1. Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 3rd ed., vol. 3 (1970), p. 312.

2. Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, vol. 6 (1927), pp. 199-200

3. A. V. Mez'er, Slovar'nyi ukasateV po knigovedeniiu, part 1, A-Zh (Moscow- Leningrad: Sotsekgiz, 1931), pp. 380-404.

4. Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 3rd ed., vol. 3, p. 313.

5. V., Osipov, Kniga v vashem dome (Moscow: “Kniga,” 1967), p. 10.Google Scholar

6. Berkov, P. N., Russkie knigoliuby: Ocherki (Moscow-Leningrad, 1967), pp. 213—15.Google Scholar

7. Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 3rd ed., vol. 3, p. 313.

8. Osipov, Kniga v vashem dome, pp. 13-14.

9. Lisovskii, N. M., “D. V. Ul'ianinskii kak bibliofil i bibliograf,” Bibliograficheskie isvestiia, no. 1-2 (Moscow, 1918), p. 16–17.Google Scholar Cited in Kufaev, M. N., Bibliofiliia i bibliomaniia: Psikhofisiologiia bibliofil'stva (Leningrad: Izdanie avtora, 1927, pp. 32–34 Google Scholar. Kufaev's book, incidentally, is the only book the present writer has ever seen that was legally published in the USSR by the author himself. It thus is legal samizdat in the strictest sense of the term. As indicated on the last page, Kufaev's book was printed in the state-owned “Komintern” printing shop and was cleared by the Leningrad censor (Gublit No. 25481). The press run was only 500 copies, but nevertheless the book was distributed by a state agency, Gubprofsoviet. At that time private bookstores and publishers still existed, and Kufaev might have been expected to avail himself of the services of both. By having a book published for him by the state, Kufaev produced (perhaps not inadvertently) a collector's item.

10. Kufaev, Bibliofiliia i bibliomaniia, pp. 46-47.

11. Berkov, Russkie knigoliuby, pp. 210-11. Vladimir Lidin, a minor Soviet novelist and well-known bibliophile, recalls an attempt by a living author at creating a “posthumous” edition of his own work. In 1897, the Symbolist poet Valerii Briusov wrote an introduction to one of the early collections of his verse: “Me eum esse is the last book by Valerii Briusov, who passed away on (date) of 1896 in Piatigorsk. The manuscript was prepared by the author shortly before his death, even though he did not consider it quite ready for publication. The publishers propose to also bring out in the near future all of Valerii Briusov's already published translations. A. L. Miropol'skii, Moscow, 1896. ” Ultimately, Briusov's book appeared without the introduction, the manuscript of which is preserved in the archives. Presumably, young Briusov wanted to elicit generous reviews of a book by a “prematurely deceased” author. See VI. Lidin, Drus'ia moi, knigi (Moscow: “Iskusstvo, ” 1962), p. 161.

12. Martynov, P. N., Polveka v mire knig (Leningrad: “Nauka,” 1969), pp. 44–45Google Scholar.

13. Librovich, [pseudonym?], “Biblioteka na odnu noch',” Na knishnom postu (Petrograd: Izdatel'stvo Vol'fa, 1916), pp. 360–62Google Scholar. Cited in Kufaev, Bibliofiliia i bibliomaniia, pp. 29-30.

14. Berkov, P. N., Istoriia sovetskogo bibliofil'stva (Moscow: “Kniga,” 1971), p. 28.Google Scholar

15. Ibid., p. 32.

16. Osipov, Kniga v vashem dome, p. 33.

17. M. A. Osorgin, who subsequently became an émigré, recalls that in the Writers' Bookstore in Moscow, which existed from 1918 to 1922, books that were once among the most expensive (such as elegant eighteenth-century French editions, leatherbound tracts of the Old Believers, woodcuts, and books from before the period of Peter the Great, which occupy in Russian collecting a position analogous to Western incunabula) could be purchased for a few pounds of black bread. On the other hand, reference works were relatively expensive. Grabar's five-volume history of Russian art sold for “up to thirtyfive kilos of rye flour, ” while the eighty-six books (forty-three volumes) of the Brokgauz- Efron encyclopedia cost fifty to eighty kilos of rye flour. Since only barter was accepted (currency was quite worthless), payment could also be made in soap, butter, oil, and sugar. Another participant in the Writers’ Bookstore was the poet V. F. Khodasevich who, too, left Russia for the West. Berkov, Istoriia, pp. 38-39.

