One of Moscow’s oldest public libraries, it was created in 1848 when Russian merchant and bibliophile Mikhail Vivien opened his private collection of nine thousand books to the public. It has had the name of Nikolai Dobrolyubov since 1919. On its 100th anniversary in 1948, the library moved to its current location in a building designed by the architect Ivan Zholtovsky on Smolenskaya Square.