Before delving into the Turgenev archive, let us first look at collecting as a practice. “If there is a counterpart to the confusion of a library, it is the order of its catalogue.” Walter Benjamin declares in his seminal work, Unpacking My Library, from 1931. What exactly is the relationship between a catalogue and a library, antithetical as they seem? A catalogue is a documentation of what the library contains, an enumeration of what it owns. In other words, it is an assertion of possession. While Benjamin meant for its “order” to be the opposite of confusion, it could also be read as a symbolic order: an authoritative command of ownership. Benjamin points out a “dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order” in the life of a collector. I suggest that this tension lies in the cataloguing process – an ordering process, to transform disordered books into an ordered collection. To order means to organize and to own.

Tension arises when one encounters difficulties in one of these two sub-tasks: the books either reject organization or resist ownership. The former might result from the lack of an efficient and consistent system, the latter from a change of ownership. “The most distinguished trait of a collection will always be its transmissibility.” Benjamin wrote. He was referring to heirs, but it could also apply in non-genealogical contexts – to donations, for examples. When a book changes hand from one collection to another, how can it be effectively re-ordered? Is there a difference if the book moves from a public to private collection, versus the opposite? Does one type of collection tend to leave a stronger imprint on the books being transferred? For example, is it easier to integrate a book bought from a bookshop to one’s own personal collection, or a book donated by Turgenev (from his personal collection) to the Turgenev Library?

Benjamin certainly perceives a difference between the two, expressing rather harsh critical views on public collections: “the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner. Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter.” I would raise objections here: Benjamin does not define what it means for objects to “get their due,” which sounds a rather slippery concept. Perhaps he implies that individuals, rather than institutions, can exercise and assert order most explicitly and convincingly over a collection; communal organization could easily get messy if, for example, different librarians use inconsistent cataloguing methods, and group ownership becomes entangled if a split occurs within the group. However, potential complications should not deprive a collection of “meaning,” however it is defined in Benjamin’s framework.

Some collections might stand at the threshold between public and private, such as Sylvia Beach’s – it was simultaneously her own personal collection and a public-facing library/bookshop. She thus exercises dual ownership over the collection – sometimes triple, as she also helped publish certain books in her collection. A potential source of disorder would be conflicting organizational methods from the two co-existing capacities: at times she might organize some books in the way that makes sense for a personal collection, but not for a public collection. The Turgenev Library would not have such concerns. As a public collection, it had a developed, if not somewhat convoluted cataloguing system in place, and we will examine how effective and consistent it was.

Benjamin also likened catalogues to encyclopedias: “the period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership - for a true collector the whole background of an item adds up to a magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object.” His conceptualization seems to highlight the goal of a furnished product - the magic of the encyclopedia is to be activated at its completion - and discount the iterative process. Thus, his dialectic tension between order and disorder might also refer to the discrepancy between the ideal (“the whole background of an item”) and the reality (i.e. often times with missing information). There is a deterministic, almost superstitious underpinning to Benjamin’s discourse: he speaks of the fate while what he really meant was the past, for he could not know the object’s future even with “the whole background”; he speaks of magic which complements his romanticized image of the collector as a king in his magic kingdom, endowed with the ability to order things at will.

This is not the first time he mentioned magic, either. Earlier in the essay, he wrote: “the most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them.” He highlights a sense of rigidity and permanency within the collecting practice, which does not hold true in our case. As Filippov’s case shows, the items are not “locked” into catalogues, but rather floats in and out of them, sometimes belonging to multiple “magic circles” at once, which may overlap like a van diagram. At the same time, these circles remain open, allowing for new entries to enter. There is a certain anxiety resulting from this seeming paradox – how to order something while maintaining fluidity; how to impose structure and ownership on items without locking them into a closed circle.

Benjamin’s “magic circle” predicts that of Johan Huizinga’s, proposed in his 1938 seminal work Homo Ludens, which argues that play is primary and necessary to the generation of culture. Huizinga describes game as a rule-governed activity and the magic circle as the limited space and time in which the game takes place. Inside the circle, the rules are absolute and arbitrary; outside the circle, freedom should be expected. If we read Benjamin through the lens of Huizinga, we can conceptualize the former’s collecting practice as a game, which draws a magic circle (i.e. the collection) and prescribes order within (i.e. through the catalogue). Indeed, in an ideal catalogue, the rules are arbitrary and absolute, otherwise the collection would threaten to fall apart. Yet critiques on Huizinga precisely targets this alleged inviolability of the magic circle: often play is a dynamic process where game and life becomes indistinguishable. In the context of collecting, the magic circle can be conceived as a space designated for the self to deal with the other, to separate the order of “my collection” within the circle from the chaos of generic books outside. Thus the magic circle is transgressed when the self spills out or otherness seeps in. This would happen all the time at a public library like the Turgenev: books were donated, acquired, transferred, borrowed, returned, lost, and found. Perhaps this is why Benjamin is skeptical of public collections; yet we must realize that the sanctity of the magic circle is but an illusion.

Works Cited:

Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library : A Talk about Book Collecting,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1931).

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: a Study of the Play Element in Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1970).

Jacques Ehrmann, Cathy Lewis, and Phil Lewis, “Homo Ludens Revisited,” Yale French Studies, 41 (1968): 31-57