The Book Thieves

by Anders Rydell

  The Turgenev Library became an important meeting place for Paris-based Bolsheviks in exile. So important, in fact, that in 1910 Lenin personally ensured the transfer of the library and archive of the Russian Social Democratic Party to the Turgenev Library.

  “No single political group was dominant at the library; the entire spectrum of colors was represented: Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, social revolutionaries, and anarchists. They were political opponents, but here in the library they could meet and have debates. The library rose above their ideological differences; here it was Russian culture that held the center ground,” Kaplan tells me.

  The Russian Revolution had a negative impact on the Turgenev Library, when Paris was emptied of its revolutionaries, who hurried off to join the uprising. Yet these Russian exiles were soon replaced by a new and considerably larger exiled Russian community after the revolution, when tens of thousands of Russians descended on the capital. The most prominent of these were the Belorussian immigrants, the White émigrés of diverse and colorful backgrounds, including aristocrats, bourgeoisie, nationalists, reactionaries, intellectuals, military staff, and priests. They were united only in their opposition to the Communists. But there were also socialists here, many of them the same exiled Russians as before—Socialists, Communists, and Social Democrats, who had joined the revolution only to be forced into exile once the Bolsheviks had seized power.

  One of them was Hélène Kaplan’s father, Venedikt Mjakotin. “My father was a Russian historian and socialist, one of the people who had started the revolution before the Bolsheviks took over. He refused to join the Bolsheviks. But he was lucky; after the civil war Lenin allowed a small convoy of intellectuals, people who had been important to the revolution, to leave Russia. It was no more than two hundred people and it only happened once,” says Kaplan, who was born in Prague, where Mjakotin and his wife sought refuge. “Obviously he was almost totally deleted from the history of the Soviet regime.”

  During the interwar years, a new circle of exiled Russian intellectuals congregated around the Turgenev Library, many of them authors, journalists, and artists, all fallen from grace in the Soviet Union. This was the heyday of the library—the time when Paris became the capital of the Russian community in exile. The circle around the Turgenev Library included writers such as Mikhail Osorgin, Mark Aldanov, and Ivan Bunin (the chairman of the foundation that ran the library), who in 1933 became the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

  With this new wave of émigrés the collection grew exponentially. At the turn of the century there were about 3,500 books in the library. By 1925 it had increased to 50,000 books, and ten years later the collection had doubled in size. Before long, the Turgenev Library was considered one of the absolutely leading Russian libraries. As the library’s renown spread, it also gained support. In the 1930s, the city of Paris offered the library the possibility of moving out of its modest premises on rue du Val-de-Grâce into the palatial Hôtel Colbert on rue de la Bûcherie.14

  “Here you could find all the books that had been banned in Russia. It became known as the great library for émigré literature,” Kaplan explains.

  In addition to Russian émigré literature, the library had first editions of Voltaire, François de La Rochefoucauld, and the Russian author Nikolay Karamzin—and also historically valuable works such as Sudebnik, Tsar Ivan IV’s lawbook from 1550 with commentary by the historian and statesman Vasily Tatishchev. The collection included personal archives and documents belonging to exiled Russian writers and books with annotations and signatures by, among others, Bunin and Lenin. In the interwar years another émigré library took form in Paris: the Symon Petljura Library. Symon Petljura was a Ukrainian journalist, writer, and politician who in 1917 had been involved in the formation of a short-lived Ukrainian popular republic. It had been an attempt to free the Ukraine from the shadow of Russia and the revolution. But the Petljura republic left a notorious legacy of the bloodiest persecution of Jews until the Holocaust. During the brief existence of the Ukrainian popular republic, tens of thousands of Jews are believed to have been murdered in more than thirteen hundred pogroms.15 When the Red Army occupied the Ukraine, Petljura was forced to flee, and in 1924 he settled in the Latin Quarter in Paris, from which he led the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) in exile. With Bibliothèque Russe Tourguéniev and Bibliothèque Polonaise as models of what he wanted to achieve, Petljura planned to start a Ukrainian public library. However, the library project had not even started in earnest before Petljura was murdered by another émigré, the Russian-Jewish poet, Sholom Schwartzbard.16

