To the Hermitage (48 page)

E
VERYWHERE
I
LOOK AROUND ME
there are books. They surround me on all sides, racked and stacked in extended rows of makeshift wooden shelves, scattered randomly over the ancient desks and reading tables, heaped up high on the floor, and piled in wild disorder beside the walls. The books are old, and seem to be more or less of one age. They’re library-bound, in hard brown leather, white calf, red morocco, their titles stamped out in gilt or heavy type. They are there in all the classic sizes: octavos, folios, quartos, duodecimos. Some have survived a couple of centuries of existence in fine shape, but a good many show the damage of time or other kinds of rough treatment, cracking out of their bindings and stitchings and reverting to printed loose leaf. The place I’m standing in is a back area tucked away among the reading rooms and stack-rooms of the enormous vaulted public library. It smells of print, paper, sweating rags. Though it’s ill-lit and dusty, it also manages to be damp. The floors are wet with the heavily imprinted footsteps of the many people who have recently been walking in and out of here, seemingly without any real purpose or reason. Water drips from cracks in the ceiling, and falls slowly onto a stack of books in the corner which is gradually changing from brown to black in colour.

‘I think I can leave you here for a few minutes? I’ll just go and bring us back some hot tea from the samovar,’ Galina has said to me a few minutes back, after first bringing me into the great library, showing me into this quiet, odd, deeply untidy back room, sitting me down.

‘But what is this, Galina, where are we?’ I’ve asked her.

‘What do you think?’

‘Surely this can’t be the library, the Voltaire and Diderot library?’

‘What is a library, do you know? A pile of books? A big room? A great building? I won’t be a moment,
mon ami
. Have a look round and tell me what it is you think you can see.’

Left, I’m now walking slowly round the room, wandering from shelf to shelf, desk to desk, and pile to pile. The room has one dusty window, with a large desk placed in front of it. On the desk are more of the books, these left open, as if someone has been reading or processing them. On it too is a plaster statue, a flighty spritely head, which is placed so that it seems to look out of the window at the busy public square outside. The head is surely Diderot’s – the one done, I rather think, by Marie-Anne Collot, though I have no means of being sure. To one end of the square outside lies the busy Nevsky Prospekt, filled with its rushing traffic and its whirring trolley buses; to the other is a grand classical façade, the front of the Pushkin Drama Theatre; everything in this city is named after one writer or another. In the central garden is another statue, seemingly the chief focus of our bust’s attention. High, coroneted, upright, imperial, it’s Mikeshin’s pompous late-nineteenth-century grand view of Catherine Veliki, otherwise Catherine the Great.

But my own interest is really with the books on the shelves. They mostly run in sets, special editions, sequences, collecteds. In fact they have the look of being someone’s private library, back in the days when cultivated men and women kept a genuine storehouse, a sequence of grand leatherbound monuments to their own true seriousness. Here are many of the great works they would have needed: the speculations of Descartes and Leibniz, Hume and Shaftesbury, Montucla and Beccarria. The bound pages of the great dramatists – Racine and Molière, Shakespeare and Marivaux. The verses of the noted poets, from La Fontaine to Colly Cibber. The essays of the great thinkers, from Montaigne to Montesquieu. Works of political economy, medicine and science: Haller and his physiology, Newton and his mathematics. Alphabets and hymnals, sermons and speculations. Prayerbooks and opuscules, lexicons and encyclopedias. Many works of travels: Bougainville’s voyages, Voltaire’s letters from the English. Works that seem like travels: Swift’s Gulliver, Galland’s version of the
Thousand and One Nights
. And those yet stranger books that came from an age of travel and invention, the fictions called novels: the adventures of Don Quixote and his servant, of Gargantua and Pantagruel, of Roderick Random, Clarissa, Tristram Shandy.

