And here on these shelves are a good number of those editions: the folios, quartos, octavos. This is a pirate edition from Geneva that’s come out in thirty-nine volumes, and another from Lucca, and yet another from nearby Livorno, that has come out in thirty-three. Le Breton published the true first edition in Paris, which started in 1751 and reached twenty-eight volumes by 1772, one year before Diderot came here to Petersburg. The set is here, with an editorial slip inside the first explaining that somewhere there exists an extra volume, containing all the entries or sections Le Breton removed from the project without Diderot’s knowledge to avoid trouble with the censor. There’s a Russian edition (so one did come out after all), and over here there’s a handy abridgement, which brings the total set down to twelve volumes.
And then there was its natural opposite, the très grand projet of the media magnate Panckoucke, the man who loved the product so much he bought the company, buying all the rights and permissions and then everything else to do with it he could think of: Voltaire’s papers, Buffon’s papers, all the world of fresh new learning. The dream in his mind was an ever greater encyclopedia, a vast revision, the Encyclopédie méthodique, that would dwarf the original and then perpetuate itself into all the ages to come. It would be ultimate, absolute, not just containing all knowledge but codifying it according to the most complex of systems, turning old words into a new window on the world. The alphabet was far too simple; what was needed was a new system of interlocks and interfaces. The work would be divided, sub-divided, each new segment turning into a distinct yet interdependent encyclopedia of its own. It was like building a great new capital city. Every street and pathway would be part of the web, linked into every other in an unbroken yet endless chain of universal knowledge which was supplemented every day.
To make Panckoucke’s wide-open book, no expense was spared, no talent and no sphere of knowledge was neglected. Great men were summoned; so were big teams of plodding hacks. Flowcharts were plotted, along with formats and concepts and timelines. All forms of organization were employed. Scissors and paste were put to work; textbooks and lexicons, dictionaries and medical works, prayerbooks and opuscules, law-books and primers of botany were gutted, torn up, mixed and matched. As in some great intellectual forest, many different trees of learning were planted together, side by side, and most of them grew fast. In no time at all the project was running at 125 volumes and showed no signs of stopping there. Volumes had come out to satisfy the first subscribers, who had to be warned that they were in for a long prospect, for work after work would follow as the travel through learning enlarged. The plan spread and spread; and so did the problems. Text didn’t arrive (it never does), so volumes were delayed, one delay then spawning many others. Costs multiplied, subscribers fell away, and profits plummeted. Contributors began to tire, take other work, or die, for dying was just coming into fashion.
For it really didn’t help that in 1789 – just as things seemed to improve and profits suddenly began rising – France chose to erupt in revolution. Now contributors became quite seriously unreliable, and many of them began to disappear at speed. Some fled the country, some fell silent. More than usual departed the human scene, thanks to the achievements of Dr Guillotine, who duly earned himself an entry. The faithful subscribers stayed faithful no longer. Printers were constantly hanged or butchered, and booksellers turned cautious. The volumes altered in appearance; they were stripped clean of their royal dedications, and appeared with a tricolour in their stead. As for the Age of Philosophy itself, that too was changing, and probably dying: militarism and melancholy were the flavours of the day. No longer were wise men called on to advise monarchs and princes, or test their wits against the unreason of the church. Thinkers became rebels, rebels became revolutionaries, revolutionaries became soldiers. Sense gave way to sensibility, reason to romanticism, and a gloomy strutting Napoleonism became the look of a man. It was the day of the career open to talents, so scholars turned both normale and supérieure. The calendar stopped, and time itself was begun again. Yet, despite all the trials and testings, the Encyclopédie méthodique managed, like the endless chain of Napoleons, to survive. By the time it was done it was one of the great projects of the Empire, running to 201 volumes, by now so out of date they went totally unread. A set of unbelievable dustiness runs across several shelvings close above my head.
