The Embodied Book of Memory

Why is it that we build libraries, and why is it that we study them? The Turgenev Library is not the first library in the world, nor will it be the last. Even its “dramatic” fate is not new: looting of cultural artifacts in war happened as early as three thousand years ago, when the Middle Assyrian king Tukulti-Ninurta I sacked Babylon and took home literary tablets as booty. His well-known admiration for Babylonian culture is akin to the Nazi Rosenberg’s Russophilism.

In a world where winners tell the tales, Tukulti-Ninurta I helped Assyrian literature become inspired by Babylonia, and laid the foundation for the Library of Ashurbanipal, the oldest library in the world, housing more than 30,000 tablets. Its owner, remembered as the last great king of Assyria, had the goal to collect all known scholarship and literature in Akkadian and Sumerian, to preserve it, to make copies, and to write commentaries. The library becomes both a display and an instrument of the Assyrian kingship: to power to own and organize the people and cultures conquered by the Assyrian kings throughout the centuries – power over not only their present, but also their past. The library embodies two histories: in terms of content, it imprisons the history of the conquered; in terms of form, its own process of foundation and expansion incarnates the history of the conqueror. The history of the library becomes the history of the empire, which physically and metaphorically contains the history of its subjects.

The Soviet Union was also an empire in a way. We already analyzed its own library system in Chapter I (through the lens of Derrida’s arkheion), and examined a library outside of that system – the Turgenev Library – as the main subject of this thesis. What next? We know what happened next in history: the Soviet Union dissolved; the Turgenev Library was rebuilt, unlike its Babylonian counterpart that never recovered from the plunder. But what happens next in historiography? How has the library been transformed in the (ex-)Soviet and/or émigré life, both in reality and in imagination?

Due to the scope of this book, we will not embark on another archival investigation, but rather briefly turn to literature to seek for insights, namely to Mikhail Elizarov’s 2007 novel, The Librarian (Библиотекарь). Not much has been written about this book, but it serves as a perfect example to draw connections to our previous discussions as well as to inspire further reflections on the role of libraries in literatures and societies.

The plot, stripped to its barebones, is almost cliché: gangs seek and fight for a hidden treasure that has the power to bring both joy and disaster. Except that these are not ordinary gangs, but libraries consisting of a group of readers led by a librarian. The treasure is not seven Horcruxes, but seven Books by a forgotten socialist realist writer Gromov. And the power of that treasure, it turns out, is not dissimilar to the Voldemort’s Horcruxes – “I shall never die,” the novel ends thus - but that eternal life is devoted to protecting the Motherland.

There is a lot to unpack, so we will start with the basics. Almost all themes discussed throughout our analysis of the Turgenev Library resurface in this novel: how to collect and distribute books, the role of the librarian in relationship to the library and the readers, cultural formation processes, sharing a living space and a membership, what it means to be a member, how a library community is structured and how it operates, etc.

In tracing these linages, a noteworthy element is the diverse forms of relationships between the librarian and the readers. In the Soviet context, this relationship is supervisory (as the librarian monitors the readers’ ideological attitudes), potentially antagonistic or complicit, depending on how strictly the monitoring was conducted. In Turgenev Library’s case, since we only have the (incomplete) administrative archives, the librarians remain anonymous, a transitory link between the readers and the library by recording and relaying information between the two sides through the catalogues and the membership cards. In this novel, the librarians are readers themselves, which is a rather obvious fact that surprisingly never came up in our previous discussions: did the Soviet librarians secretly read books from the forbidden shelves? What books did the Turgenev librarians read? Did the librarians have their own membership cards?

In Elizarov’s fictional universe, with the exception of the protagonist, all librarians start as readers, and formed their community around the shared transformational experience of a Book. With this affinity or synonymy of identities, librarians seek for ways to justify and cement their elevated status. Some considers librarianship an intrinsic quality. Lagudov, for example, upholds a hierarchical view of “initial, natural librarians who had solved the mystery of the books with their own brains” as opposed to “corrupt thieves." This quality seems to be transferable via heritage: the protagonist Alexei becomes the librarian of the Shironin reading room simply because the murdered ex-librarian is his uncle. Returning to Benjamin’s claim that “the most distinguished trait of a collection will always be its transmissibility,” here the issue at stake is not only the transmissibility of collections but also collector-ship. As Alexey does not need to read the Book in order to be able to the librarian, the Book ceases to be a book, but an object; the librarian ceases to be a reader, only a collector. When a book changes hand from one collection to another, the question is thus no longer on how the book/collection can be re-ordered, but rather on how the readers are to be re-oriented vis-à-vis the librarian.

