The Rise and Decline of Book Studies in the Soviet Union

Before the dramatic dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early nineties, book studies was one of the brighter stars in the firmament of Soviet humanistic scholarship. Book studies was understood as a wide complex of disciplines (including the auxiliary historical disciplines) and bodies of knowledge related to the history of the making and distribution of books, including the history of paper and binding, the history of their description, the ways in which they were kept and conserved, and the ways in which they were received and read by men and women over time. Perhaps most important, book studies in the Soviet context included a highly developed school of enumerative (as opposed to descriptive) bibliography. Scholars in the Slavic republics (and some of the non Slavic republics as well) made important contributions to all of these areas, particularly over the last three decades (ca. 1960-90) of the Soviet regime. They provided important insights into book culture of the ethnically, geographically, and historically diverse peoples and cultures that coexisted in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. The genuine achievements of that thirty-year period make the troubled course of book studies scholarship over the past decade especially poignant. This review article seeks to describe in Western audience some of the reasons for the startling diminution of book studies research since 1991.