Among the February 1918-related exhibits soon to be added to the University Library’s Revolution exhibition is a letter from Leon Trotsky. The letter came to the Library as part of the papers of the Conservative politician, Sir Samuel John Gurney Hoare (1880-1959), second Baronet, and first and last Viscount Templewood. Hoare was in Russia as an intelligence officer in 1916, and his interest in the country continued long after his departure. Quite how this letter, which is dated 27 February 1918 and refers to the work of the agent Bruce Lockhart, came to be amongst Hoare’s papers is only one of its mysteries.
The December 2017 item of the month was held up in the post, so with apologies here is a lovely festive card sent on 20 December 1967 to celebrate the incoming new year.
Postcard recto. From the Catherine Cooke postcard collection.
In the Soviet period, Christmas played a much-diminished role – new year celebrations took on much of Christmas’ character and iconography, and New Year’s Eve remains the main time for present-giving in much of the former Soviet bloc to this day. In the card above, we have Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost) being ferried by a troika of horses, with the Kremlin star shining in the background.
This lovely card was sent from Nizhnii Tagil, a town in the Sverdlovsk Region, to the small Norwegian town of Vikersund. The fact that the Russian sender had a personalised stamp for his details (a sign that he was well established), bottom right, made me hope that he and the recipient might be traceable – and so it turned out to be the case.
Postcard verso.
Rudol’f Kopylov was an artist and Thor Skullerud was a pharmacist – what linked them appears to have been bookplates. Kopylov specialised in the production of ex-libris and Skullerud was an avid commissioner of them. For readers of Russian, here is more about Kopylov in connection with an exhibition of some of his works in 2014: http://www.shr-ekb.ru/exibitions.php?exid=144; for all, here is a link to some of the bookplates he produced which commemorate the poet Sergei Esenin: http://www.esenin.ru/esenin-v-izobrazitelnom-iskusstve/ekslibris/kopylov-r-v Skullerud is harder to pin down in terms of biographical details, but here are some of the ex-libris he had made for him: http://art-exlibris.net/person/1922 It would seem that several of his bookplates are now in the Rijksmuseum, but copyright sensitivity prevents the museum from providing images: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search?q=skullerud
Somewhere, presumably, there is a bookplate designed by Kopylov for Skullerud to be found, but I have yet to track it down. Ex-libris are the subject of many books in the UL. A search for the subject bookplates will provide long lists. Among the results will be a formidable Russian publication which lists all bookplates found in the holdings of the rare books department of the Gosudarstvennaia publichnaia istoricheskaia biblioteka (the State Public Historical Library). Listed by name of owner, the set has covered only three letters of the alphabet and already stands at four volumes. Once complete, it will be an extraordinary resource. It can be consulted via the West Room and stands at 874.d.70-73.
Futurizm i revoliutsiia (Futurism and revolution) by N. Gorlov; CCD.54.243
This week saw the launch of Revolution : the First Bolshevik Year, a year-long online exhibition which will grow on a monthly basis and will be co-curated with undergraduates. The first month’s exhibits are also on physical display to readers and the public in the Library’s Entrance Hall for today and tomorrow – Friday 1 and Saturday 2 December 2017.
This exhibition will look at the events of the October Revolution and the year that followed, using a wide range of material from the University Library’s collections to illustrate the dramatic 1917-1918 timeline. In future months, we will see students from various faculties and departments get involved in the project, giving them the chance to curate books and objects from the Library’s fascinating revolution-era collections.
The first month’s worth of exhibits consists of 11 items in 8 online groups, telling the story of the 27 October/7 November start of the revolution, with postcards of Moscow showing buildings altered by the fighting that took place and foreign accounts of the tumultuous events in Petrograd and beyond, before taking an initial look at the impact of the revolution on the arts. Regular readers of this blog will be unsurprised to hear that several of these first exhibits (and more of those to come) are from the Catherine Cooke collection. It is a pleasure to be able to look out items there and further afield in the Library for the exhibition, and I hope that students will feel similarly inspired as they handle this remarkable material. Monthly updates to the online exhibition will be flagged by further blog posts.
Excerpt from Dvenadtsat’ (The twelve) by Aleksandr Blok with illustrations by Iurii Annenkov; S756.a.91.1
This month, we look at a little ephemeral piece from the Catherine Cooke collection – a 1977 page-per-day calendar – soon to go on display online and in the Library’s entrance hall, and its entry for the 60th anniversary of the October Revolution.
1977 calendar; CCD.54.329.
When the Bolsheviks initiated their armed overthrow of the Provisional Government, in power since the February Revolution earlier that year, the date in Russia was 25 October 1917. Elsewhere in Europe, where the Gregorian calendar had long been in force, it was 7 November. The name of the October Revolution, however, as mentioned also in an earlier post, stuck in both East and West, even after the Gregorian calendar was adopted by the Soviets in 1918.
