Names & Biographies

If the numbers were challenging to interpret, the names are not easy to even identify, since they were written in varying handwritings of different librarians, sometimes not at all legible. Most of them were written in Cyrillic letters (94 out of 103), and the rest were in Roman letters. This does not seem to be related to the ethnicity of the name itself but rather the self-identification of the individual member: non-Slavic names, such as “Шварцмань” and “Аугенблик,” appeared in Cyrillic, while Slavic names like “Pozniarov” and “Kourmascheff” were Romanized. Some names were written in both, such as “Куто (Couteaux),” presumably because they were difficult to spell from the pronunciation alone. This reveals a diversity within the émigré community that was accepted and respected by the institution of the library, where it was a choice rather than a must for a someone of Russian heritage to identify as Russian or Russian-speaking. It also demanded a linguistic and cultural flexibility on the part of the librarians. It is curious whether the choice of Cyrillic/Roman letters for names was made by the member or the librarian, or in conjunction. Since most of the scribbled notes in the cards are in Russian, the librarians presumably spoke Russian as their native language, and therefore intuitively transcribed the names in Cyrillic unless instructed otherwise and/or encountering confusion (such as in the case of “Куто”).

The frequent lack of first names added to the challenge of identifying these members. According to the place and year, however, some names could be linked to historically known individuals, some of whom more well-known than others. To glean the titles borrowed by these individuals was the most difficult part, since the belletristic catalogues we acquired came in two parts, and were tightly bound in an old-fashioned format that prevented scanning; when they were finally opened and scanned, the images did not lend themselves easily to OCR. One had to manually create an index of the index numbers featured in the catalogue with their respective pages, and eventually learn Python to digitally extract the relevant numbers from the scattered OCR-ed pages to create a larger-scale index for the entire catalogue after both parts had arrived. Yet even with the index, one still needs to manually flip through the catalogues to find, decipher, and record corresponding title for each number.

Let us start with some of the individuals we tried to identify, to provide a microcosm of Turgenev Library’s membership. The initial objective of the project was to reconstruct the literary and artistic circles around the Turgenev Libraries, but artists and writers among the sample group of readers are surprisingly few. There is “Вл. Издебский” (GARF no. 524), which refers to Vladimir Alekseevich Izdebsky, sculptor and painter with Polish aristocratic roots. His family participated in the 1917 uprising and were exiled to Ukraine. In Paris, he met and became friends with Auguste Rodin, and visited a number of private schools. In 1930, he borrowed Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Alfonse Daudet from the Turgenev Library, among other less well-known titles. “Шейхель” (GARF no. 529) might refer to Marc Sсheikhel (Марк Шейшель), a painter who emigrated to France in 1922, close to the circle of artists of Montparnasse. His borrowing records in 1929-30 consist of only sociology, philosophy and science titles, without any belletristic works.

Outside of artistic circles, one of the most famous, and most securely identified person is “Маклаков” (GARF no. 382) – referring to Vasily Maklakov (Василий Маклаков), a trial lawyer and one of the leaders of the Constitutional Democratic Party. He served as the Ambassador to France starting 1917 before the revolution, and continued to occupy the post even though not officially credited, performing work normally undertaken by Russian consulates such as certifying marriages and births of Russian émigrés throughout France. He put down the address of the Embassy on his membership card, and borrowed two books from the Turgenev Library in 1921, one of which is Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

Another securely identified public figure is Alexander Schreider (Александр [Абрамович] Шрейдер) (GARF no. 563), the deputy Commissar of Justice who served as on the commission for drafting the Constitution of the RSFSR. He was arrested in 1919 and left Russia afterwards. In 1922, he co-organized the Committee for Famine Relief (“Помощь голодающим”) for Russia, an effort headed by notable non-Bolshevik social leaders and then disproved and taken over by the Soviet government. He continued to represent left socialists at various international congresses in Europe. His membership card dates to 1930, which is the year of his death in Paris. During that final year, he borrowed seven books from the Library, all of which are indexed between 14,000 and 16,000, suggesting that they were very recent publications or acquisitions (again, the largest number in the 1924-1928 belletristic catalogue was 8,958). None of these books have been borrowed by anyone else in our sample, and their titles of the books remain unknown.