One remarks that while the world of the Books depicts a socialist utopia, the readers are the detritus of post-Soviet Russia: prisoners, pensioners, “members of peaceable profession that had been reduced to poverty, humiliated and insulted members of the intelligentsia, retired soldiers,” etc. In other words, the old and decrepit, the delinquent, the abandoned, the marginalized. For these people who were betrayed by the Soviet dream and then again by the post-Soviet reality, the Books provide them with transformation, as well as a community. The transformation might wear off in a couple hours, but the community does not. It is built upon not only the shared experience of the Book, but also a relationship with the librarian, so that even if the Book is lost, the readers do not leave the library. This in fact prompts curiosity in how the Turgenev Library’s membership changed after the plunder in 1940. To what extent were the readers actively involved in the restitution of stolen books, or was it only the librarians’ and board members’ endeavor?

What ties the readers to the libraries in Elizarov’s novel is a semblance of familial relationships for those who do not have or are abandoned by their own families. Members of a library often live together (in Lagudov’s case, the prison; in Mokhova’s case, the old folks’ home; in Alexei’s case, a shared apartment and later the abandoned village soviet house), and sometimes form romantic or sexual relationships. The rituals of adoption in Mokhova’s library is the most exemplary: adoption differs from brotherhood or sisterhood (as the typical form of gangster-bonding), and assumes a sense of ownership. By adopting Mokhova through an peculiar ritual too repulsive to recount here, the women at the old folks’ home claim ownership over Mokhova, who owns the Book, which grants the women indirect ownership over the Book as well. Therefore, in the end of the story, Alexei needs to be adopted by Mokhova (ironically, after her death and without her consent) in order to be accepted by the old women in Mokhova’s clan, now taken over by Gorn. While the transfer of books is often carried out through bloody battles, the transfer of librarianship requires more complex operations. The dead Mokhova becomes a symbolic intermediary in this chain of adoption and ownership, as the old women get to own Alexey through her – to own not only Alexey’s Books, but also his unique librarianship. Here, the term “librarianship” should be understood symbolically, since Alexey has lost his physical library – both the Book and the readers – but what remains is his unique ability to access all the Books of the collection, resulting from him having accessed the most special Book of Meaning. We may therefore question what makes a librarian a librarian, and what is a librarian without a library, or a collector without a collection.

But does Alexey remain a librarian in the end? As he wastes away, trapped in the underground bunker, more and more he resembles a piece of the collection rather than the collector. The ending page of the novels reads:

If the Motherland is free and its borders are inviolate, then the librarian Alexey Vyazintsev is keeping his watch steadfastly in his underground bunker, tirelessly spinning the thread of the protective Veil extended above the country. To protect against enemies both visible and invisible.

I would like to think that on a summer evening someone walks along the high road outside town, past cherry orchards and glittering tin-plated roofs.

…

I shall never die. And the green lamp will never go out.

In this strikingly patriotic speech mingled with nostalgia, Alexey himself has become a Book, a socialist realist novel within Gromov’s collection, hidden away in the underground bunker that in fact serves as a storage room – a stereotypical Soviet library in the basement like where the protagonist of Ludmilla Ulitskaya’s Sonechka worked. As he reads the other Books sent down into the bunker, he is both a Book and a reader, both an object in the collection and a collector, both an archive and an archivist. Only in this dual existence can he aspire to “never die” and for the lamp to “never go out.” The promise of eternal life is contingent upon a transformation of personhood into objecthood (again, not unlike how Voldemort transforms himself into the Horcruxes).