18. Ibid., pp. 41-42.

19. Lidin, Drus'ia mot, knigi, pp. 10-11.

20. Berkov, Istoriia, p. 44.

21. Ibid., pp. 69-70.

22. Vladimir, Maiakovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v trinadtsati tomakh (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1958), 11: 219.Google Scholar

23. Martynov, Polveka v mire knig, pp. 38-39. Incidentally, the discovery sheds new light on a minor aspect of Babel’ scholarship as well. The name of Benia Krik, the Odessa gangster, should perhaps be translated as Bennie the Huckster, rather than “the Yell” or “the Shout.” This new translation describes more accurately the flashy king of Odessa's underworld.

24. Martynov, Polveka v mire knig, p. 24.

25. Berkov, Istoriia, p. 20.

26. Ibid., p. 94. The Russian name of the organization was Rossiiskoe obshchestvo drusei knigi.

27. Ibid., pp. 165 and 169. The Russian name of the Collectors’ Association was Vserossiiskoe obshchestvo kollektsionerov.

28. Ibid., pp. 169 and 173.

29. Ibid., p. 175.

30. Ibid., p. 168.

31. Ibid., p. 172.

32. Berkov, Russkie knigoliuby, pp. 127-31.

33. Berkov, Istoriia, pp. 176-79.

34. Gleb, Struve, Rtusian Literature Under Lenin and Stalin (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), p. 284.Google Scholar

35. Berkov tells the story of N. N. Orlov “who was forced to leave Moscow, ” a curious circumlocution for arrest and exile. Berkov, Istoriia, pp. 119-22.

36. Ibid., pp. 17-18.

37. Ibid., pp. 74-75.

38. Ibid., p. 86.

39. Cited in Berkov, Istoriia, p. 160.

40. Cited in Berkov, Istoriia, p. 77.

41. Ibid., p. US.

42. Kufaev, Bibliofiliia i bibliomaniia, p. 28.

43. Ibid., p. 93.

44. The best treatment of this elusive subject (most information on the workings and even the existence of Soviet censorship is itself censored) is Martin, Dewhirst and Robert, Farrell, eds., The Soviet Censorship (Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1973).Google Scholar

45. Quoted in Wolfe, Bertram D., “Krupskaya Purges the People's Libraries,” Survey (London), no. 72 (Summer 1969), p. 141.Google ScholarPubMed

46. Ibid., p. 148.

47. Krasnyi bibliotekar1', no. 1 (1924), pp. 135-41. Cited in Bertram D. Wolfe, “Krupskaya Purges the People's Libraries, ” p. 148. The new set of instructions was signed by Nadezhda Krupskaia, in her capacity as chairman of the Bureau of Political Education; P. Lebedev-Polianskii, head of Literary Censorship; and M. Smushkova, chairman of the Central Library Commission.

48. Ibid., p. 151.

49. Thus, B. S. Bodnarskii maintained that a bibliophile may be interested in any one of a wide variety of unusual or rare books—very large or very small, strikingly elegant or singularly shabby—but adds, as a matter of course, that a bibliophile would also be attracted to “forbidden books.” See Berkov, Istoriia, p. 49.

50. Osipov, Kniga v vashem dome, pp. 13-14.

51. This factor is studiously avoided in Soviet discussions of rare Soviet books. For example, Lidin mentions the anthology Kniga o golode ﹛A Book About the Famine) that was published in 1921 in Samara with all proceeds earmarked for victims of the famine. Lidin is doubtlessly correct in claiming that many copies of the book may simply have been used for fuel in those difficult times. It is more than likely, however, that many of the extant copies of the volume were systematically, destroyed after its editor, V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko, a prominent Soviet leader who once served as Stalin's representative in Spain during the Civil War, was killed during the Great Purges. He was posthumously cleared of all charges after Stalin's death. See Lidin, Druz'ia mot, knigi, pp. 158-59.

