Co-Membership

An issue that came up in previous discussion was that biographical information on public figures usually does not mention whether – or who amongst – the family members emigrated together, making it difficult to discern whether a card belongs to a famous person or his/her third cousin. This then raises a question about librarian practices: to what extent did the librarians take into account these familial relations when keeping records? There is no clear pattern of when or why the librarians include the first name and/or patronymic instead of just the last name, or include "динъ" [господинъ]/ "жа" [госпожа] to specify gender instead of just letting the name speak for itself. Is the inclusion of “Вас. Ив.” on Vasily Ilovaisky’s card a chance phenomenon, or does it result from the knowledge that his brother Andrei might also visit this library, or even has already visited the library and gotten a card of his own that is now lost to history? If the latter is the case, would Andrei’s card have included just the surname “Иловайский,” or his first name/patronymic as well? Had there been incidences of identity confusion, where one brother’s card was mistaken for the other’s?

There are few edits to the names within our sample of cards, which means that the librarians were confident and conformable with their craft: either the incoming readers shared familial information with the librarians, so the latter could specific first names/patronymics and gender markers from the beginning if needed, or the librarians were so familiar with the borrowing histories of individual readers, that they would not confuse a Dostoevsky-reading brother with a Maugham-reading one, even if the two might share the same name on their cards. The membership cards from Shakespeare & Co. Library show the same mix between last-name-only and full name, which results from the only librarian’s (Sylvia Beach) varying degrees of personal relationship with the readers. Perhaps the Turgenev Library is more similar to Shakespeare & Co. than expected.

One also wonders whether multiple family members would have shared the same card, thereby sharing books and subscription fees, a convenient and economic approach. There are no recurrent surnames within our sample, yet one unusual case of possibly membership-sharing stands out. GARF no. 394 card has three names recorded instead of one, all in Cyrillic: “Руднихь, Тамазановь, Китаевь”. They all appear to be last names, rather than a first name, a patronymic, and a surname. Next, GARF no. 395 records “Roudnykh” in Roman letters, followed by “(Tamazanoff, Kitaeff)” - in parenthesis and partially underlined – and in the top margin of the card: “Люляев” in Cyrillic. This intriguing constellation of names suggest that a group of readers shared this card, and the constituents of this group changed over time. The two cards share the same Turgenev number, but the second card contains a crossed-out address from the first card, followed by a new address. The second card dates from 1919 while the first card is undated.

From these information, we could deduce that the original group consisted of the trio (Руднихь, Тамазановь, Китаевь). The trio either lived together, or used the address of a representative for the record, which might have been Руднихь since his name is listed first. When the trio (or Руднихь) moved to a new address, they got a new card, this time explicitly marking Руднихь/Roudnykh as the main member, and the other two (names in parentheses) as auxiliary members. “Люляев” must have been a new addition to the group, since his name was added after the trio’s names had been written in place. If the trio had been sharing an apartment, Люляев might have joined as a co-tenant, and by extension, a co-reader and a co-member to the Library.

The central question here, and one which recurs throughout our analysis from various angles, is: what does it mean to be a member? From the Library’s perspective, by assigning the group one Turgenev number and keeping it constant despite the change of address and the addition of a new member, the Library recognizes and supports membership sharing. In an initial exchange, the member (or member unit) pays a deposit and receives a “membership”; then the member regularly pays subscription fees to maintain that “membership”. This “membership” is more like a material object than an abstract relationship; it is an access: not a right to access, which would be restricted to specific individuals, but rather a key to access, which could be freely passed on to others once acquired. The exchanges mattered more than what would happen afterwards: the membership was given out in return for the fees; the books were given out and must be returned.

This does not imply that the library cared little about building relationships with individual members, but rather the opposite: what one did with the membership and the books remained one’s free choice; by allowing members this freedom and fluidity, the library cements its connections with its members units. Modern media-sharing platforms, like Netflix, operates in a similar way, except that technology has allowed for restrictions on the maximum number of devices sharing the same account, while it is theoretically possible to have dozens of people sharing the same membership at a library; the limit lies instead in the number of books one is allowed to borrow at a time. Yet not all libraries operate by the same logic when it comes to membership. Shakespeare & Co., for example, has only one name listed for each membership card, presumably because the library functions more on the basis of one-on-one relationship with Sylvia Beach rather than as a larger-scale public institution.

From the member’s perspective, what does it mean to share a (physical and symbolic) space on the membership card with someone else, in addition to sharing a living space? How does sharing a membership card - which is akin to an ID card - shape one’s relationship, in comparison to simply sharing a library (i.e. be independent members to the same library)? Without first-hand accounts from the readers, these questions are difficult to answer, but we can compare Roudnykh’s case with another example from our sample. “Петрушевский” (GARF no. 352) might refer to Vladimir Aleksandrovich Petrushevsky (ВладиимирАлександрович Петрушевский), who came from an eminent military family and published a collection of poems called "Родине" in Paris in 1930, among other patriotic works. The poem was by no means famous, nor is it a secure identification, but the most interesting aspect of his card lies in the shared address with another member: “Завистовский” (GARF no. 351). Both were active in 1934, and provided identical addresses on their respective membership cards. In contrast to Roudnykh’s trio (later quartet), who shared a residence as well as a membership card, Petrushevsky and Zavistovsky share the former but not the latter.