  After the murder, a library was founded in his honor, and the Bibliothèque Ukrainienne Symon Petljura opened in 1929. The library, in an apartment on rue de La Tour d’Auvergne, built up an important archive of documents from the Ukrainian government and its leader, as well as Petljura’s private library. By the time the war broke out in 1939 the collection numbered some 15,000 volumes, compared with the 100,000 volumes of the Turgenev Library and the 136,000 volumes of the Polish library.

  The émigré libraries played an extraordinarily important role for these minority communities. They became the literary homes for people who had lost their language and culture. Not only did they uphold lost cultures, to an even greater extent they were meeting places in which linguistic and national identities could live on and continue to evolve. In this sense they were absolutely crucial. At the same time they operated as a sort of resistance movement. For the Poles, the Bibliothèque Polonaise was a way of salvaging Polish culture, which was being subjected to strong pressure from Germanization and Russification processes—specifically, persecution, victimization, and a downgrading of the language and culture in Polish-speaking areas.

  These libraries also symbolized an alternative version of written history. They pointed to the other Russia, the other Poland, and preserved the stories that would otherwise have been lost. In the exile libraries, Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian literature could keep evolving and be read, debated, and criticized. For the poets, authors, and journalists that had not only lost their home countries but also their readers, this was especially important. Yet a catastrophe lay in wait for Paris’s flourishing émigré communities, and it would come from an enemy that did not merely intend to stifle and censor Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian culture but raze them to the ground and utterly extinguish them.

  • • •

  Early one autumn day in 1940, the Russian exile author Nina Berberova rode her bicycle into the center of Paris from the small house where she was living, in the countryside on the outskirts of Paris. She had emigrated in 1922 with the poet and critic Vladislav Chodasevitj. In Paris they had socialized with an impoverished but prominent circle of young exile writers such as Vladimir Nabokov and Marina Tsvetajeva. Nina Berberova had herself debuted while she was living in exile, and she would later become known for her short stories, which depicted the lives of Russian immigrants in Paris during the interwar years.

  She often made these bicycle excursions to buy milk, potatoes, and books. A month or so earlier she had taken out a book by the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, in a Russian translation, from the Turgenev Library, or as it was known among the émigrés, “Turgenevka.” It was her intention to return the book that day.

  “Hôtel Colbert lies in a little street near Notre-Dame. The clock was not even showing ten in the morning when I walked in. The whole courtyard was filled with rough wooden crates, long as coffins—three dozen of them standing or lying on the ground. They were empty. I tapped on the window of the concierge, who knew me, and asked if I could keep the book until four o’clock. She gave me an irascible look: ‘They’re here.’

  “I immediately went up the stairs. The doors were wide open. There were two crates on the landing and two more inside the hall. Quickly, efficiently, with rhythmic movements, the books were being packed. I was shocked. But in spite of this I asked in my bad German what was
going on, although it was abundantly clear. I got the polite answer that the books were being sent away. Where? Why? No one answered.”17

  Nina Berberova cycled at once to the home of Vasily Maklakov, an old Russian politician, democrat, and diplomat. Maklakov had been the country’s ambassador in Paris in 1917 when the Bolsheviks took power. He had occupied the Russian embassy for seven years before France felt compelled to recognize the Soviet Union and throw Maklakov out of the embassy.

  Conferring among themselves and with the historian Dimitri Odinets, the head of the library committee, they agreed that the only way to save the library was to make an appeal to their second-worst enemy: Stalin. Odinets hurried off to the Soviet embassy to try to put a stop to the looting. At the embassy they showed him first into one room, then another. He asked if he could see the principal secretary, or the first consul, or if possible the ambassador in person. He spoke to one person, then another, then a third—without any of them even introducing themselves. Over and over again he explained the reason for his visit: to try to save the Russian library.