52. A., Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag GULag: Opyt khudozhestvennogo issledovaniia. Books 3-4 (Paris: YMCA Press, 1974, pp. 78–79 Google Scholar. The book in question was Belomorsko- Baltiiskii kanal hneni Stalina (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1934), which was edited by Maxim Gorky, A. L. [?] Averbakh, and Semen G. Firin, the deputy chief of the Central Administration of Prison Camps (GULag). Upon completion of the canal on August 17, 1933, one hundred and twenty Soviet writers and literary critics were invited for a boat ride on the waterway. Thirty-six of them contributed to the volume. They included Gorky himself, Viktor Shklovsky, Vsevolod Ivanov, Vera Inber, Valentin Kataev, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Boris Lapin, Zakhar Khatsrevin, Konstantin Finn, Evgenii Gabrilovich, Lev Nikulin, Nikolai Tikhonov, Kornelii Zelinskii, Bruno Jasienski, and Aleksei Tolstoi.

53. KPSS o kul'ture, prosveshchenii i nauke: Sbomik dokumcntov (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Politicheskoi literatury, 1963), p. 278.

54. Soviet sources never openly acknowledge the existence, let alone the workings, of Soviet censorship. Thus, when a conference on Soviet censorship was held in London in 1970, “articles [appeared] in Isvestiya (May 30 and August 20, 1970), and Zvesda (No. 12, 1971, p. 157) attacking not only the participants of the conference on the transcript of which this volume [The Soviet Censorship] is based, but also the conference itself, [although] the subject to which it was devoted was not mentioned or even hinted at" (Dewhirst and Farrell, eds., The Soviet Censorship, p. v). At the same time, an opportunity is rarely missed to claim that such censorship exists in the United States and that, as a result, Americans are afraid to collect books. Thus, a popular Soviet guide for persons desirous of building modest libraries in their homes quotes long excerpts from The Morrison Case, a play by Albert Maltz set during the McCarthy period, to make the point that owning books in America is downright dangerous. V. Osipov, Domashniaia biblioteka (Moscow: “Iskusstvo, ” 1959), pp. 23-26.

55. Berkov wrote in 1971 that “we are on the threshold of establishing an All-Union Society of Friends of Books, or Book Lovers, ” Berkov, Istoriia, p. 247

56. 56. Since 1966 there has been a bibliophile section of the Moscow House of Litterateurs (ibid., p. 229). The activities of the Kharkov bibliophile club for 1967-68 included lectures on such subjects as “Karl Marx and Books, ” “V. I. Lenin and Books, ” “A. M. Gorky and Books, ” and “Books in the Life of the Soviet People” (ibid., p. 225). The existence of “informal” directories of book collectors and catalogs of bookplates is attested by Berkov, Russkie knigoliuby, pp. 105-6.

57. Berkov, Istoriia, p. 210.

58. Ibid., p. 25.

59. Ibid., p. 18.

60. Ibid., pp. 215-16.

61. Such collectors, for example, gather quotations from “Marx, Lenin, Turgenev, Gorky and others” (ibid., p. 211).

62. Ibid., pp. 158-59.

63. Osipov, Kniga v vashem dome, p. 67. Osipov also related the story of one bibliophile who collected minutes of congresses of the Communist Party, but then replaced them with new editions which were supplied “with excellent commentaries” (ibid., pp. 61- 62). Osipov neglected to add that the new editions were also purged of all materials that had in the meantime become “obsolete.” Elsewhere Osipov recommended that collectors acquire the most recent (fifth) edition of Lenin's collected works which, he claimed, is much to be preferred to the fourth (ibid., p. 64). Be that as it may, trading in old editions for new ones is not, to put it mildly, traditional bibliophile practice.

64. Ibid., pp. 86-87.

65. For example, Nikolai Leskov's Evrei v Rossii (The Jews in Russia) was not included in the eleven-volume set of his works printed in 19S7-S8. Religious and moralistic writings of Tolstoy appear only in the ninety-volume edition of his complete writings, but not in multivolume sets of his selected writings.