Galina still hasn’t come back, so I take down a stack of books from the shelves and carry them over to the desk by the window. I’ve gathered up a pile of the original Encyclopedia, the first Le Breton edition, because I want to play Diderot’s own encyclopedia game. This involves following out the teasing sequences that lie hidden among the alphabetical entries. Thus ‘Droit naturel’ easily leads us on to ‘Pouvoir’, which steers us to ‘Souverain’ and then to ‘Tyran’, and all this, if I remember rightly, is part of the sequence of over a hundred entries written by Diderot himself. But, playing the game, I soon hit a problem. The first six volumes I start from are fine, taking me through the alphabet from A to FNE. But something has happened to the next step: the volume FOANGGYTHIUM is missing, not to be found in the room. And where’s volume XI, and volume XIV? The problem gets me looking at some of the other sets on the shelves. They too are in similar condition. Part of Richardson’s Clarissa is absent too; the set has no Volume II. Something odd has happened to Lemuel Gulliver’s travels. In this library the unlucky and sombre ship’s doctor seems to make only two voyages; in all the other versions he goes off on four.
Next I notice a set of books I’ve already been thinking about, Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. I’ve not forgotten the day of his modern funeral, and his little library in Yorkshire. If these are Diderot’s books, then the six-volume set Sterne shipped out to Diderot in advance of his visit to Paris could very well be here. I take down the set on the shelf, and look inside; on the title pages an inscription is written (though Sterne, like a modern novelist on a book-tour, did sign a great many copies). But something is wrong here too: the six-volume set lacks volumes 5 and 6. And so it goes on, from shelf to shelf all the way round the room. The entire library is riddled with these odd gaps: blanks, apertures, elisions, or (as the theoreticians now like to say) aporias. Everything’s in this same odd condition of incompleteness, of ‘almost’. When is a library not a library? When all the sets and sequences are fractured, as they are here. The alphabetical runs of the dictionaries are short of a few letters. Periodical works have broken calendars, with whole seasons, years, or decades gone astray.
High heels are sounding on the stone flooring; Galina is coming back. She comes and sits down at the desk by the window, and puts down two glasses of tea.
‘Did you find anything interesting?’ she asks me innocently.
‘I’m not sure what to say,’ I answer. ‘I presume these are the books of Voltaire and Diderot.’
‘Some of them.’
‘But I don’t understand what’s happened. Why is nothing complete?’
‘Not complete?’
‘Yes, all the gaps, the omissions—’
From across the desk Galina looks at me oddly, as if wondering whether she can trust me with some intimate truth or other. ‘I am sure you truly love books, mon ami.’
‘I do, I always have.’
‘You see, I told Bo it was not a good idea to bring any of you here at all. That he should arrange something different.’
‘It looks as if he has.’
‘It’s true, I thought he had told you all not to come here. I didn’t expect anyone at all. When I came to the boat this morning I thought he’d arranged a different tour. He didn’t say so?’
‘Not to me. That’s why I expected to see the Diderot Library. But what have I seen?’
For an answer, Galina goes over to the wall and takes down a nineteenth-century engraving, which she sets in front of me. The drawing depicts a large handsome room, furnished with desks, classical pillars, glass bookcases, obelisks, a statue. The inscription is i
n Cyrillic, but it’s evident enough what this must be: ‘The library of the Hermitage?’
‘Yes,’ says Galina. ‘A wonderful room. The Tzarina wanted to make it very beautiful. Remember, she thought she had brought Russia from nothing to something. Scythian barbarity to Athenian grandeur. So her library of reason had to be one of the finest libraries of the age.’
‘And what the Tzarina wanted she always got.’
‘Of course. It must have been perfect, you know. The seven thousand books that came from Ferney, the library of the world’s greatest philosopher. Then the almost three thousand more volumes that came from Didro, the library of the Encyclopedia. Ten thousand volumes altogether, a collection of books just as important as any of the great pictures she hung on the Hermitage walls.’
‘It must have been.’
‘I already told you what happened next. There was the revolution in France. And then at the end of her life the Empress herself changed greatly. It’s said her whole life disappointed her. She got old, fat, fearful. Also she became gross, decadent, superstitious.’
