Subverting Gutenberg. Manuscripts and books in central display cases (curated by Monika Greenleaf and Josh Walker)

Marina Tsvetaeva, “The House at Old Pimen,” fair copy (1933).

Living in Paris in 1933, the great poet Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) supported her family in part by commissioned public readings of her jewel-like prose-reminiscences, records of a poetically apprehended, vanished world. She wrote out the "fair copy" (belovik) of her gothic prose-memoir "The House at Old Pimen" in a minute hand that painstakingly mimicked cyrillic typeface (note especially her d's).
The effect is paradoxical: instead of efficiently ignoring the medium, our attention is arrested by the archaic, loving laboriousness that has been invested in the story's far from
mechanical reproduction. The hand-made type, pre-revolutionary orthography and archaic grammatical ending ("starago") polemically materialize the patriarchal aura of the pre-revolutionary past. Together with her troubled and politically divided family, Tsvetaeva returned to Russia at the end of the decade, only to experience still greater penury and obscurity in Elabuga, where she committed suicide in 1941.

The interaction of handwriting and typeface performed a variety of artistic functions in several works of Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), from his pre-revolutionary debut as a Moscow post-Symbolist poet to early drafts of Dr. Zhivago, his Nobel Prize winning novel of the
Russian Revolution (first published in Italy in 1958).

Boris Pasternak, Twin in the Clouds, collection of lyric poems (1913).

The title page of Pasternak’s collection of lyrics, Twin in the Clouds, was printed 19 December, 1913 to look like a home-made production: the title and the word "Book Publisher” are fancifully drawn and decorated in purple ink, while the subtitle, “Poems of Boris Pasternak,” as well as the poems inside, appear to have been typed by a faded blue typewriter ribbon. The little book materializes the transition between the novice poet’s unique “fair copy" submitted with naïve hope to a publisher, and its transference to the public medium of print.

Boris Pasternak, handwritten copies of lyric poems “Insomnia” and “White Night.”

That Boris Pasternak, son of the well-known painter Leonid Pasternak and accomplished pianist Rozalia Kaufman, ascribed artistic value to the poet’s irreducibly individual
handwriting shows in several beautiful handwritten copies of such poems as “Insomnia” and "White Night,” distinctive for their sweeping calligraphy (especially the signature capital P) and purple ink.

Handwritten manuscript in purple ink, purporting to be draft of Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago.

This is a photocopy of a “newly discovered” manuscript of Dr. Zhivago, written in purple calligraphic script, which was offered to the Hoover Institution for $150,000. Fortunately, the manuscript was shown to the poet’s son Evgenii Pasternak, who immediately recognized it as a forgery, pointing out that his father “swooped but did not loop” his capital P’s.

Boris Pasternak, “Poems of Iurii Zhivago,” hand-sewn booklet with dedication to Cecil Maurice Bowra (1948).

Of still more interest are two hand-sewn booklets or "fascicles," to use the term popularized by Emily Dickinson studies, which contain the type-written “Poems of Iurii Zhivago," composed by Boris Pasternak in 1948 ten years before Dr. Zhivago was completed. (Its title “A Novel in Prose” alluded to Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, famously subtitled “a Novel in Verse.”) It is as if Iurii Zhivago’s own hand had fabricated these fragile booklets during the hard times of Russia’s Civil War (1917-20) At the same time, the fascicles are redolent of Pasternak’s own circumstances under Soviet censorship. A favored poet and precarious survivor of Stalin’s Terror, Pasternak had worked in secret since 1938 on his religious novel, which would have to be smuggled abroad and into Italian print before it became known by the circuitous route of a Nobel Prize to its readers in Russia. In 1948 Pasternak was well-aware of the novel’s small chances of publication. Thus in the time-honored tradition of Russian samizdat (self-publication), at the end of his dedication to the well-known writer and Oxford don Cecil Maurice Bowra, Pasternak wrote, “Show it please, to my sister and others.”

Boris Pasternak, corrected copy of his censored translation of Goethe’s Faust.

The historic, preservationist function of handwriting is dramatically illustrated in Pasternak’s copy of his published translation of Goethe’s Faust. Between the lines of print, Pasternak has carefully re-inserted lines cancelled by the censor.

