Trending
Having presented several examples of the reading lists of unidentified members, we now shift further away from the people towards the books – with only the catalogue numbers and their corresponding title as data. Except for the unidentified titles (i.e. published after 1928), the most frequently borrowed books are presented in a chart below. Note that in our statistics, we count instances of the same individual borrowing a book more than once as a singular borrowing event, rather than multiple. Almost all books on this list were published in the 20th century, but as new editions of older works, so publication date is not included in this chart as it does not reflect the reality of the newness of these titles. One must keep in mind that all data represented on the chart comes from a sample of very limited size, compared to the available archive and even more so to what has been lost, so conclusions drawn from the analyses should be taken with a grain of salt.
Our sample of 103 readers borrowed a total of 651 books, among which one book was borrowed five times (not surprisingly, Brothers Karamazov Volume I by Dostoevsky), one book four times (unidentified), two books three times (Brothers Karamazov Volume II, and Tolstoy’s War and Peace), 55 books twice, and the rest of the 526 books once each. Despite the small sample size, one observes that the members’ reading choices were overall quite disparate; there were trends, but no trending titles that everyone (or even 5% thereof) was reading. A difficulty in analyzing this data lies in the fact that many of these titles, especially the classics, have multiple volumes, which results in Volume I and II of Brothers Karamazov being counted as two books instead of one. Curiously, only one person borrowed both volumes; four members borrowed Volume I only – understandable, since Dostoevsky is not for everyone – and two borrowed only Volume II, which is a bit peculiar, and leaves one to wonder whether they read Volume I elsewhere, perhaps at a different émigré library or bookstore. One can thus conceive of collecting as not only the library’s job, but also the reader’s practice: as the Library collects volumes from various sources, the reader collects them from various libraries – due to convenience or the restriction on the number of books allowed to borrow per month at a given library.
A name featured most frequently on this chart is Anastasiya Verbitskaya – perhaps surprisingly, given that she was not as famous as Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. Her works often focus on women’s liberation; she also created on her publishing house and participated in civic organizations that helped with women’s welfare. Her novels written between the 1905 and 1917 revolutions were the most popular: Дух времени and Ключисчастья both sold in numbers that were unequaled in Verbitskaya’s day in Russia, and as they both appeared on the chart, continued to enjoy popularity within émigré circles. After 1917, Verbitskaya’s novels were denounced for their supposed bourgeois decadence, and she was forced to adapt her writing to mass taste. The émigré community in Paris was evidently not part of this “mass taste”: none of the books borrowed by the Turgenev readers dates from after 1914 – in fact, none of Verbitskaya’s books held by the Library did. They all dated from a period when the feminist novelist was able to freely combine political, philosophical, and aesthetic concerns with scenes of sexual seduction, without worrying about censorship and even gaining wide acclaim – a period that, to the Russian émigrés in Paris, is painfully of the recent past.
While Verbitskaya is the most frequently read author in the chart above, this conclusion does not necessarily hold true for the entire sample, because this chart only features the most frequently borrowed books. If we take into consideration the books only borrowed once, Dostoevsky ranks first as the most popular author for this sample of readers (see chart below). His works were borrowed for a total of 35 times within our data set, considerably exceeding Verbitskaya’s 23 times and Tolstoy’s 18 times. Next in line are two French authors from different time periods, Alexandre Dumas père and Romain Rolland, borrowed for 13 and 10 times respectively; the latter’s win of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1915 might have contributed to his popularity in the Library. They are followed by Semyon Yushkevich, Alexander Kuprin, and Ivan Bunin, all in emigration in France themselves at the same time as the readers had been. Occupying similar positions on the list are canonical authors of an older generation: Turgenev (the very person who helped established this Library), Goncharov, Leskov.
A surprising name is Maxim Gorky, who has not been mentioned as a borrowed author in our prior discussions but only in passing in relation to other authors. His relative prominence on the list affirms the fluidity of “White” versus “Red” categorization, as one’s reading choice does not necessarily correspond to one’s political ideology. The surprising absence of a name is Pushkin: as one of the most influential Russian writers of all time, Pushkin was only borrowed for four times. The Turgenev émigré readers seemed to prefer more contemporary, realistic, socially- or psychologically- relevant works than early 19th century Russian Romanticism. It night also be that many readers owned copies of Pushkin even during emigration, and thus had no need to borrow from a library.
Within the top twenty most frequently read authors for this sample, Verbitskaya is the only woman. And ironically, as an advocate for women’s liberation, none of the readers who borrowed Verbitskaya were female: most of them were identified as male, and the rest were unidentified. Yet the irony is not negative, most likely simply coincidental. The fact that male readers are interested in Verbitskaya’s work, even if they were not specifically reading for feminist content, suggest a fluidity and openness in the émigré community’s reading habits, not only in the realm of political ideology, but also in gender relations and expectations. The list of authors is undeniably still heavily male-dominated, but female readers did read actively and nondiscriminatingly – they did not seem to prefer romance novels or works by female authors, for example, to conform to possible gendered assumptions of reading choices.
To contextualize this ranking, we can compare it with Soviet statistics. While in 1920-21 the author most widely read was Tolstoy, the readers’ cards revealed that by 1923, thanks to the correct “reading guidance,” the Soviet poet Demian Bednyi had taken the first place. The general reader was taking less interest in belles lettres, and more in antireligious and political literature, according to the Chief of Library Affairs Khlebtsevich in 1924. In contrast, the Turgenev Library readers maintained strong interest in belles lettres, and Bednyi’s name was not featured on the catalogues at all.
When manually looking up the corresponding title for each and every borrowing event, an error in the catalogue was discovered: eleven titles by mostly different authors share the catalogue number 2238. Presented in figure 2-8, this list includes Olga Pavlovna Runova’s Лихие подарки from 1903, Alexander Ertel’s Рассказы Ивана Федотыча from 1901, an undated Сборник Брошюр featuring works by both of them, along with other authors. Besides this coincidence (if it is indeed such), there seems to be little patterns within this list. Two of the works are by the same author - Василий Иванович Савихин – but while it is common to find repetitive catalogue numbers under the same author, these numbers usually refer to the same book (i.e. the same title, only different copies). In this case, however, two different titles share the same number. Another two of these items are anonymous short stories, where the name of the story substitutes the name of the author. Most of these items were published in 1903, but it is unclear whether they were acquired at around the same time. The error could have occurred when these incoming books were registered by a careless librarian; perhaps some of these books were lost and thus new books got assigned the same number; 2238 could even be a code number secretly denoting books with a certain condition – acquired from a particular source, on loan to a different library, or in need of repair, etc., which admittedly did not end up becoming a widespread practice within the catalogue collection. There are no other instances of repeating numbers for such a large, random, and diverse list of titles, and the reason for this unusual error remains a mystery.
Works Cited:
“Лот 308” and “Лот 309”, аукционный дом “Империя”, 2010.
Solomon Volkov, St. Petersburg: A Cultural History, tr. Antonina W. Bouis (Free Press, 1997).
Вербицкая «приспосабливает к массовым вкусам свою банальную, схематичную и заурядную технику письма». Вольфганг Казак, Лексикон русской литературы XX века (РИК «Культура», 1996), XVIII, 491.
Boris Korsch, "The Role of Readers' Cards in Soviet Libraries." The Journal of Library History (1974-1987) 13, no. 3 (1978), 284.