HAROLD M. LEICH (Washington, DC, USA)

"THE CZAR'S LIBRARY": BOOKS FROM RUSSIAN IMPERIAL AT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Introduction In the 1930s and early 1940s the Library of Congress (LC) acquired 2,800 volumes from the libraries of the tsars and their families, books from the im- perial palaces in and around St. Petersburg,.1 While the overall facts about this interesting and unusual acquisition by LC have been known for some time, many of the details remain mysterious and controversial. The study of the ac- quisition of the "Russian Imperial Collection" and of its subsequent fate at LC reveals a number of interesting details about the library both then and now. The aim of this article is to review the story of LC's acquisition of the collection; to place the sales within the larger context of what was happening in Russian acquisitions at the Library of Congress; and to present some new archival evidence relating to the sales of the imperial volumes. To summarize the acquisition by LC, the bulk of the Russian Imperial Collection was acquired from New York book dealer Israel Perlstein in two purchases, in 1931 and 1932, and in a subsequent gift by Perlstein in 1933 22 The two large block purchases from Perlstein totaled 2,575 volumes. The first

1. Statistics about the tsars' libraries, and those of members of their immediate families, are hard to come by. Valerii Durov, Kniga v sent Romanovykh (Moscow: Nash dom, 2000), pp. 24 if gives the following figures for libraries of the last three tsars: Nicholas II (primarily at the Winter , 10,915 titles, 15,720 volumes); Alexander III (, 5,350 titles, 9,840 volumes; at Tsarskoe Selo, ca. 900 volumes; Palace, 97 peri- odical titles, 4,637 periodical issues); Alexander II ( and Alexander Palace at Tsar- skoe Selo: 5,646 titles, 10,387 volumes). 2. On Perlstein, see Robert Karlowich, "Israel Perlstein: A Talk Delivered at AAASS Panel on Eminent Slavic-American Bookmen, November 3, 1984" (unpublished typescript photocopy, European Division, The Library of Congress); Robert Karlowich, "Israel Perlstein and the Rus- sian Book Trade in the U.S.," Newsletter, Slavic and East European Section, Association of Col-1- lege and Research Libraries, American Library Association, 3 (1987), 52-59; and "Israel Perl- stein [obituary]," AB Bookman's Weekly, May 12, 1975, pp. 2244-46. Perlstein was the chief supplier to the Library of Congress of Russian books in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s. He supplied the Library of Congress with the vast majority of the volumes in its Russian Impe- rial Collection (only one other book dealer, Simeon Bolan, is known to have also sold the Li- brary of Congress some imperial palace volumes). of the sales, completed in March 1931, received wide publicity in the national press3 and was given prominent coverage in the LC's own annual report for 193 1.4 This first sale was also the largest, bringing to LC 1,670 volumes from imperial palace libraries. The second large purchase, offered to the library by Perlstein in August 1931 (and delivered at that time to the library "on ap- proval") and finalized in March 1932, consisted of two separate parts, the to- tal volume count for both totaling 905 volumes. Finally, in September 1933 Perlstein made a gift to the LC of twenty-one books from the library of the children of Nicholas II. While few in number, these books are among the most interesting in the collection, because of their association with the heir and the grand duchesses and the poignant dedica- tions and inscriptions written in the books, often in English, by Nicholas II and Alexandra. The Library also purchased a small number of volumes from Russian im- perial palace collections from New York antiquarian bookdealer Simeon Bolan from 1930 up until the early 1940s, chiefly the "Chertezhi i risunki" (plans and drawings) portfolio supplements to the Polnoe sobranie zakonov rossiiskoi imperii (Complete Collection of the Laws of the ).5

Literature and sources The overall picture of LC's acquisition of the Russian Imperial Collection is well known, thanks to previous research in the published literature and the LC Archives. Davis and Kasinec's A Dark Mirror has become the standard published treatment, because it is so thorough and makes extensive use of ar- chival source. While it naturally focuses on The New York Public Library's collection of books from Russian imperial palaces, it compares the experi- ences of other American libraries that purchased books from imperial palaces (Harvard, NYPL, and Stanford in addition to the Library of Congress). It also

3. "Books of Late Czar Bought for Nation," United States Daily, June 3, 1931, p. 1; "`Library of Congress Gets Books Once Czar's," The New York Times, June 4, 1931, p. 33. 4. Library of Congress. Report of the Librarian of Congress for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1931 (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1931 ), pp. 38-42, 137-44, 223-25. 5. Very little biographical information is available for Simeon Bolan, who had been an em- ployee of the Russian Embassy in Washington before the revolution, and worked for Israel Perl- stein in New York in the 1920s, establishing his own book business around 1927. Information on Bolan has been supplied by Irina Tarsis (Houghton Library, Harvard University) in personal communications and in her unpublished paper read at the December 2004 AAASS conference, "How Did Harvard Get its Russian Books?: Major Acquisitions Sources, 1920s-1930s." The "Chertezhi i risunki" order (accession #406656, Jan. 20, 1931) is available in the Order Division papers in the Library of Congress Archives (accessions records, book 143, box 17). 6. Robert H. Davis and Edward Kasinec, A Dark Mirror: Romanov and Imperial Palace Li- brary Materials in the Holdings of the New York Public Library (New York: Norman Ross Pub., 1999).