The books in this novel are neutral objects, devoid of agency or resistance, and their power precisely lies in their objecthood. For instance, memorizing the words or photocopying the pages is useless; only the original printing can produce the desired effect. The book is a form of information transmission and storage, and simultaneously incorporates its encodings in a material layer. Gromov’s Books need both the informational signal and the physical shell in order to function. As Katherine Hayles points out in her work on posthumanism and virtuality, the human body works in a similar way, both as an expression of genetic information and as a physical structure; “print and proteins in this sense have more in common with each other than with magnetic encodings, which can be erased and rewritten simply by changing the polarities.” While we are not discussing electronic literature here, the point about books’ and humans’ parallel doubleness as a body and as a message is relevant: through reading, organizing, and owning the Books, the message of the Books is eventually transferred to the body of Alexey. He embodies the Books – the socialist realist narrative, the transformational power. What he transforms is himself.

But perhaps this is all an illusion. That the reader, the librarian and the library itself merges into one sounds too perfect to be true, just like the protagonist’s final burst of patriotism in dedicating himself to the protection of the Motherland. Not only did Alexey embody a socialist realist Book in the end, but also this very novel that we are reading becomes a socialist realist one: one that recounts the perekovka of a cowardly, ignorant and overall flawed young man at the margin of the Soviet (or post-Soviet) society, transformed into a strong, knowledgeable, and overall perfect Soviet librarian, so perfect that he becomes the very embodiment of the library and its socialist realist message!

More precisely, this novel is a parody of a socialist realist story. It is noteworthy that the Alexey’s first Book – the one he inherited from his uncle and owned for the longest period – is the Book of Memory. We recall once again Benjamin’s words: “To renew the old world – that is the collector’s deepest desire when he is driven to acquire new things.” Both the readers in Elizarov’s world and the émigrés in the Turgenev Library sought for what was promised but betrayed by their Motherland. Many of the Turgenev readers in our sample were initially sympathetic or actively contributed to the revolutionary cause in its early years, until it backfired and forced them into exile. The émigré library thus functions like a Book of Memory – it connects those betrayed in a collective false memories of a world where the betrayal did not take place, a world of Dostoevsky and Verbitskaya.

In Elizarov’s novel, we are constantly reminded that the betrayal did happen, and that the false memories are false. The battle scenes are extremely realistic and surreal at the same time. Every attack, every wound is described in great detail, yet as the weapons used are laughably primitive, such as ice-hockey helmets, kitchen knives, and knitting needles. The overall effect these graphic descriptions produce a hallucinatory effect on us the readers similar to that of the Book of Memory on the readers in the story: drawing us in, and at the same time reminding us of the impossibility of such scenes. This simultaneous indulgence and denial manifests in Alexey’s narrative as well. After hearing Soviet music from the 1970s, he remarks: “the infantile arsenal of false memory was reinforced with an acoustic equivalent of the Soviet eternity, which repeatedly brought me succor in difficult moments.” As he comes to embody the Book in the end, he also embodies this Soviet eternity, which is uplifting yet ultimately false. He becomes a false memory – as he thinks he is turning immortal, in fact he is simply going insane, losing control over his mind to a greater force, to this hallucinatory nostalgia for a lost Soviet utopia. Tellingly, when Mokhova first built her library community in the old folks’ home, Gorn “as a former dean of a faculty of Marxism-Leninism” suggests: “promise them eternal life, and then we’ll see how it goes.”

Libraries are thus potential sites of false memories, and since archives are symbolically synonymous to libraries in many ways, studying the archives of a library is essentially studying false memories of false memories. Why am I still doing this then? Derrida’s words might provide an answer: “it is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement.” I would add that this nostalgia is not only for the past that happened, but also for a past that could have happened. There is not one definite point of “absolute commencement,” studying archives is to trace back a multitude of paths in search of that origin, and to indulge in the vertigo of all the (Schrödinger's) paths that might or might not have been taken, like in Borges’ Library of Babel. After all, false memories are also called imagination.

Works Cited:

Marc Van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East: ca. 3000-323 BC, 3rd ed. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 161-189.

Zainab Bahrani, Art of Mesopotamia (Thames & Hudson Incorporated, 2017), 223-249.

Mikhail Elizarov, The Librarian, tr. Andrew Bromfield (London: Pushkin Press, 2015).

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

Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies In Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, "Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression," Diacritics 25, no. 2 (1995).