Zoom out: France

Starting from the furthest view in the Turgenev Library layer of the map, all but six addresses lie within the Greater Paris region (Métropole du Grand Paris). We will first discuss some of the outliers and then zoom in. An interesting example is “Веревкин” (GARF no. 188 & 189): he had two cards with the same Turgenev number but different addresses. The first card is undated, has a Parisian address, and no catalogue numbers, only “4 книги” and “2 книги” scribbled alongside dates and numerical calculations. The second card dates from 1924, has both the Parisian address and a provincial address, and a more extensive borrowing record. Verevkin was presumably moving back and forth between Paris and the countryside in the southwest of France, thus owning two cards. In this understandably confusing setup, perhaps some borrowed books were recorded on the wrong card, which would explain the “4 книги” short hand as a correction.

The second address appears as “le Pech par St André L/Larlot Dordogne,” which could not be found online. “Pech” derives from the Latin “podium” and designates a flat and raised place, so the address might have been more of a description of the location or a local colloquialism. Though the geography of Paris did not change much over the past century, that of the countryside did; it is possible that some villages, including “le Pech par St. André”, have merged or fallen into decay, though parts of them might still exist, only transformed. Their vernacular nature, as opposed to administrative, helps them stay alive in local traditions. It turns out that a major difficulty lies in the librarian’s handwriting: it was “Sarlat” rather than “Larlot.” The area called “Le Pech par St. André” that used to be part of Sarlat has become a town of its own – Saint-André-Allas. Since there is no street number, the coordinates of the town itself is recorded in place.

This illustrates the typical process of deciphering an address, albeit on the complex side. The librarian’s handwriting is often not only an obstacle to be surpassed, but also an object of investigation in of itself. In this case, the librarian made a mistake in writing the Parisian address and then corrected it. Instead of “rue d’Aumale”, he/she wrote “rue d’Aumoille.” Since the two have similar pronunciation, the librarian might have misheard or misspelled when Verevkin announced his address. This small mistake suggests that though generally bilingual, the librarian might have not been completely comfortable with the French language, or at least with Parisian geography - there is no “rue d’Aumoille” in Paris, after all.

The greater question, which unfortunately cannot be answered, is why Verevkin as an émigré was moving between Paris and the remote French countryside. That he had family or friends there would be the most reasonable explanation. Other members who reside in the provinces include Roudnykh’s group, who also had a change of address, from one village in the area of Vosges (a mountain range close to Germany) to another village in the same area. This adds an additional layer of complexity to the aforementioned issue of co-living and co-reading. Inhabiting the same, unstable space in the middle of nowhere in a foreign country with three others already creates an experience that is bubble-like at best and limbo-like at worst, and one wonders whether going to Paris once in a while to borrow and return books further tightens or loosens the bond. Most likely they would have sent a representative instead of going all together. What if someone in the group, due to the inconvenience of long-distance travel, never actually managed to visit the Turgenev Library? We discussed that membership, as an access, resembles an object more than a relationship, but how is it experienced when the source of that access is not physically accessible? How does it compare with the digital libraries of modern time, or the peculiar space between the physical and the virtual in the age of the pandemic, when you still read the physical books borrowed from the library, but can no longer visit the library itself?

Living not far from Roudnyx’s group is “Kourmascheff (GARF no. 538), who had his name recorded in Roman rather than the Cyrillic alphabet. Active during 1929, he lived in “Pension ‘Steib’ à Aubure (Haut-Rhin)” - a family pension that also operated as a spa hotel in the 20s. This suggest that not all members had permanent addresses, nor did the Library require a permanent address for membership registration. One of the Parisian addresses, for example, features “Hôtel Magda” (which still exists in this location today). It could be that the reader (Богуславская, GARF no. 376) had just arrived in Paris, and eagerly visited the Library in search of a community or useful information on émigré life, before finding an apartment. Kourmascheff, on the other hand, might have been staying in the pension for long-term rather than as a transition, and traveling to Paris periodically during this stay. In fact, the Turgenev Library itself changed location for several times and moved into a hotel itself in 1937 – Hôtel Colbert, “un grand et beau local.” In its place now stands a new hotel called Melia Paris Notre-Dame, though the street where it was located is still named “rue de l’Hôtel Colbert.”

Among the non-Parisian addresses, the most well-known one is perhaps that of “Доброхотов” (GARF no. 391) - Villa Venden [Wenden] in Cannes. This German-style villa was built in the 1889 and inhabited by Grand Duke Frederick Francis and his wife, a Russian Romanov princess, before World War I. Since the card is undated, it is unclear when exactly the reader Доброхотов lived in the villa, but perhaps he had connections with the Duke’s or the princess’s family, suggesting that not all émigrés are complete newcomers and outsiders to France; some might have already established ties that would afford them a lodging and by extension, access to certain social milieus. The concept of an address, which would have had a universal meaning for these individuals when they were back in Russia, now loses that sense of stability and takes on different values depending on one’s circumstances. The concept of a membership, however, remains stable and standard, structurally and temporally, unlike the shelter of a family friend that could potentially throw you out at any moment, or a hotel where you might stay for an infinitely long “transition.” That one would have a longer-term library membership than one’s stay at an address might have been strange but also comforting – a source of belonging for those away from the home address; a predictable, time-bound system within a period of uncertainty and chaos.

On the country-scale, Shakespeare & Co. had more members who lived in French provinces outside of Paris – about 70 - interspersed throughout the West (closer to the Atlantic, across which visitors from the United States would have come) and the South, with a small concentration along the Riviera, as well as in neighboring European countries such as Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, the UK, and Ireland. This wide interspersion could result from the greater renown of the library compared to the Turgenev, a larger population of English-speaking expatriates than Russian-speaking ones, a significantly larger sample size, and/or the more generous opening hours of Shakespeare & Co. (9-12am and 2-7pm every day, excepting Wednesday afternoons and Sundays) compared to Turgenev Library’s two to three hours per day, which would have made it difficult for people from out-of-town to schedule a visit.

Works Cited:

“Aubure: plus haut village d’Alsace,” tourisme-alsace.com.

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

“History of Villa Wenden at Cannes,” Do Tours.

Joshua Kotin, “Becoming a Member of the Shakespeare and Company Lending Library,” Shakespeare and Company Project, version 0.29.0, Center for Digital Humanities, Princeton University, January 30, 2020.