While the 25 October (the “Old Style” date for the revolution) entry in the 1977 calendar does make reference to the events of 1917, the chief entry for the revolution appears here on the page for 7 November (the “New Style” or Gregorian date).
The CamCREES bibliographical notes have lapsed of late, with many of the 2016 seminars missed due to trips away, but it is a pleasure to resurrect them to discuss the three seminars which the Lent Term provided – a talk on early Russian modernism and two on Soviet underground literature.
Russian rules allow the export of modern books that are a maximum of 50 years old. Towards the end of each calendar year, I therefore have a look at the books soon to turn 51 which are available for purchase from Ozon, a Russian online shop in the mould of Amazon. These are almost always incredibly cheap and in impressively good condition, and it is impossible to resist buying rather a lot.
Last month, then, I bought 55 books published in 1966. While the emphasis of Russian modern book selection would clearly be on Russian and East European culture and history, the table below (and the illustrations above it) show that my eye was drawn to less standard subjects for this older material. Technology, for example, came second overall – seeing how mid-century Soviets developed and wrote about computers, for example, could quite conceivably spark someone’s interest in the future.
Left to right: books on nuclear submarines, where to spend a day out in and near Leningrad, computer programming, choosing an amateur film camera, food preservation, space exploration, and calculators.
‘Kniga dlia detei 1881-1939’ (Books for children, 1881-1939; S950.a.200.4173-4174) is a huge two-volume set which contains reproductions of excerpts from beautifully illustrated Russian children’s books. It was produced in 2009 but is a only a recent arrival in the University Library.
The two volumes (right) and a winter scene (left).
The portraits from v. 1 and 26 of the newly acquired set
This month, we look at a recent political addition to the collections – the works of Mikhail Gorbachev – and examine the publications of his Soviet leader predecessors.
The University Library already holds dozens of titles by Gorbachev, chiefly from his 1985-1991 time in office. The earliest is the 383-page ‘Izbrannye rechi i stat’i’ (Selected speeches and articles; 231.c.98.626) which is followed by a mixture of very short printings of speeches and much longer books. The majority of our Gorbachev material is in English. Russian comes a fairly distant second, and Chinese, German, and Belarusian account for the remainder. Among our stock are biographies (Russian at 586:95.c.95.297-298; English at 586:95.c.95.315) as well as Soviet and post-Soviet political writings.
By the time Gorbachev’s works started to be published as a collected corpus, Politizdat (short for Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury) – the official Soviet political publishing house – had long ceased to exist. The set is instead being published by the private Ves’ Mir publishers in Moscow in conjunction with the Gorbachev Foundation. Between 2008 and 2015, 26 volumes were published, covering the period of November 1961 (starting with a speech by the 22-year-old Gorbachev to the Stavropol’ Komsomol committee) to July 1991, with the Foundation’s preface to volume 1 stating clearly the intention for the set to cover the post-1991 period too. The Library has managed to pick up 24 of the 26 volumes this summer, with volumes 22 and 25 lacking at the time of writing. We intend to fill these gaps and order future volumes as and when they are published. The volumes we have already can be ordered through the Reading Room from C211.c.5890- .
This month, we look at three old and new books. Old to the Cambridge system but new to the University Library, the three anthologies offer interesting glimpses into the publishing world of the post-WW2 Stalinist period.
Hundreds of Slavonic books have recently started to be transferred to the University Library from the Modern and Medieval Languages Faculty Library (MML) as the MML makes space for new books coming in to support courses taught by the Department of Slavonic Studies. The history of the MML and UL’s Slavonic collections – a subject for a separate blog post – means that the former holds many early and Soviet literary editions which the latter lacks. As a result, we are taking close to 100% of the books they have withdrawn which are not already in the UL, and it is a pleasure to be able to add these books to our collections. Listed below are three examples from the Soviet period. In all three, the parental guiding hand of the state is very clearly seen, and a paternalistic Stalin features in many of the anthologised works. Continue reading “Three Soviet anthologies : the July 2016 Slavonic item(s) of the month”→
A little later than planned, we look in this post at a recently published guidebook to Ekaterinburg’s 1920s-1940s architecture, the first in a projected series of architectural guidebooks produced by the Tatlin publishing house. Ekaterinburg (or Sverdlovsk, as it was called from 1924 to 1991) boasts some extraordinary buildings from the first decades of Soviet power.
The last 100 years have seen a great deal of change in the physical appearance of the city. ‘Ekaterinburg : arkhitekturnyi putevoditel‘, 1920-1940′ (Ekaterinburg : an architectural guidebook, 1920-1940) contains a huge number of photographs from the early Soviet period which show a city under serious reconstruction. Intricate single-storey wooden houses on major streets sit cheek by jowl with new constructions. The former eventually disappear; their counterparts further out from the city persist in part to this day although many have been pulled down in the last decade or two to make way for new skyrises, the latter of far less obvious architectural worth than the new builds of the 1920s to 1940s.
Languages across Borders 