  “It was founded by Turgenev,” he explained, “the author of Fathers and Sons and Rudin, while he was living in Paris.” But their eyes remained blank. He went on: “It was important to act quickly, before the books were removed. . . .” The embassy staff just shrugged their shoulders: “What’s the importance of this to us? Dramatic writings by migrants!”

  “All of a sudden,” Odinets told me, “I had an idea. I explained that Lenin had once worked in this library. That there were books here with his annotations in the margins, and other books that he had donated to the library. Even his chair was still here!” Never before, he admitted, had his imagination worked so hard. “People started running about around me and getting worked up. They called in other people. I had to repeat what I just said about Lenin.”

  He rounded off his story: “They showed me through a new set of doors. They continued opening and closing them. Someone promised me that he would intervene, but I could not quite believe him. That a telephone call could make a difference! That night I stayed yet again with my friends in Boulogne. The next day when I arrived at Hôtel Colbert it was all over. The chests were gone, the doors had been shut and sealed. The largest Russian exile library had ceased to exist.”18

  Librarian Hélène Kaplan displays one of the few books from the Russian Turgenev Library that have been returned. The unique émigré library, where among others Lenin worked, was plundered and scattered during the Second World War.

  Nina Berberova kept her Schopenhauer. Another émigré, the historian Nikolai Knorring, also witnessed the plunder. Judging by the numbers on the crates, he estimated that nine hundred crates of books and archive materials were taken away. Other sources, however, have indicated a smaller number.”19 According to Knorring, the ERR also stole paintings, busts, and portraits. A few items slipped through its fingers; among other things the librarian Marija Kotljarevskaja managed to save some correspondence between the anarchist Peter Kropotkin and the philosopher Pavel Bakunin.

  Hélène Kaplan opens one of the library’s prewar catalogs on the table. These were also not picked up by the Nazis, and in fact they were found a few years ago in an old cardboard box in the cellar of the Hôtel Colbert. The catalogs testify to the breadth of the collection before the war, with an abundance not only of literary books but everything from geography to economics and law.

  A similar story to the one that Berberova described was also played out at the Bibliothèque Polonaise, which was only a short walk from the Hôtel Colbert, in a house from the 1600s on the Île Saint-Louis, in the middle of the Seine. The library, which had recently celebrated its centenary, had 136,000 books in its collection, with an additional 12,000 drawings, 1,000 manuscripts, 2,800 antique maps, 1,700 Polish coins and medallions, and a rich archive of photographs.20 It was a priceless collection, representing a free Polish culture, and it had been laboriously collected over a full century of exile.

  The collection also included the Pelplin Bible, a Bible printed by Gutenberg, which had been saved after the assault on Poland in 1939. The Gutenberg Bible is the literary equivalent of Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings. The Bibles, in two volumes, were printed by Gutenberg in the middle of the 1400s, and are considered the first significant edition of printed books in Europe. There are only twenty known complete copies. No Gutenberg Bible has been put on sale since the 1970s, but the current market value is estimated to be in excess of $35 million. The so-called Pelplin Bible was famous for having a unique mark, which is believed to have been caused by the printer dropping a section of type. The Pelplin Bible was inlaid with gold and bound in red kid leather. It was also one of only nine Gutenberg Bibles still to have its original binding from the 1400s.21 When the war broke out in 1939, the Bible was in a library in Pelplin, a small town in an area of western Poland that would be brutally Germanized and integrated into the Third Reich. The Nazis viewed the Gutenberg Bibles as German national treasures, which absolutely had to be returned to the Reich. For this reason, the Pelplin edition, Poland’s one and only Gutenberg Bible, was a coveted prize. Father Antoni Liedtke at the seminary in Pelplin was painfully aware of this, and he had the local saddle maker construct a leather case with hidden compartments, in which he hid the two volumes whose combined weight was close to ninety pounds. In October 1939, while Poland was capitulating, the Bible was being smuggled onto a cargo ship loaded with grain, bound for France and the Bibliothèque Polonaise. The consignment also included some valuable books that had been saved from the National Library in Warsaw.22

