"Quaint Chaos": Aleksis and Tatiana Rannit at Yale, 1960-1989.

This essay describes the career of Aleksis Rannit (1914–1985), Yale Library’s first Curator of Slavic and East European Collections, and how Rannit’s curatorial style and aesthetic sensibilities shaped Yale’s collecting strengths in the field. It also discusses how his career was shaped by the library’s overall organization and strategic goals, as well as those of the university. Finally, it discusses Tatiana Fedorow Rannit (1919–2021), Rannit’s wife and the collection’s second curator, and how the role she played in the collection’s history is both revealed in and obscured by institutional records.