On the difference between the Turgenev Library’s philosophy and belletristic catalogues, we may bring Soviet cataloguing practices into discussion as a historical backdrop. Under the ideological assumption that the protection of information is no less important than its dissemination, the ruling party made use of deliberately deficient catalogues, unhelpful librarians, and uncomfortable working conditions to assert control over the Soviet citizens’ access to knowledge through libraries. The first step towards the Party’s political control over reading was initiated by Lenin as early as 1895. He created a “reading guidance” for the libraries established by his St. Petersburg League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class (Союз борьбы за освобождение рабочего класса), giving socio-political literature high priority as it was identified with Party literature.
In this framework, cataloguing is as much of a technical task as an ideological one. Catalogue purges initiated by Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, started in 1926. Books removed during the purges from provincial libraries could be transferred to central libraries for purposes of scientific work, if placed in special bookcases and included in a separate catalogue which may be consulted only when necessary. In the ensuing years, a system “deviating considerably from any existing classification” was set up, one based on “quality,” that is, discrimination, between “socially significant” literature from other books, between “good” teachings and “bad” ones. In terms of specific practice, there were to be two versions of the catalogue: a complete listing of the library’s book holdings, accessible only to government officials, librarians, and authorized research workers; and a public catalogue, featuring only materials approved by the party, available to the general reader.
This introduces a new layer to the ordering process suggested by Benjamin. Besides the previously discussed paradox of the “complete” catalogue (i.e. the inviolability versus fluidity of the magic circle), there is now an additional issue of political order. In my interpretation of order as consisting of organization and ownership, the Soviet context complicates the latter by introducing a dual ownership: collections are owned by libraries as well as by the state. It might be productive to examine this phenomenon through Derrida. In Archive Fever, he traced the source of the word “archive” to arkheion in ancient Greek, which refers to the residence of the superior magistrates, where official documents were filed and stored. Librarians are therefore also guardians, endowed with hermeneutic right and competence. The library can be viewed as a type of archive, a place where cultural memory is curated, ordered, stored, and circulated. The Soviet library thus becomes the arkheion of the party leaders, and the librarians their agents, entrusted with the power to interpret and manage what is housed in the arkheion. The dual ownership is in fact hierarchical: collections are owned by the state through the library.
“It is in this domiliciliation, this house arrest, that archives take place,” wrote Derrida. It is a particularly fitting description to be applied to Soviet collections: a remote acting force (i.e. the ruling party) imposes various levels of “house arrest” upon selected titles, so that they become hidden away from public view or shoved right in front of one’s eyes; the librarians serve as security guards, implementing the order. Again, the “order” here refers both to command and to structure. The space of the library, including both the physical space of the shelves and the symbolic space of the catalogue pages, is a necessary vessel for this selective domiliciliation to take place, for the Soviet archive/library to come into being.
The objects of control, however, were not really the books, but rather those who read them (or those who do not read them). There was the catalogue – the ordering of a collection – and there were readers’ cards – the ordering of the users of a collection. These cards often noted if the reader was registered in another library; interests in political literature; characteristic demands; what books h/she refused to borrow; what were his/her books at home; in what political circles did s/he participate, etc. In some libraries readers and their cards were divided by educational or occupational factors, and the individual borrower’s reading plan was recorded together with the librarian’s notes characterizing him/her. The readers themselves became part of the collection, organized and owned by the Great Soviet Collector-Leader through its agents guarding the arkheion.
Yet the job of the security guard is tricky: with the assigned power comes duty. While government approval was an essential step, it was the librarians’ responsibility to curate a listing for the public catalogue – one that must not simply enumerate the books available, but rather promote only the “best” books, according to reports published on the Bibliothekar’, the Soviet Union’s official library journal. Their job is both abstract and practical – that of consignation (literally, gathering together signs for the unity of an ideal configuration) and of a salesmen: not only to curate and advertise the best products, but also to be sell them (i.e. convince the readers to borrow them). When monitoring the readers’ carts, they themselves were also being monitored: items like “what means were employed to raise the reader’s political level” or “how the reader was guided in book selection” in fact serves to hold the librarian in addition to the reader in check. Furthermore, librarians’ diaries (similar to Sylvia Beach’s logbooks) were checked for ideological attitudes. The “hermeneutic right and competence” of the guardians of the arkheion are not intrinsic properties, but rather to be tested and earned. Librarians must prove capable of raising the readers’ political consciousness and cultural level in order to keep their jobs, and sometime lives.
The readers’ cards therefore ordered both the users and the agents of a collection, both of whom were objects (i.e. as part of the collections) as well as subjects (i.e. interacting with the collections) in the “house arrest” that allows for the Soviet library to take place. Sometimes, however, the librarians and readers collaborated in quiet resistance, the former making fictitious entries on the latter’s cards to put up an image of both sides’ ideological conformity. This creates a new layer of order beneath the surface, where collections take on an autonomy and order themselves in resistance to the directives of the collector.
Works Cited:
Andrei Rogachevsky, "Homo Sovieticus in the Library," Europe-Asia Studies 54, no. 6 (2002).
K. I. Abramov, История библиотечного дела в СССР, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Kniga, 1970).
Nadezhda Krupskaya, “To All Provincial and District Politprosvets, Partkoms, Oblits, Gublits, and Sections of GPU,” The Index of the Soviet Inquisition, Slavonic Review IV (March, 1926).
Arturs Baumanis, and A. Robert Rogers, "Soviet Classification and Cataloging," The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 28, no. 3 (1958).
Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, "Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression," Diacritics 25, no. 2 (1995).
R. Kibrik, “Аналитический формуляр читателя,” Библиотекарь (Dec., 1951).
E. Sokolovskaia, "Как мы обслуживаем читателей," Библиотекарь (March, 1949).
V. Kiseleva, "Об организации систематического каталога в массовой библиотеке" ("On the Organization of the Classed Catalog in the Mass Library"), Библиотекарь (May, 1949).