  After receiving reports from Poland, the staff at the Bibliothèque Polonaise was aware of what to expect if the country fell. When Amiens in northern France was taken by German forces in May 1940, the Bible was evacuated once again. In early June, a truck loaded with a selection of Poland’s literary inheritance, including the Pelplin Bible, traveled south. The books left on a small Polish steamer, which slipped its moorings only a few hours before the Germans attacked the town. The ship also managed to cross the English Channel, which was full of German submarines. Finally, the Bible was in safe hands.23

  However, the collection at the Bibliothèque Polonaise was much too large to be saved in its entirety. The most important items were evacuated: drawings, maps, and original manuscripts by Adam Mickiewicz were hidden in various French libraries. Despite such efforts, the lion’s share of the library remained in the building on the Île Saint-Louis, which was searched by German security police two days after the fall of Paris.24

  Two months later, on August 25, staff arrived from the Paris office of the ERR. According to the head of the library, the historian Franciszek Pułaski, who witnessed the events, the work was overseen by three men from Rosenberg’s office and about forty French workers, who packed the collection into crates like those Berberova had seen at the Turgenev Library. The contents of each crate were carefully noted down, and in all, 780 crates were filled, of which 766 contained books, newspapers, and other printed materials.25

  In October 1940 the library was transported to La Chapelle in northern Paris and loaded onto a train bound for Germany. This time, the ERR also had to share the booty with another organization, known as the Publikationsstelle Berlin-Dahlem, a department of the Prussian state archive devoted to what was known as Eastern research.26 As a subject it had existed before 1933; however, its purpose now was to promote German expansion to the east. Most of the Polish library was taken to the Publikationsstelle Berlin-Dahlem.

  The Bibliothèque Ukrainienne Symon Petljura was also visited by the plunderers. In January 1941 the library on rue de La Tour d’Auvergne was cleared in a matter of three days of its books and archive materials, which were packed and sent to the sorting center in rue la Bruyère—once the head office of the Alliance Israélite Universelle.

  The intention at first had been to send the Petljura library to the RSHA in Berlin, but after an assessment of the
collection, it was concluded that it lacked relevance for the intelligence services. The books were handed over to the ERR. Alfred Rosenberg would find a place for the collection in a new library that had taken form in Berlin under his leadership—the Ostbücherei, a research library under Amt Rosenberg that would aggregate any material relating to Bolshevism and Russia and Eastern Europe in general. The Turgenev Library was eventually added as well. These émigré libraries from the “West” would make up the foundations of a collection that after the invasion of the Soviet Union started to grow exponentially.27

  The historian Patricia Kennedy Grimsted argues that the Nazi attacks on the émigré libraries in Paris were an aspect of the preparations for the invasion of the Soviet Union, which was already under way in 1940 under a cloak of great secrecy. The libraries were considered to be possible sources of valuable intelligence for the coming war.28

  • • •

  Hélène Kaplan rises, takes her crutch, and walks up to a gray metal cupboard with frosted glass doors, which she opens. She reaches in and runs the tips of her fingers over the spines of the books inside. What immediately strikes me is just how tattered the books are. Some of the spines have split. The binding has loosened and the threads stick out. Some of the books are in such bad condition that they seem to be held together only by their place on the shelf. They are neither old nor valuable, but they have had hard lives—émigrés, some having arrived with refugees from Russia before the war, only to go back east at a later stage. More than sixty years later they have come home to Paris.

  As for Hélène Kaplan, she came to Paris in the third wave of Russian immigrants, after the Second World War, when her family left an Eastern Europe that was just about to be trapped behind the Iron Curtain. Not until the end of the 1980s, after perestroika, was she able to revisit her homeland. By that time, she was already involved in the Turgenev Library; then, after retiring fifteen years ago, she became its protector.