ABSTRACT
Nikolai Iakovlevich Marr played a huge role in the post-revolutionary history of the National Library of Russia. Although Marr’s ideology-driven linguistic theories have been discarded as seriously flawed after his death, they led him to lasting reforms within the Library. Thus the attempt of Marr to reform the activities of the Oriental Department of the Library, although not successful to the extent he had envisioned, did lead to the formation of a Department for National Literatures of the Soviet Union and the creation of a single catalogue of publications in the non-Slavonic languages of the peoples of the (former) Soviet Union.