Whose books? Most afford no clue at all to their owners, but some do. A number have been printed on their owner’s private press, and more are stamped with the coat-of-arms of their prince-like owner: the great Monsieur Voltaire. Others bear a familiar signature in a spikey, jagged hand: Diderot. Voltaire’s books have the finer bindings, Diderot’s show evidence of the more impassioned use. In the fashion of the times, the books have been used by both to make more books. Voltaire has filled his own with underlinings, great emphases, judgements, annotations, some of these written in the end-papers in a miniature version of his round wide hand. Denis has used the rag pages even more freely, and filled up every spare page with instant reactions, fresh speculations and stories, and written not just round the text and down the margins but across the printed type itself. His reactions are clear. The sentimentally feminized stories of Samuel Richardson – tales of the hunted maidens Pamela and Clarissa – have driven him to passion, and possibly something more: maybe here are the first glimpses of his own literary jewels of indiscretion. The writings of Helvétius have annoyed him. Those of Sterne seem to have provoked him to something resembling mania.

So books breed books, writing breeds writing. The writer starts out as reader in order to become the new writer. In this fashion one book can actually become the author of a new one. And the new books, the books these two authors have then written in such numbers, lie in this odd room as well. Voltaire’s huge narrative of the struggles of Charles of Sweden and Peter the Great (eleven years in the writing); his history of the Reign of Louis XIV, which so troubled the reigns of his two successors; all those secret books he wrote that everyone knew about, the books that, printed under mysterious pseudonym or perhaps under no name at all, still managed to get themselves celebrated or burned right the way across Europe. Here’s the philosophical encyclopedia he wrote to provide his critical supplement to the greater
Encyclopedia
; the poems and squibs and flatterings; the plays. Here are the bitter little texts that ruined entire reputations and were known to be by Voltaire simply because he’d already gone to such trouble to deny authorship before the books were even published. Here’s the incomplete
Thérése;
the tale of the wise Zadig; the even greater tale of his innocent optimist, Candide.

As Voltaire, so Diderot. Here’s the famous and shameless tale of the indiscreet talking jewels, Diderot’s vagina monologues, which solemnly sits on the shelf next to his reflections on the mysterious worlds of deafness and dumbness. Here’s the libidinous romp through the nunneries, next to his thoughts on embryology. His books are many, but what shouts them down or crowds them out is the famous
Encyclopedia:
that amazing book of books that brought the first philosophes together, adding Voltaire to Rousseau, d’Alembert to d’Holbach; then took them through danger, turned strangers into friends and friends into the most implacable enemies, made their fame and shaped their influence, that defined their futures and posterities, spread light and learning, confusion and infection; that started out with dangerous intellectual adventure and ended in commercial competition, moved from being outrage to commonplace, from danger to safety, had all the publishers fighting each other and the readers competing, and in the end made learning some of the biggest business in the world.

It was, I’m now starting to remember, a very strange book indeed. For one thing its most explosive criticisms of the church and the state were oddly hidden away amongst the 70,000 articles, cross-referenced away in the weirdest of subjects, meaning that you had to explore the most innocent of topics in order to discover the most dangerous of thoughts. Then the volumes were surrounded by every kind of deception and concealment, passed on from publisher to publisher and printer to printer, in France and elsewhere. Going through edition after deceptive edition, it became the great bestseller, the big book of the age. Publishers fought to have the rights to it, pirates multiplied. Texts and formats kept changing, the printing was rushed from place to place.

And here on these shelves are a good number of those editions: the folios, quartos, octavos. This is a pirate edition from Geneva that’s come out in thirty-nine volumes, and another from Lucca, and yet another from nearby Livorno, that has come out in thirty-three. Le Breton published the true first edition in Paris, which started in 1751 and reached twenty-eight volumes by 1772, one year before Diderot came here to Petersburg. The set is here, with an editorial slip inside the first explaining that somewhere there exists an extra volume, containing all the entries or sections Le Breton removed from the project without Diderot’s knowledge to avoid trouble with the censor. There’s a Russian edition (so one did come out after all), and over here there’s a handy abridgement, which brings the total set down to twelve volumes.