‘And her lovers got younger and younger.’
‘Oui. When King Louis was executed, she put on a black dress. I think it destroyed every hope she’d had in these things. Philosophy, learning, science, enlightenment.’
‘So she sent Voltaire up to the attic and locked the library doors?’
‘Yes. And from this time strange things started to happen in the Hermitage.’
‘Strange things?’
‘A locked library is a great temptation. And the place was filled with treasures. Didro’s papers. The police file Sartine kept on Voltaire. Many important things. So of course all the little Chichikovs came. The doors were locked but they were easily opened. Treasure is treasure, it is always plundered, officially, unofficially. When Stalin needed some more foreign currency, he just sold pictures from the Hermitage. When the Germans came, they looted everything they could.’
‘You mean they took the books from the library?’
‘Of course.’
‘But I don’t understand. No intelligent thief steals just part of a set. A couple of volumes from a collected edition? And who’d steal just three volumes of an entire encyclopedia?’
‘It depends who steals, for what. Some people like to possess, others to destroy.’
‘It just doesn’t seem right.’
‘Besides, if you want to lose a book, where do you put it?’
‘I don’t know. In a library?’
‘Of course. In a library books are found, but also they are lost. Sometimes they are taken away, sometimes brought back and put in the wrong place. We try to keep a catalogue, but even the best catalogues are wrong. And this library has been moved many times. When it came from the Hermitage, no proper list was kept. There was the Revolution, the Siege, when books were moved to the basements. When the time came to put them back, no one was sure where. Only one person really thought about the old library in the Hermitage. Only one person tried to restore it as it was.’
I look at her: an elegant grey-haired lady, in a fine flimsy French dress, fingering the brooch at her breast.
‘You mean you, Galina.’
‘Oui, d’accord. But imagine, here you are in one of the world’s greatest libraries, like the Berg, or the Bibliothèque Nationale. But it’s still a library with nothing: no complete catalogue, no full record on computers. We don’t have these clever shelvings they have in London or Paris, or teams of scholars to classify everything. Maybe there are five million books here, and maybe ten miles of shelves. Somewhere in all that there were once ten thousand special books, the library of Voltaire–Didro. It’s not hard to find some, the ones with Voltaire’s mark on. Some you can identify only by the annotations: Voltaire’s hand, Didro’s. For forty-five years I tried to go to every shelf and look at every eighteenth-century book. If I thought it belonged once to the Library of Reason, I bring it here. Every book in this room comes here for a purpose. Maybe it was once in the library, or maybe in some way it will lead me to the others.’
The room suddenly seems sad. I look around it, at the rough shelves, the incomplete sequences, the damaged spines, the volumes soaking with a leak of rain.
‘How many do you think you’ve identified by now?’
‘Five thousand, perhaps.’
‘What about the rest? Do you think they’re still there, somewhere in the library.’
‘How can I know that?’
‘Surely there’s a better way than checking every single book.’
‘Of course, if I could find Didro’s Book of Books. It’s said he kept a list of all his books.’
‘Is it here?’
‘Maybe. Maybe in his papers.’
‘His papers? So you don’t know everything that’s in his papers?’
‘The papers were confused too.’
‘There are still manuscripts that haven’t been published.’
‘I expect so. Yes, of course.’
‘But haven’t the scholars been through everything?’
‘Almost. Everything we have found so far.’
‘Have you read his papers?’
‘Not all. First I want to put back the library of the Encyclopedia. Restore it as it was before.’
‘You will, Galina. I feel sure.’
‘I am glad you are sure, mon ami. I tried already for forty-five years. I am not so sure any more.’
I get up, and look out through the dirty glass of the window. The square is filled with cold drab people, walking briskly through the hard-blowing wind; they all seem much more than a world away.
‘Surely you can get someone to help you? A foreign scholar?’