Artistic experiments of the extended family of Leonid Andreyev, Vadim Andreyev, Olga Andreyev Carlisle, and Alexei Remizov.

Alexei Remizov, correspondence with calligraphy (1940’s)

The correspondence of the innovative prose-writer Alexei Remizov (1877-1957) gives us vivid glimpses of modernist handwriting as abstract art and extravagant individual self-expression. The practical and prosaic content of the letters, often addressed to publishers
and other professional associates, stands in amusing contrast to the rhapsodic calligraphy of his openings and signatures, which often create the effect of a flowering canopy or writerly whirlwind in the text. (One detects the influence of Remizov’s wife Serafima Remizova-Dovgello, a specialist in medieval calligraphy).

Alexei Remizov, letters with drawings to his niece, Olga Andreyev Carlisle (1940’s).

Interspersed in the charming letters to his niece, Olga Andreyev Carlisle, are many verbal and pictorial endearments to his “guardian angel” and “silver little poisson” (serebriannyi puassonionok) with Remizov in the role of a bespectacled rabbit. Even after Remizov’s eyesight succumbed to disease, he continued to sprinkle sketches through his increasingly indecipherable handwriting, joking, “My drawings are easy to explain: my broken pen scatters unavoidable inkblots.” On the reverse side, he accompanies a sketch of a supine creature with the inscription (exorcism?) – “This is my toothy insomnia.”

Vadim Andreyev, Childhood, author’s manuscript hand-illustrated by his very young daughter Olga Andreyev Carlisle.

In her introduction to Visions: Stories and Photographs by Leonid Andreyev, Olga Andreyev Carlisle vividly describes the ambience of her parents’ apartment in Parisian emigration, dominated by the enormous inkwell, self-portrait, glass color-plates, old Remington typewriter, and other artifacts of her mysterious grandfather, the prose-writer, dramatist, artist, and photographer, Leonid Andreyev (1871-1919]. A close friend of Maxim Gorky, author of works well-known in the west such as the story “The Seven Who Were Hanged” and the play “He Who Gets Slapped,” Andreyev was a darkly magnetic counter-revolutionary writer who enjoyed enormous popularity and literary influence until his death in 1919. Suppressed during the era of Stalinist socialist realism, Andreyev’s reputation has been revived by such writers as Milan Kundera, the Czech dissident, who called him “an old friend, a friend of my childhood. A huge writer.”

Born into a family celebrated for its artistic innovations in both literature and visual arts, Olga Andreyev Carlisle became an artist, author, journalist, and translator in her own right. Here, she signs her delightful illustrations to the manuscript of her father’s memoir, Childhood, with the proud title “Khudozhnitsa” (Artist), her very young age betrayed only slightly by the backwards letter “u.”

Leonid Andreyev, Autochromes (glass color photographic plates), from 1901-

At a remarkably early moment in the history of photography, Leonid Andreyev was experimenting with color technology. The Hoover Institution has a collection of his glass color photographic plates, on subjects ranging from portraits of children to rustic landscapes and interiors, as well as Andreyev’s favorite genre, the self-portrait.

Autographs, Collection of Imaginist poems and drawings (1917)

The little book Autographs (1917) perfectly embodies the mingled modernist aesthetic and material conditions of its historical moment. The object has the aura of a handmade, private album of poetic autographs, such as those collected by high-society ladies in the salons of the nineteenth century, yet this impression is belied by the crudity of its materials.

The cover’s title appears to have been scrawled with a crude marker, while the back cover advertises a "Collection of Imaginists: their declarations, poems, prose, and drawings," together with an introductory essay by the peasant poet Sergei Esenin, "The Keys of Mary , a theory of Imaginism."
The collection contains original poems inscribed by the individual hands of prominent contemporary poets of various stripes (Bal’mont, Esenin, Viach. Ivanov, Pasternak, Kamenskii, Sershenevich, Mariengof, R. Ivanov, A. Lunacharskii, Rukavishnikov). These are interspersed with original sketches by artists Konchalovskii, Morgunov, Rozenfel’d, Svetlov, and Iakulov, all temporarily brought together under the short-lived rubric of "Imaginism."