And then there was its natural opposite, the
très grand projet
of the media magnate Panckoucke, the man who loved the product so much he bought the company, buying all the rights and permissions and then everything else to do with it he could think of: Voltaire’s papers, Buffon’s papers, all the world of fresh new learning. The dream in his mind was an ever greater encyclopedia, a vast revision, the
Encyclopédie méthodique
, that would dwarf the original and then perpetuate itself into all the ages to come. It would be ultimate, absolute, not just containing all knowledge but codifying it according to the most complex of systems, turning old words into a new window on the world. The alphabet was far too simple; what was needed was a new system of interlocks and interfaces. The work would be divided, sub-divided, each new segment turning into a distinct yet interdependent encyclopedia of its own. It was like building a great new capital city. Every street and pathway would be part of the web, linked into every other in an unbroken yet endless chain of universal knowledge which was supplemented every day.

To make Panckoucke’s wide-open book, no expense was spared, no talent and no sphere of knowledge was neglected. Great men were summoned; so were big teams of plodding hacks. Flowcharts were plotted, along with formats and concepts and timelines. All forms of organization were employed. Scissors and paste were put to work; textbooks and lexicons, dictionaries and medical works, prayerbooks and opuscules, law-books and primers of botany were gutted, torn up, mixed and matched. As in some great intellectual forest, many different trees of learning were planted together, side by side, and most of them grew fast. In no time at all the project was running at 125 volumes and showed no signs of stopping there. Volumes had come out to satisfy the first subscribers, who had to be warned that they were in for a long prospect, for work after work would follow as the travel through learning enlarged. The plan spread and spread; and so did the problems. Text didn’t arrive (it never does), so volumes were delayed, one delay then spawning many others. Costs multiplied, subscribers fell away, and profits plummeted. Contributors began to tire, take other work, or die, for dying was just coming into fashion.

For it really didn’t help that in 1789 – just as things seemed to improve and profits suddenly began rising – France chose to erupt in revolution. Now contributors became quite seriously unreliable, and many of them began to disappear at speed. Some fled the country, some fell silent. More than usual departed the human scene, thanks to the achievements of Dr Guillotine, who duly earned himself an entry. The faithful subscribers stayed faithful no longer. Printers were constantly hanged or butchered, and booksellers turned cautious. The volumes altered in appearance; they were stripped clean of their royal dedications, and appeared with a tricolour in their stead. As for the Age of Philosophy itself, that too was changing, and probably dying: militarism and melancholy were the flavours of the day. No longer were wise men called on to advise monarchs and princes, or test their wits against the unreason of the church. Thinkers became rebels, rebels became revolutionaries, revolutionaries became soldiers. Sense gave way to sensibility, reason to romanticism, and a gloomy strutting Napoleonism became the look of a man. It was the day of the career open to talents, so scholars turned both
normale
and
supérieure.
The calendar stopped, and time itself was begun again. Yet, despite all the trials and testings, the
Encyclopédie méthodique
managed, like the endless chain of Napoleons, to survive. By the time it was done it was one of the great projects of the Empire, running to 201 volumes, by now so out of date they went totally unread. A set of unbelievable dustiness runs across several shelvings close above my head.

Galina still hasn’t come back, so I take down a stack of books from the shelves and carry them over to the desk by the window. I’ve gathered up a pile of the original
Encyclopedia
, the first Le Breton edition, because I want to play Diderot’s own encyclopedia game. This involves following out the teasing sequences that lie hidden among the alphabetical entries. Thus ‘
Droit naturel
’ easily leads us on to ‘
Pouvoir
’, which steers us to ‘
Souverain
’ and then to ‘
Tyran
’, and all this, if I remember rightly, is part of the sequence of over a hundred entries written by Diderot himself. But, playing the game, I soon hit a problem. The first six volumes I start from are fine, taking me through the alphabet from
A
to
FNE
. But something has happened to the next step: the volume
FOANGGYTHIUM
is missing, not to be found in the room. And where’s volume XI, and volume XIV? The problem gets me looking at some of the other sets on the shelves. They too are in similar condition. Part of Richardson’s
Clarissa
is absent too; the set has no Volume II. Something odd has happened to Lemuel Gulliver’s travels. In this library the unlucky and sombre ship’s doctor seems to make only two voyages; in all the other versions he goes off on four.