Commercial Activity of the I. Ladyzhnikov Publishing Company in Berlin (1905—1931)

Abstract

The author reveals the commercial aspects of activity of the I. Ladyzhnikov publishing company in Berlin in the first decades of the twentieth century. This paper clarifies the company’s concept and fills in a number of gaps in the study of Russian-language foreign book publishing in the first decades of the twentieth century, due to the small number of comprehensive studies in this area. Getting acquainted with Russian-language emigrant book publishing is of great interest, since it reflects the large-scale processes of the post-revolutionary breakdown of the cultural life of Russia. The source base of the research is the documents of a number of Russian archives, as well as the archive of the I. Ladyzhnikov publishing company, discovered by the author at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam (Netherlands). The author introduces into scientific circulation a number of new, previously unpublished data about the I. Ladyzhnikov publishing company. The article reveals the circle of people who stood at its origins: on the one hand, these are the leaders of early Bolshevism (V.I. Lenin, L.B. Krasin, V.D. Bonch-Bruevich), on the other — the central figures of the writing group “Znanye” [Knowledge] (M. Gorky, К.P. Pyatnitsky). The author presents all the names under which the publishing company operated in different years, accurately dates the stages of its existence from the moment of its origin (5th August, 1905) to the beginning of the 1930s and proposes periodization. The archive of the publishing company preserved 40 contracts with the authors; therefore it was possible to determine the circle of writers and playwrights who collaborated with it: M. Gorky, S.S. Yushkevich, S.G. Petrov (Skitalets), A.N. Kuropatkin, S.N. Rabinovich (Sholom Aleichem), Sh. Ash and other writers. The author notes that among other tasks, the publishing house defended the copyright of Russian writers abroad. The article analyses the total annual circulation of publications, the number of authors, as well as the total annual turnover of the company. For the first time, the author considers the role and place of the “Novaya Russkaya Kniga” [New Russian Book] magazine in the activities of the I. Ladyzhnikov publishing company. The author established that the 1920s were the most successful in terms of commercial activity for the publishing company. Thus, from February to March 1924, the company “absorbed” three of the major competitors: “Helikon” publishing company, “Russian Universal Publishing Company” and “Epoch” publisher. The article presents the exact dates of the contracts for the purchase of publishers, the data on the sales value and the features of the agreements concluded. In particular, I. Ladyzhnikov company bought the publishers with the preservation of their trademarks, purchased their warehouses with commodity stocks, contracts concluded with authors, as well as debt obligations to banks. The author concludes that for almost the entire first third of the twentieth century, the I. Ladyzhnikov publishing company was the most powerful commercial enterprise among all the publishing companies of “Russian Berlin”.