Konstantin Nikolaevich Derunov

Born June 1 (13), 1866, in St. Petersburg; died July 29, 1929, in Moscow. Soviet librarian and bibliographer.

Derunov studied at the University of St. Petersburg. However, because he was arrested in 1887 and exiled for participation in the Narodnik (Populist) revolutionary movement, he did not graduate. He began his library work in 1898 in Nizhny Novgorod, and in 1902 he returned to St. Petersburg, where he worked in the library of the Ministry of Finance.

After the October Revolution he worked at a number of important Moscow libraries.

Derunov’s main work was A Model Library Catalog: A List of the Best Books Published in Russian From the 1860’s Through 1905 (parts 1-2, 1906; 2nd ed., 1908-11). A valuable appendix to the second edition of the Model Library Catalog is the “Composite Guide to Journal Book Reviews From 1847 to 1907,” which is partly based on information in Derunov’s unpublished Bibliography of Russian Reviews, a guide containing about 300,000 reviews that were printed in 332 Russian periodicals from 1850 to 1927. Derunov also wrote other important works, such as The Vital Tasks of Bibliography (1913) and Typical Features of the Evolution of the Russian Public Library (1924).