Biblioteka Gennadiia Vasil’evicha Iudina: zhizn’ posle zhizni [The library of Gennadii Vasil’evich Yudin: life after life]

Abstract

The private library of Gennadii Vasil’evich Yudin (1840–1921) has taken on a life of its own, perpetuating the magnificent bibliographic legacy of its founder for over a century. Yudin, a Siberian merchant who lived for the most part in the city of Krasnoiarsk, diligently amassed one of the largest private libraries of his day in Russia, consisting of books, journals, newspapers, maps, prints and manuscripts in not only Russian but in French, Latin, German, English, Polish, Ukrainian and other languages. Due to a combination of factors, including Yudin’s advanced age and his desire to keep the library extant, Yudin sold the majority of his collection to the Library of Congress in 1906. The sale, however, did not put a stop to Yudin’s indefatigable collecting efforts. Before his death in 1912, it is estimated Yudin acquired approximately 10,000 more volumes, most of which are now preserved in the rare book department of Gosudarstvennaia universal’naia nauchnaia biblioteka Krasnoiarskogo kraia [State universal scientific library of the Krasnoiarsk district]. The volume, Biblioteka Gennadiia Vasil’evicha Iudina: zhizn’ posle zhizni, is a celebration of Yudin’s bibliomania. The book itself is bound in a handsome brown and yellow cover decorated with an attractive floral design. Its large, rectangular size suggests the intention for display as a “coffee-table” book. The lion’s share of content in the book is dedicated to a reprint of Alexis Babine’s description of Yudin’s library, originally published in 1905 in Washington, DC under the title The Yudin library: Krasnoiarsk (Eastern Siberia). Alexis Babine (1866–1930), a Russian émigré originally from the Riazan’ province who worked as a specialist of Russian literature at the Library of Congress from 1902 to 1905, was instrumental in negotiating the sale of Yudin’s collection to his employer. As a result of Babine’s visit to Yudin’s library in 1903 to survey its condition and contents, Babine produced an outline of the collection highlighting its impressive breadth and marveling at its inclusion of numerous bibliographic rarities, including issues of the 18-century publication Irtysh, the first periodical from Siberia. Babine’s sketch remains one of the best sources for providing a sense of the state of Yudin’s library when it was purchased by the Library of Congress. As far as this author can tell, the subject of this review seems to be the first reprint of Babine’s text since its original publication in 1905, which has been digitized by at least three U.S. universities and is available through the HathiTrust digital library. The reprint of Babine’s work in Biblioteka Gennadiia Vasil’evicha Iudina retains the side-by-side versions of the text in English and Russian as was presented in the original and preserves the text’s pre-Revolutionary orthography. In terms of original content, Biblioteka Gennadiia Vasil’evicha Iudina contains two essays – “Vybor sud’by” [The choice of fate] by Leonid Berdnikov, a librarian at Krasnoiarskaia gorodskaia biblioteka im. A. M. Gor’kogo [Krasnoiarsk city library], and “Obraz bibliofila G. V. Iudina v kul’turnoi pamiati rossiian i amerikantsev” [The image of the bibliophile G. V. Yudin in the cultural memory of Russians and Americans] by Liudmila Veniaminovna Belgorodskaia, a professor of history at