“А. Альперин” (GARF no. 549) was another relatively securely identified public figure identified within the sample. Presumably referring to Abram Samiulovich Alperin (Абрам Самойлович Альперин), he only borrowed one book from the Library during the year of his membership, 1931, and the index number of the book was not found within the available catalogues. Perhaps the brevity of his reading list could be explained by his biography as a busy industrialist and philanthropist: Before the war, he was a legal counsel, a banker, a steelworks plant owner, and a devoted supporter to the Don Cossacks population. After emigration to Paris in 1919, he became the director of several Russo-French companies, including “Биотерапия,” which actively offers work opportunities to many fellow émigrés. He soon started hosting meetings at his apartment for the Overseas Committee of the Labor People’s Socialist Party (Трудовая народно-социалистическая партия), and joined “Помощь голодающим” in 1922 along with fellow reader Schreider. The two presumably knew each other, though the extent of their relationship remains unknown. His philanthropic efforts did not focus solely on the general émigré population, but also specifically on Jews: since 1928, he was a member of World ORT (Общество Ремесленного Труда), now a global education network driven by Jewish values, and he actively advocated for the employment of Jews at his various companies.

All these three individuals are socially engaged, devoted to promoting welfare for fellow citizens domestically and/or internationally, and serves the Russian émigré community in Paris in various capacities. They are representative of the same community-building spirit as advocated by the Turgenev Library itself, though not necessarily of the library’s entire membership. These three examples also provide a glimpse of how Russian émigrés – even those who share certain backgrounds, such as roles as public figures – could have different interests and priorities. For example, Alperin might perceive himself as more of a Jewish Russian émigré than simply a Russian émigré, and we will continue to explore these multiplicities of identities in later examples.

Alperin was not the only one devoted to helping fellow Jews in our sample. “Шехтмань” (GARF no. 407), for example, might refer to Joseph Schechtman (Иосиф Шехтман), writer and political activist who co-founded the World Union of Zionists-revisionists in Paris in 1925. In 1929-1931 he was the editor of Yiddish weekly Der Noyer Veg (The New Way) in Paris. From these pieces of biographical information, he seems to be more in contact with the Jewish rather than Russian aspect of his émigré identity. The membership card shows that he borrowed 11 books at the Turgenev Library in 1928 – a relatively prolific reader. The authors on his reading list include Victor Forbin (French science journalist), H. Rider Haggard (English adventure fiction writer), Maarten Maartens (Dutch prose writer and poet), Percy Fawcett (British geographer and explorer), Artur Landsberger (German fiction writer and critic), William Somerset Maugham (Schechtman borrowed The Moon and Sixpence), Thierry Sandre (French novelist and poet), etc. His selections were relatively niche – no Dostoevsky, for example – and notably very current and diverse. Most of the titles he borrowed were within three years of publication (i.e. post-1925), from a wide range of genres and nationalities. He eagerly read these European works in their Russian translation, yet intriguingly borrowed no books by Russian authors.

Yet why should it be surprising? Here we encounter the limitation of associating one’s biography with one’s reading list: the two do not necessary share a connection. A fervent Zionist might not borrow any books related to Zionism or politics, but enjoy reading Песнь любви (Maarten Maartens) instead. The Library offers an alternative space for its members to step outside of their usual social roles, and temporarily assume new identities and explore unknown terrains. While such feature could apply to any library, it manifests itself most saliently in émigré libraries such as the Turgenev: situated at the crossroad between two and more cultures, it allows its members to be as Russia and/or as European as they would like to: one could indulge in Dostoevsky and reminisce the lost 19^th century motherland; one could also exclusively read the most recent European works to catch up with the new environment, while keeping in touch with one’s native culture through language and community. The émigré Library is therefore a role-playing arena where social functions are destabilized and reconstituted. While the advertisements in the published catalogue curated a particular image of émigré life, the cultural formation processes taking place at the Library were by no means one-dimensional.

