Members

Each card is comprised of a biographical section on the top (name and address), followed by a brief залог section, confirming that the reader has paid the one-time deposit, ranging from 15 to 60 francs, in order to become a member. The ensuing section is a chart that records one year’s worth of subscription payments: each row represents a month, with spaces to be filled out for the number of francs, centimes, as well as the date of receipt for each month’s subscription fee. The next and last section, continuing into the verso side of the page, is for borrowing events: for each borrowed book, multiple columns allow librarians to record the date of borrowing, the book’s catalogue number, the date of required return, the date of actual return, as well as fines when applicable – the amount and the date of payment.

A small proportion of cards follow a slightly different format, resembling booklets more than traditional cards. The front page contains all the aforementioned items except for the chart of borrowing records. In its place, there is a schedule of the Library’s opening hours, which was 6-8 on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and 3-5 on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. A rather limited time window that would hardly allow readers to sit down in the library to read a book or even browse extensively. One needed to know what one wanted to borrow, and check out expediently. The published catalogues list a more generous version of the library hours – 5-9 on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; 3-6 on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays – but still rather limited. Besides the schedule, the front page also features the name of the Library, written in both French and Russian, along with its address, on the top area of the front page. The borrowing records are in turn placed inside the booklet, taking up the whole page spread.

The exterior and interior of the booklet thus assume different functions: the former – to presentinformation to the reader; the latter – to store information about the reader. The schedule and the address on the front page allows the reader to easily remember when and where to go if they want to return or borrow a book, and the borrowing record charts inside allows the library to keep track of what books the reader borrowed and when they should be returned. This information is less useful to the reader, since it would be difficult to match up the catalogue numbers with the titles without the catalogue in hand. Moreover, sometimes additional documents – such as written correspondences, receipts, or even new cards would be kept within the fold of the booklet. The booklet thus further extends its function as a dossier, to maximize information storage about the member.

We assumed that the booklet-format membership cards had fallen out of use because most members borrowed only few books, not enough to warrant the double-page spread of the booklet. Besides its symbolic function, what is the use of a dossier if it is to remain empty most of the time? The Library opted for the one-page card as the new format, removing presentational information (e.g. the address and opening hours of the library) and moving the borrowing records to the front page (which continues into the verso side). As the library constantly encountered financial crises throughout the interwar years, the format change might have also resulted from a budgeting concern. There is always a practical side even to the most idealistic setup.

By a similar logic, it is important to note that although the cards were designed to be clear and systematic, the actual records are not. The Turgenev librarians frequently wrote in the wrong places, crossed out and made messy edits in the margins, smeared ink, etc. One of the main challenges in the transcription process is old orthography. A major reform of Russian spelling was implemented shortly after the 1917 revolution, replacing the letters ѣ with е, ѳ with ф, and і with и, etc., as well as removing the hard sign ъ at the end of words following consonants. However, because the reform took place at a time of great social upheaval, it divided the Russian intelligentsia into two camps. Adherence to the old orthography became a mark of adherence to pre-revolutionary values, and some émigré presses continued to employ the pre-Soviet conventions until the 1970s. In the available archives from the interwar years, the Turgenev Library adhered to the old orthography, both in their printed publications (i.e. catalogues) and handwritten records (e.g. membership cards, inventories, etc.). Whether such was a habit passed down from librarians who emigrated pre-revolution or intended as an ideological statement remains unknown. Acronyms were also confusing at times: it took many cards to realize, for example, that the often hastily scribbled "д" or "динь" at the beginning of the name line stands not for an initial, but rather for “господинъ”, the old spelling for “господин” which means “Mister.” Despite these challenges, we try to gather the most key information, in order to reconstruct a picture both of the library (specifically, its membership management practices) and of the readers.

Due to the large number of cards and the frequent illegibility of the handwriting thereon, this project selects a random sample of 103 cards as a case study of the Turgenev Library’s readership. I hope to construct a personography of the Turgenev readers - who they were, who they had been before emigration, when they were active, what they read, the community they formed – by analyzing a sample group of membership cards in detail. Randomly selected from the pool of approximately 770 cards available at GARF, our sample of 103 cards cover a wide range of years (from 1918 to 1934), with later years occupying a relatively larger proportion, which fortunately coincides with the availability of the catalogues. Since the belletristic catalogues cover the most part of the 1920s, it would be productive to have more cards from the 1930 than from 1920. Note that the chart omits undated cards, and double- or triple- counts cards whose dates span more than one year.

The transcription of these cards thus includes the following information: image number, GARF number, Turgenev Library number, name of the member, address, year (if available), catalogue numbers of his/her borrowed books. The image number helps the research team to identify and locate a card within the corpus of photographs taken at GARF. The GARF number is the Archive’s own method of organizing these cards, and our sample feature mostly consecutive GARF numbers as the cards were drawn in order from adjacent piles. These two numbers are organizational tools for us researchers, and will not be the object of analysis. Specific cards discussed below will be referenced by their GARF numbers, since that is the most unequivocal identifier. Due to limited capacity, financial transactions involving the library and/or its readers, albeit constituting part of the membership practices and personography, are not transcribed or analyzed at the present stage of this project.

Work cited:

Neil Bermel, Linguistic Authority, Language Ideology, and Metaphor: The Czech Orthography Wars (Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), 31.