You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia

by Jack Lynch

  TITLE: (Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia)

  ORGANIZATION: Alphabetical

  PUBLISHED: Moskva: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1926–47

  VOLUMES: 65

  PAGES: 28,000

  ENTRIES: 65,000

  TOTAL WORDS: 17 million

  SIZE: 10″ × 6¾″ (25.5 × 17 cm)

  AREA: 13,000 ft2 (1,210 m2)

  WEIGHT: 55lb. 7 oz. (25.2 kg)

  LATEST EDITION: 3rd ed. of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 30 vols., 1969–78; the Great Russian Encyclopedia, 30 vols. (2004–9)

  The Entsiklopediia was forward looking. It was a new era, and the sooner the past was forgotten, the better. All of Russian history from the beginning to 1917 got three pages of text; the entry on the Russian Soviet Federated Republic got a hundred twenty. Recent accomplishments, such as the Moscow Canal, were celebrated in rapturous terms; czarist accomplishments were often passed over in silence. Coverage of scientific accomplishments is one of the weaknesses, but the biographies and historical entries are strong. Considerable attention is devoted to the major figures in Soviet history. The entry on Leninism took up more than eighty pages, and Stalin got forty to himself. Lenin and Stalin were themselves credited with contributing to the forty-page entry on Marxism.

  But the nature of the coverage shifted over the time it took to produce the book. As one reviewer wrote, the encyclopedia “took more than twenty years to complete, a long time by any encyclopedic standard, but an even longer and more eventful period when viewed through the prism of Soviet history.”8 The period between the first volume and the last, 1926 through 1947, was one of almost unimaginable turmoil in the Soviet Union. In 1926, Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Politburo, and eventually from the Communist Party; Nikolai Bukharin would follow in 1929. Stalin began his five-year plans in 1928. The Moscow Trials of sixteen dissidents took place in 1936. Stalin’s constitution went into effect in 1936, and the Great Purge of 1937 rooted out anti-Soviet elements. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were incorporated into the Soviet Union; Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia were invaded.

  Writers of reference books are charged with representing the world around them, and if that world is changing in unpredictable ways, their work will represent it. Early volumes of the Entsiklopediia were published in the 1920s, and they are filled with Bolshevik energy. As Stalin’s brand of leadership sank in, though, many of the early figures who were celebrated enthusiastically fell from favor. In 1931, the editorial board looked back on their work to date and came to the conclusion that some of the articles—no one specified which or how many—were not appropriately orthodox in their commitment to Marxism-Leninism. The publication plan was shaken up. And as political attitudes shifted, the subsequent volumes of the encyclopedia had to be rejiggered to reflect the new orthodoxy. Bukharin, for instance, at the heart of the October Revolution in 1917, was still in good standing in the 1920s, but when he stood up to Stalin and opposed his consolidation of power, he fell from grace. Though his name was at the top of the list of editors in the volumes published in 1930, he found himself demoted in the volumes published in 1932. In 1937, Bukharin disappeared from the masthead entirely. It was a grim harbinger of his fate: in 1938, he was arrested and executed. Later he would suffer the posthumous indignity of not even appearing in the entry on the October Revolution, published in 1939.9

  Not every shift in coverage can be explained by an individual’s getting on Stalin’s bad side. The entries for Great Britain and Germany were written early, and these two nations received more or less sympathetic treatment. But Italy, Japan, China, and France, all appearing later in the Russian alphabet, paid the price for their poor standing with the Soviet Union in the years leading to the Second World War. The entry for the United States was relatively positive, because by 1945, when the relevant volume appeared, the Americans and the Soviets were working together to defeat the Axis powers.10

  As soon as the first edition was complete, the editorial team turned its attention to a second edition. Rapid progress was part of the national ideology, as was achieving ideological purity. The Council of Ministers therefore issued a decree:

  The second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia should elucidate broadly the world-historical victories of Socialism in our country, which have been attained in the USSR in the provinces of economics, science, culture, and art… . With exhaustive completeness it must show the superiority of Socialist culture over the culture of the capitalist world. Operating on Marxist-Leninist theory, the encyclopedia should give a party criticism of contemporary reactionary bourgeois tendencies in various provinces of science and technics.11

  The first edition reached the end of the alphabet in 1947; the second edition began appearing in 1949. It was concerned less with extending the first edition than with replacing it.

  The second edition explicitly took sides in the cold war. The Soviet Council of Ministers instructed the editorial board “to show with exhaustive completeness the superiority of socialist culture over the culture of the capitalist world. Based on Marxist-Leninist theory, the Encyclopedia should give the party’s criticism of reactionary bourgeois tendencies in various fields of science and technique.”12 But Soviet history did not stop making life confusing for the encyclopedists. Stalin died in 1953, and Nikita Khrushchev’s rethinking of Stalin’s rule required the editors to be fast on their feet. We can trace the decline in the adulation directed at Stalin in the volumes published after 1953. The once-beloved leader had the misfortune to have a name beginning with S, which put his own entry late in the encyclopedia. By the time his volume appeared, his reputation was already in tatters. At the same time, many of the figures who were “disappeared” in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s and excluded from the first edition of the Entsiklopediia reappeared in the second.