When it comes to ideologies, the elephant in the room is the typical categorization of “White” versus “Red” by which émigrés are so often and so easily sorted. The émigré community was far from a homogenous group, especially as it developed over the years. In fact, when the Soviet embassy was first notified of the German plunder of the Library in 1940, they first thought it was just “émigré dramatics” – which suggests that conflicts did occur between different factions or individuals; the embassy was oblivious to the crisis until hearing that Lenin used to read in the library and that the plundered materials include his annotations. The relationship between the émigré library and the Soviet embassy remains to be investigated; a divergence in political leanings is evident, yet not inflexible. Even the highest profile “White” émigré within our sample, Maklakov, visited the Soviet embassy in 1945 with other survival members of the Provisional Government to express their pride and gratitude for the Soviet war effort, allegedly drinking a toast “to the motherland, to the Red Army, to Stalin,” and understandably creating a controversy within the émigré community.

To organize the case examples, we will attempt to deploy this categorization here, but by no means suggesting that the dividing lines between the two camps are absolute. Within our sample, an exemplary “Red” public figure would be “В. Сольский” (GARF no. 409), likely referring to Wacław Solski (ВацлавСольский): Polish/Russian Communist leader, writer and journalist who worked as a foreign correspondent for Izvestia in Berlin and Paris in the 1920s. He wrote about the Bolshevik agitation in the Russian army during the revolution, the formation of Soviet policy in literature and other cultural affairs.^[9] He severed ties with the Bolsheviks in 1925 and escaped to Europe, eventually settling down in New York in 1945. One might expect such a personage to read political and/or communist-leaning literature, yet the Turgenev Library records show that Solski borrowed five books in 1928, all of which by Alexandre Dumas père, who briefly lived in Russia and whose work enjoyed immense popularity there.

Another “Red” figure amongst the members is “Косенко” (GARF no. 199) - Ilarion Kosenko, a political and civic figure who used to be a member of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries and of the Labor Congress, a prominent champion of Ukrainian independence. He worked briefly as the Minister of Postal and Telegraph Services before emigrating in 1920. In Paris, he served as the business manager of the émigré newspaper Тризуб (1925-40) and the chairman of the Petliura Ukrainian Library (1942-50). His membership card predates these positions – in 1924, he borrowed one book (title unknown) from the Turgenev Library. At the time, Petliura was not yet founded. It is possible that Kosenko took inspiration from the community-building potential of the Russian émigré library, and later channeled it into his service for the Ukrainian library.

Besides his membership at the Turgenev, Kosenko had little involvements with the Russian émigré community, which could be explained by his advocacy for Ukrainian independence. Kosenko’s case reminds us that 1) “Red” is not a definite category – he would have been a “Red” in the context of Ukrainian revolution, but not for the Soviets; 2) the “Russian émigré” population is in fact not all ethnically Russian despite being able to speak/read the language, and not all members of the library would define as a Russian émigré. The community formed around Turgenev membership was not a homogenous circle, but one with centers and peripheries, depending on one’s level of access and identification to a certain image of the Russian émigré. From these examples, we start to piece together what this image was, how individuals related themselves to this image, and what it meant to be a member of this library.

A high-profile “White” figure amongst the membership would be “Сергей Елисеев” (GARF no. 198), who could be identified with certainty as the famed scholar Serge Elisséeff. Born in a noble, affluent family, he was educated to be a polyglot from a young age, and studied Japanese in Berlin and Japan, before completing a PhD in St. Petersburg. Harassed after the revolution, his family had to burn furniture to keep warmth, and eventually managed to flee Russia through a fishing boat. They settled in Paris in 1921, and Elisséeff worked as the head interpreter at the Japanese Imperial Embassy. He obtained French citizenship a decade later, and moved to the US to teach at Harvard the following year. According to his membership card, the only book he borrowed from 1923-24 is Ivan Goncharov’s Frigate Pallada, a fictionalized travelogue based on Goncharov’s own experience on a naval expedition around the world, during which one of the missions was to establish trade relations with Japan, then a mysterious territory. Elisséeff might have found the Goncharov’s ethnographic accounts of Japan to be of academic or personal interest.