Shershenevich’s Imaginist theory of montage poetry comprised several principles: the catalogue of bare nouns, the shocking juxtaposition of images and metaphors typical of Futurism, and the poetics of ruptured transitions (poetika sdviga), all of which forced the audience to forge its own imagined meanings.
Here, for example, Boris Pasternak’s poem “Does the grass [arum] really beg alms from the mud” faces N.B. Rozenfel’d’s no less enigmatic drawing, “Telephone.”

We may also see an Imaginist aesthetic at work in the album’s physical embodiment. Conspicuously, the album is reproduced by the old lithographic process, using acid-etched stones dipped in ink to stamp prints, in the manner of the popular lubok or cartoon, on
scarce sheets of coarse-grained paper redolent of wartime. Thus we have a composite aesthetic artifact gesturing toward several cultural contexts simultaneously: the highly refined culture of modernist poets and their urban patrons and collectors, about to be overtaken by revolution; the cheap popular broadsides of the urban and provincial lower classes; and the modernist trend toward a deliberately cultivated, childlike or savage
"primitivism" in the arts. The book resembles an archaeological artifact or precious relic, containing either the last poetic epitaphs of a dying culture, or conversely the first handwritten graffiti of the revolution.

Nikolai Gumilev, Poems, handwritten album, illustrated with artists’ original water-colors (1916).

Nikolai Gumilev (1886-1921) was the founder of Acmeism, Petersburg’s celebrated post-Symbolist school of poetry; other members included Sergei Gorodetsky, Osip Mandelshtam, and Gumilev’s wife Anna Akhmatova. Rejecting Symbolism’s search for transcendent meaning behind the surface of phenomena together with its apocalyptic attentiveness to the "music" of history, Acmeism proclaimed that "a rose is a rose" and oriented its poetics to a freshly-perceived visual world and to architecture. An adventurous traveller to Africa and a World War I officer whose poetry bears the traces of his neo-Lermontovian exoticism and restlessness, Gumilev was executed by a Bolshevik firing-squad in 1921, the first of many writers and artists to die at the hands of the Soviet state. A unique artifact, the album entitled Poems (1916) is permeated with Gumilev’s exotic color and acute visuality. His poems, handwritten on its varicolored, pastel pages, were evidently offered to visiting artists as canvases for their pictorial musings.

Thus, on the first two open pages of the poem entitled “The Snake,” Dmitri Steletskii executed a spectacular double water-color: a kneeling archer on the left page shoots his arrow to the right page, where a crowned figure falls and a winged dragon floods the
written page with red blood. Steletskii’s bold watercolors have effaced some of the poem’s handwritten text, yet a number of the words have then been reinforced with black ink, creating an unusually expressive palimpsest. It may be that the sketch conveys an allegory about the sensational success of the almanach Strelets (The Archer), which in 1915 had united the older generation Symbolists with the young Cubo-Futurists led by Mayakovsky, in a leftward turn hailed by Gorky and the reading public.

Holograph Letter Draft in Invisible Ink from Lev Trotsky to the Central Committee of the Communist Party

Lev Trotsky (1879-1940) wrote this anti-Stalin letter in lemon juice during his exile in Kazakhstan, December, 1928, in the margins of a favorite book: The Diary of Aleksandr Blok, 1917-1921. Blok (1880-1921) was a Symbolist whose famous poems The Scythians and The Twelve had ushered in the Revolution. The diary captured his hopes and aspirations for the new Soviet state as well as his eventual disillusionment and mental decline (he died of heart failure caused by malnutrition in Petrograd on August 7, 1921). Perhaps to further the sense that it was just a good book that he wanted to pass on, Trotsky demarked passages in red pencil. They successfully passed the scrutiny of the censors and mail-readers en route to a publisher in France where the pages were ironed and the words rendered visible for transcription and publication. The functions of the handwriting here are to convey a readable text (legibility being critical) and to confirm the writer's identity (that it is Trotsky's handwriting). Ironically, the treasured volume of Blok was reduced to a vehicle for the subversive manuscript; the printed words of the past offered a wall for the handwriting of the future.
was first published in Russian in the pamphlet Chto i kak proizoshlo? (Paris, 1929), and in English in The Militant (April 1, 1929

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