To the left of the University is Herzen Street, one of the capital's street preserves. From the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries the road to the old Russian towns of Volokolamsk and Novgorod the Great ran along here. For many years this was one of the favourite residential areas of the nobility. Many of the houses built here at different periods are preserved as historical and architectural monuments.
      On the other side of Herzen Street is the "new" University building, erected by the architect Yevgraf Tyurin in the 1830s. A statue of the University's founder, Mikhail Lomonosov (1711-65) was set up in the courtyard in 1957 from a design by the sculptor Ivan Kozlovsky.

View of Moscow University (old building)

      The front facade of the Central Exhibition Hall, the former Manege, built in 1817 from a design by Auguste Montferrand to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the victory in the Patriotic War of 1812, faces Manezhnaya, named after the Manege, Square. In its day the Manege was considered a constructional "miracle" (engineer Augustin Betancourt).
      The huge hall of about 7,500 square metres (166 metres long and 45 metres wide) has a roof without a single supporting column.
      Originally it was intended for military reviews, parades and exercises. However, it soon began to be used for exhibitions, public entertainments and concerts. The decor of the building in the form of fasces, swords, helmets and other military regalia was added in 1824-5 under the supervision of the architect Osip Bove.
      The Manege also gave its name to the street which runs alongside the Alexandrovsky Gardens. Here at number 9 is a branch of the Central Lenin Museum, namely, the Flat Museum of Anna Ulyanova-Yelizarova, Lenin's elder sister, whom he often visited. A memorial plaque tells us that Inessa Armand (1874-1920), the eminent figure in the Russian and international workers' and communist movement, lived in the same building.
      Opposite the Manege, on the right-hand side of Mokhovaya Street is an administrative building.
      In 1905 the writer Maxim Gorky stayed in this building (which was then the Peterhof Hotel). His room became a base for the revolutionary fighting bands who took part in the armed uprising of December 1905.
      One of the facades of the former hotel looks onto Vozdviz-henka Street a radial thoroughfare which incorporates the ancient road to the towns of Mozhaisk and Smolensk. There is a fine view of the multi-storey buildings which line the modern section of the Novy Arbat Avenue from the bridge linking the Trinity Tower with the Kutafia Tower.
      The old town mansion in classical style at number 5 Vozdviz-henka Street houses the Shchusev Research Museum of Architecture. On the opposite side is the Union of Soviet Societies for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries at number 14. The next building (number 16), built in pseudo-Moresque style with an attic storey, a powerful portal and walls decorated with shells is now the House of Friendship with Peoples of Foreign Countries.
      On the left-hand corner of this street is the complex of the Lenin State Library of the USSR, the largest library in the Soviet Union and one of the largest in the world. It has more than thirty million books, journals, newspapers and other periodicals in almost 250 languages of the peoples of the Soviet Union and the world. The library's six blocks, including the nine-storey stack section, were built in 1928-9 from a design by the architects Vladimir Shchuko and Vladimir Gelfreikh. The broad colonnade which encloses a large terrace with flights of steps and monumental portico form a most impressive composition. The vertical structure of the building is emphasized by its elements, namely, the band of narrow windows in the stack section, the pylons of the facades and the sculptures on top of them. The rich decor includes bronze bas-reliefs of writers and scholars.