Names without Biographies
Like many other Turgenev readers, but perhaps even more so, “Торбаковекая” (GARF no. 554) had a predilection for Dostoevsky. Out of the 14 identified titles within her 18-title list from 1930, Dostoevsky occupies six spots. The rest of the authors listed include Turgenev, Ibsen, Panteleimon Romanov (who won fame for his satires on Soviet bureaucrats in the 1920s, but fell out of favor with the Party by the time his death in 1938), Ilya Ehrenburg (whose account of the Library we read in the introduction), Chirikov (who started as a revolutionary but gradually broke away from the Marxists and ended up emigrating), and Irina Odoyevtseva (who emigrated to Paris in 1922 and wrote popular novels there). The reading list is therefore a mixture of the unmistakable classics and what was vogue in the émigré circles at the moment.
“Терехова” (GARF no. 547)’s impressive 19-book reading list from 1930 similarly gravitates towards the classics: four books by Bunin, three by Leskov (this combination recalls Bostrem’s list), two by Goncharov, four by Boris Zaitsev (elected chairman of the Moscow branch of the All-Russian Union of Writers in 1922 and emigrated to Pairs soon afterwards), one by John Locke, one by Lermontov, one by Pyotr Krasnov (Lieutenant General of the Russian army during the revolution in 1917, emigrated to France in 1923 and continued anti-Soviet activities), and the rest are unidentified.
“Пиворович” (GARF no. 381) also borrowed 19 books, though her card dates from 1921, almost a decade earlier than the previous examples. Besides Яма, which Kondzerovsky borrowed two years later, she borrowed four other books by Kuprin, whose relationship with Gorky and centrality in Russian literary-cultural life both deteriorated post-revolution, leading to his emigration to Paris in 1920 and a plunge into alcoholism. Besides Kuprin, her reading list is in fact more diverse than the average member. She borrowed works by the Sholem Aleichem (Yiddish), Bret Harte (American), Henryk Sienkiewicz (Polish, winner of the 1905 Nobel Prize in Literature), Ostrovsky (19th century realistic playwright), Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (19th century Russian satirist), and Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin (18th century playwright, one of the founders of literary comedy in Russia).
Besides books by Kuprin and other authors, Pivorovich also borrowed two periodicals - Энергия (1913) and Жатва (winter edition, 1912) – a rare occurrence within our sample. Not much is known about these periodicals besides some basic information. Энергия (1913), for example, is a literary-artistic collection published in St. Petersburg, edited by А. Амфитеатров, includes works by four authors including Амфитеатров himself, and has a color-illustrated front cover. We do not know when the Library acquires this copy – it would require access to all inventories from 1913 to 1921, when Pivorovich borrowed it – but it would be helpful to find out whether the Library consistently tried to acquire new periodicals as soon as they come out, as well as acquire every published volume of a periodical.
The belletristic catalogue from 1924 has a dedicated “Сборники и альманахи” section after books by authors with names starting with “С.” Both Энергия and Жатва are relatively short-lived and have only a three or four published volumes, which was in fact typical at the time according to the catalogue, though in many cases it is unclear whether the listing of a sole “volume I” means that the periodically only published one volume or the Library only managed to acquire the first volume. For longer-standing journals such as Земля and Знание, the Library houses almost continuous collections. Only two volumes are missing within the 18 consecutive volumes of Земля from 1909 to 1916, and one more volume of Знание would have completed a 40-volume collection from 1904 to 1913. Again, we do not know whether these volumes came in to the Library as they were released bi-monthly in St. Petersburg, or if the Library acquired the whole collection afterwards, but it is evident that Library strove towards completeness in acquiring its collections.
