"Ne mogu otorvat'sia ot Rossii....": Russkie knigoizdateli v Germanii v 1920-kh gg. (review)

Abstract

The scope of this slight volume is carefully circumscribed. A study of publishers of Russian books in Germany after the revolution, the book focuses on the economic factors, legal issues, and personal relationships that initially underpinned, and eventually undermined, Russian book publishing in Berlin. The authors make few claims about the broader experiences and significance of the Russian emigration or the Russian colony in Berlin. They are not interested in cross-cultural influences between Russians and Germans, insisting that these already have been documented.1 Nor do they endorse the long-standing tendencies to see the emigration as one of "two Russias" spawned by the revolution and to regard the perpetuation of genuine Russian culture as the unique destiny of the emigration. Although it deliberately leaves such "big questions" off the table, Ippolitov and Kataeva's portrait of Russian book publishing implicitly adheres to what Valeriia Selunskaia has called the "civilizational cognitive paradigm" that assumes a unity of Russian culture and identifies a common national identity in the multi-faceted activities of the emigration and Russians who remained under Soviet rule.2