< http://www.iht.com > Titillation, for Comrades' Eyes Only Josephine Schmidt New York Times Service Thursday, September 6, 2001
Russian State Library Unveils Its Soviet-Era Erotica Collection
MOSCOW In the official Soviet world all families were happy families and there was no interest in or place for sex outside the nuptial bedroom.
"Sex didn't exist in the Soviet Union," said Marina Chestnykh, recalling the upside-down logic that prevailed for much of the Soviet era as she led the way into a cage-like storage area of the Russian State Library.
Miss Chestnykh oversees an erotica collection assembled by the Communist government, which for decades kept its existence such a tight secret that no one knows exactly what is among the approximately 11,000 books, postcards, prints, brochures, drawings and other objects from around the world that are jammed into the library's rambling storage stacks.
There is still no comprehensive record of the collection's contents or provenance because the trove was never methodically assembled. It accrued over decades thanks to customs officers, the secret police, the Soviet government's censorship bureau and ideologically obedient library patrons who turned in material that even hinted at sex, whether erotic, pornographic, suggestive or even scientific.
So far, the collection has yielded previously unknown drawings by Russian avant-garde artists, rare editions of risqué poems by literary giants such as Pushkin and Lermontov, erotic prose published illicitly in the Soviet Union of the 1920s and items from Europe, Asia and the United States, some dating to the 1700s and many of which Miss Chestnykh says are "absolutely unique in this world."
One of her favorites is a Chinese scroll that unfurls to reveal a tumble of sinuous figures having a very good time. Other items include a set of miniature British porcelain reliefs, packed in a handy traveling case, that illustrate the art of love, and a packet of ABC flash cards that teach the same discipline along with the alphabet.
There are also medical texts, illustrated books and magazines, proceedings of scientific conferences and other objects that hardly rate as erotica today but were deemed too racy for good Soviet citizens.
Part of the collection was put together by Nikolai Skorodumov, a deputy director of the library at Moscow State University. Before his death in 1947, he collected thousands of pieces of erotica from around the world, thanks to his close connections with university and party officials, They provided him with letters saying his purchases were needed for professional reasons.
After Mr. Skorodumov died, the NKVD - a precursor of the KGB, the Soviet secret police - brought the collection to what is now the Russian State Library, where it was hidden for years. For much of the last century it was seen only by scientists and scholars who could prove that they needed it for research and by Communist Party officials who wanted a peek.
Miss Chestnykh, 38, said that government officials liked to visit. Examining one thing after another, they would pronounce the works "a nightmare, an absolute nightmare." Every so often, someone would leave with a postcard or two in his pocket. "It was theft, of course," Miss Chestnykh said. "But how could a librarian stop them? They were party officials."
The erotica collection is no longer off limits, but it has never been publicized. Few people know about it, said Miss Chestnykh, who, as director of the department, cares for many of the library's 42 million items and is responsible for the collection. If the library could get money to pay for the research and restoration of the collection, Miss Chestnykh said, she wants to exhibit it and place it online as part of an effort to make available to the public the previously closed holdings.
The library, still known here by its nickname, Leninka, and still reached via the Lenin State Library metro stop, is a treasure house of books and ephemera from around the world, one of the largest libraries after the Library of Congress in Washington.
Founded in 1862 as the first free public library in Russia, it has become a repository of Russian history and culture, reflecting all the terror and glory that entails. Along with the illuminated manuscripts, rare maps, early editions by 19th-century writers and reference books are items like those in the erotica collection and the once-secret caches of forbidden history.
"Our department is absolutely new, but like everything else here it has a history," said Nadezhda Ryzhak, chief of the department of Russian émigré literature at the Russian State Library.
With 700,000 journals, books, newspapers and other documents, many published after 1917 by Russians living abroad, the collection of émigré work is extremely comprehensive, attesting to the paranoia of the government that collected it, Miss Ryzhak said.
Slowly opened to the public after 1988 under perestroika, the special-sections division contained mostly foreign-language publications in addition to the Russian émigré and erotica collection. Among those foreign-language documents once off limits, and still bearing the censorship stamp, are Bernard Malamud novels, Tom Stoppard plays and somewhat dog-eared copies of John le Carré thrillers that now coexist on shelves near nonfiction texts such as "Red Star Over Tibet," a dictionary of ballet, copies of The New York Times and Vogue.
"All these books brought to the Soviet Union could survive only here, in the library," said Miss Ryzhak, who began in special sections in 1976. "Anywhere else they would have been burned immediately. We were able to save them, and they are part of our Russian history that we can now have back."
The library still holds secrets, though, among them the fate of books taken from the Romanov family after 1917. They were brought to Leninka, and Stalin later insisted they be destroyed. But Miss Chestnykh said that the director of the library, Vladimir Nevsky, could not bear to lose the fine old texts. For his efforts, he was shot in 1937, but the staff hid the volumes throughout the library, shoving them pell-mell into the stacks.
"We are still finding them," Miss Chestnykh said. "But nobody knows where they all are."