Books, Bibliographies, and Pugs: A Festschrift to Honor Murlin Croucher

Pacific Rim Librarianship: Collectors of Russian Materials on the Far East

Pacific Rim librarianship: Collectors of Russian Materials on the Far East' Patricia Polansky During a research trip to California in the spring of 2002, this author, the Russian bibliographer at the University of Hawaii (UH), turned her thoughts to Russian librarianship in the Pacific Rim. This broadly defined region encompasses not only the Russian Far East, but China, Japan, Korea, Hawaii, and Alaska, along with the American West Coast states of Washington, Oregon, and California. A list of libraries that have collections on the Far East, and librarians, bibliographers, and bibliophiles who have collected these materials, was made. This geographical designation of the Far East includes not only the regions of Kamchatka, Magadan, Sakhalin, the Maritime Province, Khabarovsk and the Amur, but also Japan, and the Manchurian area of China, especially during the period when Imperial Russia held the Chinese Eastern Railway concession (Kitaisko-Vostochnaia zheleznaia doroga, KVzhd). It is interesting to look at the Far East in the larger context, as much contact and interaction existed for centuries, with the first Russians having reached China in the seventeenth century. An earlier Russian version of this article appeared in the Vladivostok library journal Vlast' knigi2 1 My thanks for help with this article extends to the staff of the Hoover Institution, especially Molly Molloy, reference librarian, and archivists Carol Leadenham and Ron Bulatoff; to Allan Urbanic, Slavic bibliographer at the University of California, Berkeley; to John Stephan, emeritus University of Hawaii professor of history; and to Amir Khisamutdinov at VGUES and DVGTU in Vladivostok. 2 P. Polansky, "Bibliotekovedenie na poberezh'e Tikhogo okeana: Sobirateli russkikh materialov 0 Dal'nem Vostoke," Vlast' knigi: Biblioteka, izdatel's tvo, VUZ. Na uchno-il1formatsionnyi al'manakh, no. 3 (2002): 60- 72. Translated into Russian by A. Khisamutdinov. Gregory C. Ference and Bradley L. Schaffner, eds. Books, Bibliographies, and Pugs. Bloomington, IN: Siavica, 2006, 159- 80. Indiana Slavic Studies (16). 160 PATRICIA POLANSKY The following brief survey will introduce readers to a few of the people responsible for adding collections of materials to libraries that deal with the Far East. This is only a preliminary list. Librarians and collectors who lived and worked in the Russian Far East for the most part are omitted.3 Such prominent people as Fedor Fedorovich Busse, Zotik Nikolaevich Matveev, and others are well-known in their own country, so this article focuses on Westerners and Russian emigres. In the following biographies, the reader will get a sense of the interconnectedness of not only the geographical parts of the region, but how people moved around, and how their collecting touched on many themes important to the history and understanding of the region. It is interesting to note that there is only one librarian in the group. Robert Joseph Kerner (1887-1956) The complex and controversial Kerner was Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) from 1928 until his death. His view of looking at Russian history from a Pacific perspective is often referred to as the "Berkeley" or "Kerner" School. He founded the Northeast Asian Seminar and edited the 1939 Northeastern Asia: A Selected Bibliography. He taught many prominent historians in the Russian field such as Dorothy Atkinson, Basil Dmytryshyn, Raymond H. Fisher, Richard Pierce, George Lantzeff, Hugh Graham, Wayne Vucinich , and Alton Donnelly. Kerner taught at UH during the 1935 summer session. Present-day librarians at Berkeley do not have a clear history for the early years of their Slavic collections. The Pavel Miliukov library came to UCB in 1929, and Kerner was very enthusiastic about this. Whether Kerner was the main selector for books while he was there is not known. After his death, Kerner's wife donated her husband's library to UCB in 1957. It contained more than 1,000 books, 200 brochures , microfilm, and over 1,000 periodicals and 600 unbound vol3 This author's research is continuing on a greatly expanded article dealing with this subject that will contain extensive descriptions of libraries, bibliographers , and collectors. For a good summary of some of the same people mentioned here, see Stephen Kotkin, "Rediscovering Russia in Asia," in Rediscovering Russia in Asia, Siberia and the Russian Far East, ed. Stephen Kotkin and David Wolff (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1995),3-15. PACIFIC RIM liBRARIANSHIP 161 urnes. Part of this collection deals with Russian eastward expansion to the Pacific; Kerner's Russian-American Company materials went to the Bancroft Library4 There...