As a scholar, Elisséeff borrowed surprisingly few books. Yet it is important to keep in mind that his linguistic capacities and prior international exposure would have allowed him, more so than for Russian émigrés who only spoke Russian and/or never left Russia before, to step outside of the bubble of the émigré library. He could have borrowed more books from French or Japanese libraries than from Turgenev, and been active in diverse social circles instead of inhabiting the role of a Russian émigré. Again, we return to the image of the émigré and ways in which individual members of the library conforms to or rejects that image.

Other “White” figures within our sample are mostly military personnel. The most famous one is perhaps “Кондзеровский” (GARF no. 202), referring to Piotr Konstantinovich Kondzerovsky (ПётрКонстантинович Кондзеровский), who served as a General during WWI, and lost his post after the February Revolution in 1917. He continued to work in the military capacity for the new government(s), but in relatively unimportant positions. After the defeat of the White armies in 1920, he moved to Paris, and worked for an insurance company before becoming the Head of the Military Chancellery of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich in 1925, in charge of collecting information on imperial generals and colonels in emigration. His membership card dates from 1923, six years before his death in Paris. Considering his career and his involvement in an émigré society of zealots in memory of Emperor Nicholas II, it is not surprising that the five books he borrowed include Dostoevsky (Brothers Karamazov), Kyprin (Яма), and Vasily Nemirovich-Danchenko. The latter two authors have military backgrounds and wrote about their war experiences, to which Kondzerovsky would have been able to relate. The seeming outlier on his list is French author Colette’s Claudine en ménage – which narrates the journey of a schoolgirl as a newcomer to Paris, seeking new experiences and sensations. Perhaps it served as an cultural induction to Kondzerovsky, who himself was relatively new to Paris.

As Kondzerovsky sought out the émigré military officials, he might have found fellow Turgenev Library reader “Бостремъ,” (GARF no. 552) presumably refers to Ivan Fyodorovich Bostrem (Иван ФёдоровичБострем): Russian naval commander, vice-admiral, head of the Black Sea naval forces. From 1919 to early 1920, he worked extensively on restoring the ships of the Black Sea Fleet for the White Army, and since 1920, he was exiled in Paris, where he was chairman of a local organization and an honorary member of the Naval Union. An avid reader, he borrowed 16 books from the Turgenev Library in 1930, four years before his death. A popular choice within this sample group of readers, Dostoevsky seemed to be his favorite: Bostrem borrowed Brothers Karamazov, Idiot, and three other volumes by the author. Besides classics like Chekhov, Bunin and Nikolai Leskov, his reading list also includes contemporary names like Aleksey Remizov – who features surprisingly frequently amongst this group of émigrés’ lists of books, known as “one of the most peculiar and enchanting writers of the senior generation.” Remizov was later abhorred by the émigré literary community when he announced his interest in returning to the Soviet Union. Bostrem also read the Leonid Leonov, who later helped Gorky found the Union of Soviet Writers and was elected a Deputy of the Supreme Soviet.

The line between pro- and anti- Soviet is therefore not always clear-cut; a supposedly “White” émigré could read literature by potentially “Red” authors, just like a communist could read French romanticism. When scrutinizing each membership card, it is important not to conflate individuals with their political ideologies or their public biographies: what one read (or simply what one borrowed, as not all books borrowed were necessarily read) does not need to line up with who one was or who one appeared to be. One could be borrowing a book for a friend or family member, or have a private preference for certain authors unrelated to their public image. The catalogue number system facilitated this privacy – no titles were written on the membership cards, so only the librarian and the readers themselves could know what books were borrowed.