By now one might note a trend: many authors on Turgenev readers’ lists are either established classics (like Dostoevsky), or contemporary authors who recently emigrated to Paris themselves. An émigré writer herself, Hélène Iswolsky divided Russian literary works abroad into two categories: that of the older generation, uprooted from yet still closed linked to the former Moscow or St. Petersburg literary world, whose works are characterized by pessimism and Elysian memories of Russia; and the new, “Western” school of young writers and poets, “citizens of the world,” influenced by modern French and English masters. Iswolsky listed Bunin as the most prominent writer of the older generation, “a typical example of this deep, poignant attachment [to Russia]”, as well as Remizov, Boris Zaistev and Merezhkovsky – the latter is a rare case whose work sometimes did not deal with Russia but rather with religious and philosophical topics. For the younger generation, Iswolsky lists Tsvetaeva, Poplavsky and Nabokov as its “most talented representatives”, but criticizes that their works still lack the unique, unrepeatable human destiny that dictates the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. While this categorization might appear somewhat schematic and harsh on the young writers, it offers insight into what a typical émigré from the interwar period might have viewed the literary world around him/her.
Many of the émigré authors read by our sample of readers seem to belong to the “classical” category, although Iswolsky lists too few examples of the “younger generation” to allow for a fair comparison. “To renew the old world – that is the collector’s deepest desire when he is driven to acquire new things,” wrote Benjamin. Was it the old world that the émigré readers, writers, and librarians were searching for in their respective literary consumption, production, and circulation endeavors, and that which connected them through the shared institution of the library?
One thing was certain: it did not seem to matter whether these authors had been sympathetic to the Bolsheviks pre-revolution; what mattered was that they had since then broken away with the Red circle, and been forced into exile. The common lived experience – both generally of emigration (i.e. of leaving one’s homeland and settling in a new environment) and specifically of emigration to Paris (with its unique social, cultural, political and linguistic complexities) – brought the readers and the authors onto the same level. One who used to admire Kuprin from afar now perhaps shares an apartment building – or a library, for that matter – with him. How did this change of physical and psychological proximity with an author affect one’s reading choices and experiences? Did Pivorovich read Kuprin’s works as extensively or frequently before her emigration (and his, for they emigrated only one year apart)? Did she read Kuprin differently now, knowing their shared circumstances? What was it like to borrow five of Kuprin’s older, higher quality works, knowing that the author now barely produced anything but nostalgia-laden platitude? What was the role of the Library, witting or not, in mediating these shifting dynamics between the author and the reader? As the author-identity and reader-identity each collapses with the émigré-identity, the circulation of books produces the circulation of a collective experience, which in turn validates individual experiences.
Due to the lack of convenient search tools, we have not yet started to explore whether any of the card-owning members have been listed as authors on the catalogues. This could be a focus in the next stage of the project, after all the catalogue information will have been transcribed to facilitate searching: to explore the potential overlaps between the reader and writer identities. Though authors seeing their own works in libraries is a generic phenomenon, the particularity of the emigration context adds an additional layer of complexity, especially as emigration often serves as a timestamp, thematically and stylistically dividing one’s work from before and after. One wonders about the experience of an author in emigration encountering his or her prior work work being circulated in an émigré library – perhaps like two displaced body parts serendipitously finding each other, yet the re-jointure is not always smooth.
Works Cited:
Anna Gattinger, Literary Heritage of Panteleymon Romanov, 1883–1938, Master of Arts thesis (University of British Columbia, 1966), i-iv.
Victor Terras, Handbook of Russian Literature (Yale University Press, 1990), 84.
M. V. Zakharova, “Odoevtseva I.V. (1895-1990), writer,” St. Petersburg Encyclopedia, 2001.
Tamira Pachmuss, A Russian Cultural Revival: a critical anthology of émigré literature before 1939 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), 151.
Sergey V. Volkov, Трагедия русского офицерства (1999).
Nicholas J. L. Luker, Alexander Kuprin (Boston, G K Hall, USA: 1978).
Hélène Iswolsky, "Twenty-Five Years of Russian Emigre Literature," The Russian Review 1, no. 2 (1942), 64-73.
Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library : A Talk about Book Collecting,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1931).