Catalogues

During a research trip to Moscow, the research team discovered that the only useful content of the GARF Turgenev archive are the approximately 770 membership cards, some of which contain handwritings on both recto and verso sides, which results in total of 1,102 photographed images. Each of these cards records the name, address, and the borrowing history of an individual member. Many do not indicate the year, but only the month and date of borrowing events, but according to the cards that do contain year numbers and their sequence in the pile, we were able to deduce that most cards range from 1910 to 1936.

The main challenge lies in the fact that unlike the detailed records for Shakespeare & Co., the borrowing history on the Turgenev cards does not include book titles, but only a four- or five- digit call number for each borrowed book. Some of these numbers are prefaced by a capitalized Cyrillic letter, which indicates the genre of the borrowed book: for instance, Ф229 refers to no. 129 within the philosophy catalogue. The unprefaced numbers, occupying the majority, belong to the belletristic category, for which the catalogue is missing within the archive. As a larger institution, the Turgenev Library organizes its holdings more systematically than Shakespeare and Company, which lacked such categorized catalogues.

According to public-facing information from the archive, Turgenev Library’s holdings include such diverse genres as the history of literature, Russian and general history, Russian and foreign art history, mathematics, natural sciences, medicine, philosophy, religion, sociology, political science, foreign books about Russia, children’s books, and journals since 1868. Yet due to the scattered state of the archive, GARF housed only the sociology and philosophy catalogues, which do not constitute a representative sample of the types of books borrowed by members of the library during the interwar period. In case the rest of the catalogues (the belletristic one in particular) could not be found, the research team first photographed the entire philosophy catalogue as an alternative solution, to be able to focus exclusively on the philosophy readership among Turgenev members. In the following year, we are able to acquire the belletristic catalogues in two parts.