One wonder how the dynamics of book-sharing differ in these two cases. Do the co-members borrow similar books? For Roudnykh’s group, their first card (GARF no. 394) only shows one book – Tolstoy’s Повестии рассказы – while the next card records nine books, including the Complete Works of Tolstoy (perhaps chosen by the same person who borrowed Повести и рассказы) and the Complete Works of Dostoevsky. Other authors they read include by Chirikov, Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak (known for children’s stories, and indeed Детские тени was borrowed), and Semyon Yushkevich (emigrated the year when his borrowed book Одинокие was published). There is some stylistic or thematic consistency throughout their choices – a penchant for 19^th century classics as well as for contemporary works by socially engaged yet eventually disillusioned authors in recent emigration. Детские тени was a bit of an outlier – perhaps someone in the group borrowed it for a child. Further questions arise: how did the co-members share the card/the books? Does Roudnykh get to keep the card and borrow on behalf of everyone? Given that there must be a limit on the maximum number of volumes allowed, was there a rotational system for who got to borrow next, or was it first-come-first serve?

Turning to Petrushevsky and Zavistovsky, the former borrowed four books by Joseph Conrad, two by Dostoevsky, and the rest by Bunin, Bulgakov, Merezhkovsky, etc. – mostly well-known recent works with respectable literary quality, a mix of the traditional and the experimental; the latter borrowed one book by Conrad (the same Nostromo that his housemate had borrowed, perhaps following the latter’s recommendation), three books by Panteleimon Romanov (whose two books Торбаковекая also borrowed, albeit four years earlier), two books by Rudyard Kipling, and then various titles by Leonid Andreev, Henrik Ibsen (coincidentally, Торбаковекая also borrowed a book by him), Mor Jokai, Olga Forsh, Ryurik Ivnev, etc. Like his housemate’s, his reading list features well-established contemporary authors of prose, poetry and theater. Coincidentally, each of their lists features a laurate of Nobel Price of Literature (Kipling and Bunin). They did not seem to look for works that confirm certain ideological, cultural or personal backgrounds, but simply good literature, regardless of the nationality or political leaning of the author. They were also clearly communicating with each other about the books they had been reading; hence the twice-borrowed Nostromo, though presumably Zavistovsky did not find Conrad as appealing as his housemate did.

Within the year of 1934, Petrushevsky and Zavistovsky borrowed an impressive number of 13 and 15 books each. This might be a reason why the two did not share a membership: more prolific readers than Roudnykh’s group, this duo would have wanted to borrow more books than allowed for one card, and preferred the freedom to each one’s own allocation than competing for spots. A library’s holding is often conceived as limitless, yet the circulation always needs to be limited, and this limitation affects not only the relationship between readers and the library, but also between readers themselves, which is often overlooked. One may wonder how these relationships would change if libraries remove limitations on the number of books one could borrow and/or on the number of individuals allowed to share a membership. Would it lead to a more devoted, closer-knit community of readers, or has it simply led to something like Project Gutenberg, a library of over 60,000 free eBooks today? Does open source detract from the symbolic and social functions of “membership,” whose rituals is necessary in defining a community, since what is a tightly-knit circle if it does not have boundaries? Is the democratization of information antithetical to the concept and practice of boundaries?

The effect of digital media on education (broadly defined) is not a new topic. In 1992, literary critic J. Hillis Miller spoke about the “Thoreau prototype”: “such workstations will differ radically from the library of books side by side on the shelves.” Yet the efforts to make texts accessible online is not technologically but ideologically motivated. As Aarseth argues in his seminal world, Cybertext:

The library is more than books on shelves; it is also an ideology, an ethics of information; and this ethics is radically similar to the ideas behind free information providers such as the Gutenberg project and other sources on the Internet hypertext system known as the World Wide Web. Through such efforts, the idea of the library is sustained, even as the medium (“the shelf”) is superseded. More important, neither the old library nor the new Internet-connected workstation should be seen as inherently procanonical or anticanonical. Both can be used for both purposes, and from the start they have been used for those seemingly opposed activities: preservation (inclusion) and selection (exclusion) of information.

This quote is particularly noteworthy not only because it also mentions Project Gutenberg, but also since it complements with our previous discussions of the library – as an arkheion, an ordering apparatus guided by a certain (ideological or else) directive. Regardless of the specific directive, the mechanism of that ordering process is always through a combination of inclusion and exclusion. Aarseth meant for his argument to be applied to books – it is a book about literature, after all – but it can be applied to people as well. In my framework, the medium of the library is not just “the shelf”, but also the membership cards: the library does not operate by passive voice (i.e. what is preserved; what is selected), but by active voice: who preserves what; who selects what; who read/can read/should (not) read what. Therefore, it is true that when the medium is superseded, the idea/ideology of the library can be sustained, but if we consider not just the books but also the people, there are qualitative changes in how readers, writers, and librarians interact; in how membership is presented, experienced, and potentially shared. These changes bring up new challenges like user-oriented design, access control and information security, as well as virtual community building (particular relevant now). As the example of Soviet librarians logging fictitious entries tells us, people are always harder to order than books.

Works Cited:

Elena Pustovoitova, “Верный сын великого народа,” Русское Воскресение, Литературная страница : Критика.

“Юшкевич Семен,” Электронная еврейская энциклопедия (КЕЭ), World ORT, том 10, кол. 880–882, 2001.

J. Hillis Miller, Illustration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 39.

Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives On Ergodic Literature (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 169.