Not all émigré military personnel are as highly-ranked as Kondzerovsky and Bostrem. Some barely left a mark in history besides their membership cards. “Вас. Ив. Иловайский” (GARF no. 190), for example, refers to Vasily Ivanovich Ilovaisky (Василий Иванович Иловайский), the son of a military officer from a noble family. His card is undated, and the only book he borrowed was Emile Zola’s Madeleine Ferat, a story of obsessive love leading to tragic consequences. One can interpret it as a typical bourgeois choice of literature in the context of the reader’s familial background, or simply a matter of personal taste. It is important not to draw hasty generalizations with a small sample size.

The biographical information of his brother Andrei, who served as a captain, is recorded in Офицерыказачьих войск, and Vasily is only mentioned in passing as having emigrated together with his brother to Paris. This case raises a question about identification: since many of the cards only contain the readers’ last names, how do we know if a card belongs to a known individual with that last name, or to one of his family members? For example, if we do not have the first name and patronymic “Вас. Ив.” as identifiers, we would have assumed that this card belongs to the brother Andrei, or another better-known member of the illustrious Ilovaisky family, as long as the chronology matches up. Biographical information on public figures usually does not mention whether – or who amongst – the family members emigrated together. Therefore, one must read these speculations on the readers’ identities with a grain of salt, and know that it might be not Joseph Schechtman himself, but rather his wife, sibling or third cousin who borrowed 11 books in 1928.

Works Cited:

“Возвращение творчества забытого художника. Владимир Издебский,” Музеи россии, 2005.

Д. Я. Северюхин, “Шейхель (Шейшель) Марк (Мейер) Израилевич,” Искусство и архитектура русского зарубежья, 2012.

Georgy Adamovich, Василий Алексеевич Маклаков: Политик, юрист, человек (Paris, 1959).

“Шрейдер Александр Абрамович,” Личные фонды Государственного архива Российской Федерации (1917–2000), Путеводитель (Том 5. 2001).

Oleg Budnitsky and Timothy J. Portice, Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites, 1917-1920 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 143.

“Шехтман Иосеф,” Электронная еврейская энциклопедия (КЕЭ), World ORT, том 10, кол. 1890–190, 2001.

Nina Berberova and Craig A. Wilson, "The End of the Turgenev Library,” 101.

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton University Press, 1991), 84.

“Overview of the Waclaw Solski writings,” Online Archive of California, Hoover Institution.

“Waclaw Solski Papers,” PIASA (Polish Institute of arts and Sciences of America), Fonds no. 28.

Pauline Annenkova and Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour, "Dumas's Decembrists: Le Maitre D'armes and the Memoirs of Pauline Annenkova," The Russian Review 59, no. 1 (2000): 38-51.

“Kosenko, Ilarion,” Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988).

Edwin O. Reischauer, “Serge Elisséeff,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 20, no. 1/2 (1957): 1-35.

G.N. Potanin, “Воспоминания об И. А. Гончарове,” И. А. Гончаров в воспоминаниях современников (Leningrad, 1969), 263-65.

Alexey Likhotvorik, “Кондзеровский Петр Константинович,” Русская армия в Первой мировой войне: Картотека проекта.

V.N. Afanasyev, Александр Иванович Куприн (Moscow, 1960), 6. Valentin Khrama, “Возвращение: Вехи судьбы Василия Немировича-Данченко” (Русская книга, 2001).

Margaret Wallace, “Colette’s Claudine,” The New York Times, April 7, 1935.

V.N. Hristenko, “Бострем Иван Фёдорович,” Фаберова дача: энциклопедия истории николаева и николаевой области. History.mk.ua.

Hélène Iswolsky, "Twenty-Five Years of Russian Emigre Literature," The Russian Review 1, no. 2 (1942), 66.

Andrew Field, The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov (New York, 1986), 188.

Neil Cornwell, Reference Guide to Russian Literature (Taylor & Francis, 1998).

Sergey Volkov, Офицеры казачьих войск: Опыт мартиролога (Litres, 2018), 235.