Description of the attraction
At the end of the nineteenth century, on a vacant lot located at the corner of Moskovskaya and Gorky (formerly Aleksandrovskaya) streets, construction began on a building intended for the city library, public auditorium and a cinema. The idea to combine several directions of the city's cultural activities under one roof was an architectural innovation at that time and belonged to the Petersburg architect N. M. Proskurin.
The asymmetrical building, which opened its doors in 1899, drew controversial criticism: windows of different sizes and shapes, projections of projections, and "scattered" buildings. All parts of the building are grouped around the main objects - the halls of the cinema and the library.
The library, which existed in Saratov since 1831 only on paper and previously occupied temporary premises, has finally found a house with a spacious reading room and a room for storing books. Nowadays, the Saratov Regional Scientific Library, being the main book depository of the region (2.5 million rare editions), occupies the entire building and is considered the educational, information and cultural center of the city.
The public auditorium, which had at its disposal a spacious hall for holding public readings, meetings, lectures and exhibitions, now functions as a conference hall of the library, where contemporary figures of culture and science perform.
"Reasonable cinema", located in a multifunctional building, initially showed newsreels for students of schools and gymnasiums, later an art cinema, having changed several names, became one of the most popular and visited in Saratov. In the 1990s, it served commercial purposes until it was handed over to the library.
The building of the regional scientific library is a cultural landmark of Saratov and is an architectural monument.
