology, Syntax, etc. that are very helpful for the students of Russian language. These books are written by such famous people like Wagner, Pulkina, Khavronina, etc. This collection includes books and textbooks written on these above-mentioned subjects by the JNU Faculty members of Centre of Russian Studies, SLL&CS and Faculty of some other Centres as well. These books have also become so rear these days that they are not available anywhere in markets, not only in India but worldwide. These collections of books, including the Dictionary collection that the eighth floor of the JNU Central Library has are priceless.
The Russian Section of JNU Central Library has recently updated its collection of books. Earlier it had books which had been published in the erstwhile USSR. Now it has procured books which have been published after the breakdown of USSR into fifteen CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) countries, i.e., books which were published in and after 1991. It is getting books not only from Russian Publication Houses but also from Publication Houses of these fifteen CIS countries including Ukraine, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and so on. Now it has the latest collection of books and journals on almost all the fields, including Law, History, Science, Humanities and so on. The Russian Section of the JNU Central Library has the largest collection of Russian language books in India.