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Yosef Treller has a very interesting Facebook post (in Russian) that starts:
Я – то, что называлось в советское время “книголюб”, 60 лет покупаю, собираю, меняю, а в последние годы – продаю книги (чтобы купить другие, соответствующие моим нынешним вкусам)
I am what was known in the Soviet era as a “booklover”; for sixty years I have been buying, collecting, and trading books — and in recent years, selling them (in order to buy others that suit my current tastes).
He says that now, of course, you can get pretty much anything you want: “Хочешь Платона, Костанеду, Стругацких, Пастернака, Даниэлу Стил или, прости Господи, Армалинского – только плати” [you can get Plato, Castaneda, the Strugatskys, Pasternak, Danielle Steel, or — God forgive me — Armalinsky, you just have to pay]. But back in the day, from the ’60s through the ’80s, things were more interesting — booklovers had to go to a lot of trouble to find what they wanted, and those who had access to the desired books through connections could charge what the market would bear. He goes on to list the “white whales” that were in particular demand:
Большая Библиотека Поэта. Тут были три сияющие вершины – Саша Чёрный, Марина Цветаева и Пастернак. Потом присоединился Мандельштам.
Литературные Памятники. Трехтомник Плутарха, трехтомник (подчёркиваю, оригинальный именно трехтомник) Монтеня, двухтомник Тацита, двухтомник Речей Цицерона. Позднее появились более массовые хотелки – собрание рассказов Эдгара По, Петербург Андрея Белого, Смерть Артура. Ну, были, конечно, среди желанных Ларошфуко, Шамфор, Талеман де Рео, были оригиналы не от мира сего собиравшие полную Махабхарату, но я говорю о массовом спросе.
Любители искусства и просто желающие быть in искали Вазари и двухтомник Ревалда. Остальные убивались по Жизни Ван Гога Перрюшо и Модильяни в Жизни в искусстве. Ну, конечно, всем нужен был Кафка и Булгаков
Отдельно – любители фантастики сметали всё, делая, конечно, упор на Стругацких и Зарубежную фантастику, но об этом я писал уже не раз.
Ну и все – и простые люди, и ультраинтеллектуалы хотели Наследника из Калькутты, Джин Грин неприкасаемый, Зарубежные детективы, которыми радовали народ издательства Молодая гвардия и Прогресс.
Эверестом был красный двенадцатитомник Дюма
My translation:
Library of the Poet, Big series [academic editions with essays and annotations]; here there were three shining peaks—Sasha Chorny, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Pasternak. Later, Mandelstam joined them.
Literary Monuments: the three-volume Plutarch, the three-volume Montaigne (I emphasize: specifically the original three-volume edition); the two-volume Tacitus; and the two-volume set of Cicero’s Orations. Later on, items with more mass appeal showed up—a collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, Le Morte d’Arthur. Well, of course among the coveted authors were La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, and Tallemant des Réaux—and there were eccentrics, truly not of this world, who collected the complete Mahabharata—but I’m talking about mass demand.
Art lovers—and those who just wanted to be “in”—sought out Vasari and the two-volume Rewald. Others were obsessed with Perruchot’s La Vie de Van Gogh and the Modigliani [by Vitaly Valenkin] in the A Life in Art series. And, of course, everyone had to have Kafka and Bulgakov.
As an aside, science fiction fans snapped up everything, focusing, of course, on the Strugatskys and foreign sf, but I’ve written about that more than once already.
And everyone, both ordinary people and ultra-intellectuals, wanted The Heir from Calcutta, Gene Green the Untouchable, and the foreign detective novels with which the Molodaya Gvardiya and Progress publishing houses delighted the public.
The red twelve-volume set of Dumas was the Everest.
I love these obscure corners of cultural history, and I was pleased to learn about Robert Shtilmark and his adventure novel The Heir from Calcutta, set in the late 18th century (a pirate vessel under the command of Captain Bernardito Luis El Gorra seizes a passenger ship carrying Fredrick Ryland, heir to the Viscountcy of Chensfield, who is traveling from Calcutta to England, and his fiancée, Emily Hardy; Bernardito’s henchman Giacomo Grelli steals Ryland’s documents and travels to England under his name with Emily, forced to act as his wife), which was commissioned by a Gulag crime boss who wanted to send it to Stalin under his own name (after its own adventures, it was eventually published under both names in 1958), as well as Gene Green the Untouchable, a spy thriller parody featuring the American doctor Gene Green, born Evgeny Grinyov, son of a White Guard immigrant from Russia, who gets caught up in a spy plot, published in 1972 as by “Grivady Gorpozhaks,” a pseudonym for the group authorship of Grigory Pozhenyan, Ovid Gorchakov, and Vasily Aksenov; it was very popular, but was taken out of circulation in the USSR when Aksyonov emigrated in 1980.