‘You can see how Russia is now. Now the bad times are over, the worse times come. Who knows what will happen, if we will go forward or back? We always call ourselves civilized, cultured. But our sufferings make us brutal and our poverty makes us weak and degraded. People still starve here like they did in wartime, and wages don’t get paid. There’s no true state, no real order. The people who survive are those who have learned to be cunning or how to commit crimes. In times like that, why would anyone care?’
‘You care.’
‘Moi? But I am nobody. No, it’s not true. I am a ridiculous old woman, who for years has tried to be elegant and Parisian, be the way Petersburg was. I wanted a life among pictures and books. In other words, I am a silly woman who ignored the truth, and does not understand the world.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Please. You see with your own eyes what is happening. Each day I dress and I walk through the city to come here. Each day I try to build my Library of Reason. Each day someone, some little Chichikov, walks in off the street. We don’t have proper guards, he can go anywhere, do anything. If a door is locked, it only takes five roubles to get someone to turn a key. Those people come and they know exactly what to look for. They get their commissions from collectors, in Italy, America. He finds the book or the manuscript, and ships it abroad for a profit. Now it gets worse. Young children walk in off the Nevsky Prospekt, and pick up books to sell to the foreigners on the streets. As I put things together, someone takes them away. If I find a new book for the library, someone walks in and takes ten. One day, there will be nothing left. There will never be a library of reason. So you see I truly am a fool.’
‘No, truly, you’re not a fool.’ And then, to my surprise, I’m holding in my arms a handsome white-haired woman, scented by Chanel, dressed by Poiret, at least seventy years old. And I’m holding her tight and embracing her fondly, trying to kiss away the bright tears that suddenly fill her eyes . . .
THIRTY (THEN)
THEN, SUDDENLY, it’s a time of endings. Christmas has been and gone, in a great and Byzantine display of festivities, a New Year has dawned in the northern darkness, and everything changes. It’s as if the ornate celebrations that have lit the sky for a fleeting moment are the bringers of a greater darkness that descends, like night and snow
, over everything. The last pages of the calendar, which turn differently here, have finally turned, and strange new creatures seem to appear over the horizon as the new book of pages dawns. Over the season, the snow has fallen steadily and thickly: turning streets into great white pads, creating the most incredible night spectacles as a million huge flakes sail down slowly past the thousand candle-lit windows of the Winter Hermitage. The Advent season has filled it with great festivities, crowds that are nearly mobs, drunken nobles, arrogant princelings, stumbling generals who have attended the spectacles, watched the sweet plays and operas, even danced in the public staterooms with a newly visible empress.
But here too things are changing, and now the new year darkness has begun to fall too. Plainly not all is well. The snow that began by cleansing the city has now captured it, blanketing all. Horses trot through the streets with frozen beards hanging from their mouths. The urine turns to yellow bricks on the ground beneath their feet. Carriages slide along on huge runners. Long toboggans dragged bodily across the ice of Lake Ladoga keep the city fed. The Baltic is solid-frozen, so nothing from the real Europe which the city mocks comes in. His error in not going deeper into Russia when the weather let him only becomes more apparent. For the snow blanket is so deep that no journey is made now unless entirely necessary; for a soft elderly fellow like himself it’s quite impossible. Only if he resolves to remain in Russia through another summer season will he see in detail the place he has described, his imagined Utopia.
Otherwise it will remain almost as it was before he came, a dream-like scene lit by the (as he now suspects) highly unreliable information that, in answer to his endless questions, has been so sedulously fed to him, by empress, courtiers, scholars and academicians, and which is now supposed to be the stuff of his next great project, so warmly promoted by dear old chancellor Betskoi: his Russian encyclopedia. But is it really true that all over Russia the serfs eat turkey daily, in the same way the unlucky peasants of poorer countries eat gruel or stale bread? Is it really the case that in this fine and decent land no one is ever tortured without excellent reason, ever detained without good cause? Is it really true that its gold reserves are the world’s greatest, and its emerald mines are beyond compare? Is it unquestionably so that the cossacks are all loyal and consenting subjects, or that the Tartars far to the east all read Voltaire and Bossuet and speak the most perfect French?
To the Hermitage Page 41