  The second edition, which drew on the work of a mind-blowing 15,820 contributors, was complete in fifty-one volumes by 1958. The scientific coverage is better than before; the entries are both more extensive and more accurate, showing less of the concern with dialectical materialist doctrine. It also deserves credit for sticking to its publication schedule, and it is a more attractive and more usable book than its predecessor. The third edition, ordered by the Central Committee in 1967, is smaller—thirty volumes instead of fifty-one—a condensation achieved partly by shortening the entries and partly by printing them in smaller type. Still it featured 100,000 articles, 36,000 illustrations, and 1,650 maps, prepared by more than ten thousand scientists, headed by Aleksandr Prokhorov, winner of the Lenin Prize and the Nobel Prize in physics. It appeared between 1970 and 1978, with an index of names appearing in a separate volume in 1981. By this time the Soviet Union was looking abroad, and it authorized translations into the major European languages: Italian, Greek, Spanish, and English. The English publisher was eager to distance itself from the doctrine that prompted the encyclopedia in the first place: they were presenting a document of cultural interest without endorsing the Marxist-Leninist ideology that created it:

  This English edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia is a faithful translation of the Soviet national encyclopedia, unannotated and as true as possible to the content and meaning intended by the editors of the original edition in Russian. The publisher and editors of this work do not embrace the ideology or endorse the views expressed by the Soviet Editors and authors of the Encyclopedia, nor do they believe it is meaningful or valuable to its users in English for them to comment on the material. Rather, the purpose of this translation is to convey the scope and point of view of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia and to bring to scholars and others with a serious professional interest in Soviet affairs a primary source through which they can gain a richer knowledge and understanding of the contemporary Soviet Union.13

  Most of the Western reviews of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia were just as much a part of the Cold War mentality as the Encyclopedia itself. “Objectivity” became the favorite word of hostile critics, who contrasted p
utatively “objective” Western publications with the “doctrinaire” or “ideological” work of the Soviets. A reviewer points to the “half-comical and half-macabre megalomania” of the book.14 And yet Western encyclopedias have no shortage of doctrine and propaganda; their entries on democracy and Smith, Adam can be every bit as propagandistic as Fascist and Communist publications. And when the English third edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia appeared in 1991, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, some American reviews were positively gloating. “What’s more out of date than a leisure suit, denser than the caveats to an insurance policy and a whole lot bigger than a breadbox?” asked the St. Petersburg Times—Florida, not Leningrad. “Try a multivolume set of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, a master compendium of the world’s most outmoded, misleading and downright untrue knowledge.”15

  Other twentieth-century ideologies were enshrined in encyclopedia form. The Enciclopedia Italiana di scienze, lettere ed arti (36 vols., 1925–37) was determined to support the Fascist state, and the entry fascismo was signed by Benito Mussolini himself (though it was probably ghostwritten by philosopher Giovanni Gentile, editor of the series).16 Nazi Germany had no exact equivalent. Der Große Brockhaus (20 vols., 1928–37) rejected Nazi influence, but Meyers Lexikon (8 vols., 1936–42) shows contemporary concern with race. And the Zhongguo Da Baike Quanshu (China Great Encyclopedia) began appearing in 1978.

  It is well to remember, though, that some Western encyclopedias are every bit as ideological, even as they vigorously deride ideology. After an education at Cornell and Yale and a career as a literary critic and theorist, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., achieved prominence as the director of a college writing program. He became increasingly concerned that his students lacked the background needed to be good readers and writers of important literature. Quoting Samuel Johnson’s invocation of “the common reader,” Hirsch noted that in the eighteenth century “there did exist a commonality of literate people who shared much the same grammar school education, who had ready many of the same ancient and modern authors, who continued to read many of the same periodicals, … and who could be counted on to have a certain range of shared knowledge and attitudes.” He rejected the increasing politicization of literary studies and called for a “Back-to-the-Classics” approach to teaching writing: “back to content, shared knowledge, cultural literacy.”17 The concern culminated in the bestselling Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (1988), an attempt to delineate essential shared knowledge in an age of increasing relativism and intellectual fragmentation. But adherence to a canon of classics is itself an ideological position, and in the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy’s most vehement denunciations of doctrine, it reveals its true genealogy among other doctrinal encyclopedias.

  CHAPTER 24 ½

  UNPERSONS

  Damnatio Memoriae

  History, it is said, is written by the winners. More important, history is often rewritten by the winners—or, even more, unwritten. Nowhere is that seen more clearly than in encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries.

  The Roman practice of damnatio memoriae—Latin for “condemnation of memory,” though the term was not used by the ancients—is the removal of every trace of an enemy of the state from history. When the Roman Senate pronounced an abolitio nominis on someone, an “abolition of the name,” the abolition was literal. Statues were knocked over, mosaics pried up, inscriptions chiseled out, and coins bearing the hated image removed from circulation.1 Even the person’s family name was removed from circulation. He became what George Orwell in 1984 called an “unperson.”

