About the Project

The Turgenev Library was founded by German Alexandrovich Lopatin and sponsored by Ivan Turgenev in 1875 to create a book depository for Russian-speaking revolutionary youth emigrants in France. Turgenev lived in Paris at that time, and his personal books formed a basis for the new library, which was therefore named after him. Having always lacked funding, supported only by the voluntary help of a librarian, the library changed location for several times in the decades after Turgenev’s death. World War I and the Russian revolution brought an influx of new émigrés, which supplied the Library with ample readership and prompted it to move to yet a new location, to accommodate all the enthusiastic readers. Nonetheless, the queue would often line up from within the library to the street. In the 1930s, the collections of the Library reached 100,000 volumes, among which the most precious are the complete sets of periodicals. In 1937, the Library moved into a new, larger location, as it entered a period of great prosperity, which unfortunately did not last long – in September 1940, it was plundered by German authorities under the order of Rosenberg.

Having lived in Paris before World War I, and spent many hours at the Turgenev Library, Ilya Ehrenburg wrote of its “dramatic” fate in his memoir People, Years and Life (Люди, годы, жизнь), published in Novyi Mir in 1960. Fellow émigré reader Nina Berberova vividly recounted her own first-hand experience with the Library’s tragic demise in 1940, a poignant story full of twists and turns. In an endnote, Berberova provided a brief update on post-war efforts to rebuild the Turgenev Library, with a preserved collection from the old site as well as newly gathered books. As an integral part of this rebuilding process, historian Patricia Grimsted meticulously traced the whereabouts of the Library’s plundered collections, scattered across Europe and ex-Soviet territories. The results of her detective work was published in a monograph, The Odyssey of the Turgenev Library from Paris, 1940–2002: Books as Victims and Trophies of War. Meanwhile, Tatiana Ossorguine-Bakounine, the Secretary-General of the Turgenev Library Association during more than forty years, devoted herself to the rebirth of the library, and edited a collection of essays on its historical background, as well as several other volumes of references works on Russian emigration in Europe.

These are almost all the literature available on the Turgenev Library. Most of them investigate the aftermath of the demise (post-1940), or recollect the early history (pre-1918). But what happened in between? “It continued to exist after the revolution; only the readers changed,” wrote Ehrenburg. Who were the readers at the Turgenev Library during these interwar years? What books did they borrow? Where did they live? How did the Library operate? How did it keep track of its books and members? What was the role of the librarian? What was the role of the Library in émigré community-building, information exchange, and cultural formation? These are some of the questions that no one seemed to have asked, and that I hope to explore in this project. Very little has been written about the Library in this time period, and almost none in English; I would like to fill in this gap through original archival research aided with a comparative approach and digital humanities tools.

To introduce my methodology, another library must be brought into the picture. In 1919, an American expatriate from New Jersey opened a lending library called Shakespeare and Company (Shakespeare & Co.) at 8 rue Dupuytren, Paris. Her name is Sylvia Beach, and her library, which also functioned as a bookstore, quickly became the meeting place for a community of expatriate writers and artists now known as the Lost Generation. In 1922, Beach first published James Joyce’s Ulysses under Shakespeare & Co.’s imprint, a feat that would bring fame to her and her library in the decades to come.

Shakespeare and Company has been the focus of extensive scholarship as a result of the high profile of its expatriate patrons, such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound. However, as its sphere of influence was relatively limited to the anglo- and francophone worlds, and structured around personal relationships with the founder, Shakespeare & Co. does not fully represent the multiplicity of expatriate experiences in interwar Paris. Contemporaneously, the Turgenev Library in Paris serves as an alternative model of émigré library, as it exclusively serves the Russophone community, and operates as a public institution rather than a private enterprise.

This project hopes to survey the readership and administration of Turgenev Library during the interwar period in juxtaposition with Shakespeare & Co., examine divergences and overlaps in their technical and symbolic structures and functions in their respective émigré communities, and explore the ways in which culture-/language- specific libraries shape the identities and social interactions of those in exile. The framework of this research borrows from Princeton University’s Shakespeare and Company Project (SCP), headed by Joshua Kotin, and is envisioned as a parallel project thereof.

SCP is a digital humanities initiative that uses documents from the Sylvia Beach Papers collection at Princeton University to recreate the world of the Lost Generation, detailing what members of the library read and where they lived, as well as how expatriate life changed between the end of World War I and the German Occupation of France. The main archival materials that the SCP team focused on transcribing, encoding, and analyzing are logbooks that include every library membership and renewal, and library cards that include addresses and borrowing histories of individual library members. With these information – of who borrowed which books, when and where – the SCP was able to develop an interactive website to showcase a searchable database of library members and the circulation of books.

Ideally, this project hopes to obtain similar types of archival documents about the Turgenev Library, in order to form a solid base for comparative study. The difficulty, however, lies in the inaccessibility and incompleteness of the materials which, as Grimsted’s work shows, have been scattered across Germany, France, and territories of the former Soviet Union. Most of the existing administrative documents of the library, namely an incomplete set of membership cards, inventories from a short range of years, scattered correspondences and photographs, are housed in Russian State Archive (GARF) in Moscow, with minimal descriptions online, and only accessible in person. The Turgenev Library did not have logbooks similar to the ones kept by Sylvia Beach, which increased the difficulty of systematically tracking the membership flow of the library throughout the relevant years.

Works Cited:

Tatiana Ossorguine, « La bibliothèque Tourguenev », Bulletin d'information de l'ABF, n^o 41,‎ 1963.

Ilya Ehrenburg and Christopher Moody, Selections From People, Years, Life I (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1972).

Nina Berberova and Craig A. Wilson, "The End of the Turgenev Library," The Journal of Library History (1974-1987) 16, no. 3 (1981): 509-16.

Patricia Grimsted, The Odyssey of the Turgenev Library from Paris, 1940–2002: Books as Victims and Trophies of War (Amsterdam: International Institute of Social History, 2003).

Tatiana Ossorguine-Bakounine, Русская общественная библиотека имени И.С. Тургенева : сотрудники, друзья, почитатели (Paris: Institut d'études slaves, 1987); L'émigration russe en Europe : catalogue collectif des périodiques en langue russe (Paris, 1976-1977).

Joshua Kotin, Rebecca Sutton Koeser, et al, Shakespeare and Company Project, version 0.29.0 (Center for Digital Humanities, Princeton University, 2019).

Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991).