Victor Zaslavsky
MYSTERY IN A SOVIET LIBRARY
American libraries suffer from what Stalin would have
called a "peasant leveling mentality." Simply anyone can walk in, go
to the stacks and choose a book ... simple as buying a piece of
cheese. I suspect that these computerized cemeteries impart no
respect whatever towards books, but rather depress readers. The
will to write, to add yet another tome to the multitudes standing on
the shelves is completely dissipated. Soviet libraries are very dif–
ferent. ...
And I know what I miss in American libraries. It is that in
many of them the traditions of Western individualism are obeyed to
such an extent that the tables are big enough for only one reader.
For this reason alone, I never would have had the chance to share a
table at the Central Public Library with a certain reader registered
under the surname Carrasco, whose real identity aroused in me an
obsessive curiosity.
It
was an opportunity arrived at after years spent traversing the
capricious library-access hierarchy of the Soviet Union. When I was
just ten years old, my school's head librarian noticed my love for
books and co-opted me onto the Library Council. The Council's first
memorable act was purging books. Immediately after the war, text–
books were scarce, and my school received two hundred history text–
books printed in the mid-1930s. To purge the old edition of "the
enemies of the people," we would open to page 181 and spill ink on
the portraits of Marshals Tukhachevsky and Blucher.
The store of books in the school library was meager, textbooks
excepted, and I read quickly. The librarian wrote me a recommen–
dation for the district library for grown-ups. The district library was
subject to almost military discipline. Books could be signed out three
at a time and exchanged no sooner than three days later. The library
had a catalogue but it was out of bounds. To sign out a book the
reader had to name the author; if he could not, which was usually
the case, he had to mention at least what kind of book he wanted.
"Something about love," the women quickly said. The men often
hemmed and hawed, their hands aflutter.
When I entered the university, I reached a new height. The
student library was a department of the Central Public Library,