  Though the term is Latin, the practice was not limited to Rome. The Hebrew Bible records threats of punishment: “his name shall be covered with darkness,” says Ecclesiastes 6:4. And Christians could remove people from history by excommunicating them.2 The most notorious modern examples of damnatio memoriae, though, came from the Soviet Union.

  Readers of volume 5 of the second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia in 1950 might have been interested to read of the career of Lavrentii Pavlovich Beria, the state security chief under Stalin. There they would have learned about his childhood in Georgia, his rise through the ranks of the Georgian State Political Directorate, his appointment as secretary of the Communist Party for the entire Transcaucasus, and his eventual promotion to the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1934. They would have read about how he became one of Stalin’s favorites, and how he reached the post of commissar general of state security. All of this was captured, in suitably patriotic detail, in the encyclopedia.

  In the early 1950s, though, Beria underwent a rapid downfall, as Stalin had begun to suspect his loyalty. Stalin’s death offered Beria only a temporary reprieve, because after a coup by Nikita Khrushchev and a few others, Beria was arrested, tried for “criminal activities against the Party and the State” in a trial where he was not permitted to defend himself, and found guilty of terrorism and treason. He was executed in December 1953.

  The Party found itself in an embarrassing position: the official state encyclopedia now included a laudatory entry on a traitor. In 1954, therefore, subscribers to the encyclopedia received—at no extra charge!—a new set of pages 21 through 24. They were instructed to cut out the original pages “with a small knife or razor blade” and to paste the new ones in their place. The new pages included extended coverage of the Bering Sea, as well as of Vitus Bering, the Danish explorer whose name it bears. Readers got expanded information on Friedrich Wilhelm von Bergholz, an eighteenth-century courtier and diarist, and on philosopher George Berkeley’s subjective idealism. All this new information, though, left no room for an entry on Lavrentii Pavlovich Beria, who disappeared completely. Beria would not appear in any official history or memoir for the next thirty years.3

  Beria is the most famous, but far from the only, instance of damnatio memoriae in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Leon Trotsky’s entry came and went in the book as his reputation among party officials rose and fell. Nikolai Bukharin, Grigory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev, eliminated from positions of power by Stalin, were eliminated from the encyclopedia by loyal editors. Even literary figures and scientists found their entries rewritten or eliminated from subsequent printings if party doctrine became less tolerant of their work.

  While Soviet revisionism was extreme, as Charles W. Hedrick wrote, “all societies, including modern Western liberal democracies, have necessarily been selective about what they remember and what they forget. Even contemporary American businesses may treat embarrassing executives in a manner reminiscent of the damnatio memoriae.”4 Disgraced CEOs and indicted insider traders have suffered the indignity of watching their oil portraits come off the wall in boardrooms and halls of distinguished alumni. A twenty-first-century twist is provided by the services that seek to remove unflattering information about their clients from the major databases and search engines. A recent European Union law asserts the “right to be forgotten,” empowering the living to decide which facts about them should be forgotten.

  CHAPTER 25

  NOTHING SPECIAL

  Books for Browsers

  Norris and Ross McWhirter

  The Guinness Book of Records

  1955

  Ben Schott

  Schott’s Original Miscellany

  2002

  Reference works evolved to serve practical needs. Essential information, having grown too copious and unwieldy to be retained in memory, had to be laid out in documentary form for quick access. But eventually the books pervaded the culture, and the reference form was used for other purposes, begetting full-length reference books containing information no one will ever need to refer to. These books are meant entirely for browsers, with no pretense to being “useful” at all. They are instead reference-book-shaped compendia of trivia—the word got its modern sense of “Trivialities, trifles, things of little consequence” as recently as 1902—and they have become a publishing phenomenon.

  As with every reference genre, books of trivia have deep roots.
Jeremiah Whitaker Newman’s Lounger’s Common-Place Book (1792–93) is typical of late eighteenth-century miscellanies: the subtitle promises an Alphabetical Arrangement of Miscellaneous Anecdotes: A Biographic, Political, Literary, and Satirical Compilation, in Prose and Verse, and that is what the book delivers. Some four pages are devoted to Robert Adair, then the same to Anabaptists, to Tomaso Aniello, John Arbuthnot, Polly Baker, and so on—a gathering of people with nothing in common. Volume 2 starts over at the beginning of the alphabet, this time trading biographical for topical entries: “Benefit of Clergy,” “Black Hole” (of Calcutta), “Burton-upon-Trent.” Whitaker confessed his scholarship was sometimes shoddy. “From the nature of this production,” he wrote, “authors have been occasionally referred to generally by memory; sometimes I have imagined myself quoting, when in fact I was not, and sometimes I have quoted without being conscious of it.” For readers who discovered his quotations “have not been exactly and literally correct,” he “claim[ed] the reader’s indulgence for an omission, which I hope he believes did not originate from a mean design of plucking feathers from the nightingale, to deck a parrot, whose merit at best is to repeat by rote.”1 But the quotations hardly have to be correct. No one will ever turn to the Lounger’s Common-Place Book as part of a scholarly investigation into Burton-upon-Trent. It was meant only for curious browsers.