Corpus des notes marginales de Voltaire, Vol. 9: Spallanzini–Zeno ed. by Natalia Elaguina (review)

This is the penultimate volume of a monumental scholarly edition that began in Oxford fifty years ago—a great achievement for the founding editor, the late Theodore Besterman, and all his successors in the Voltaire Foundation.

Assuming that the final volume appears as intended, the publication of Voltaire's notes in books will also represent a triumph of international academic collaboration. The complete works at first excluded the marginalia, which had been taken on by a group of scholars at what is now the Russian National Library in St Petersburg. Publication began in Berlin, but when the East German publishing arrangements collapsed, the Foundation stepped in. They had the first five volumes reprinted as part of their own edition and saw to it that the project continued, coordinating teams of native Russian-, French-, and English-speaking experts to produce four more volumes and complete the alphabetical series at Zeno. Volume 10 will cover a separate set of books and manuscripts from outside Voltaire's personal library, works that he marked or annotated not for himself but for acquaintances or correspondents and therefore annotated differently. it is also expected now to include a 'retrospective' essay about Voltaire as a reader but, as far as i can make out, not anything resembling a comprehensive index.

Volume 9 is bound as two volumes of roughly equal size, the first containing the notes of Voltaire and in some cases of members of his circle who had access to the books (notably his secretary Wagnière), and the second the commentary of the editors. it includes 163 books from the preserved Voltaire library and six others that had somehow been separated from the collection and reshelved in another part of the National Library (see The Library, Vii, 15 (2014), 202–3 for my review of Vol. 8 with a summary of the history of the acquisition and preservation of the Voltaire books in Russia). Three Annexes provide a few doubtful attributions, a list of books with corrections that may be in Voltaire's hand, and five titles annotated by some of his contemporaries for Voltaire to see. Spallanzini–Zeno like its predecessors demonstrates the wide range of Voltaire's reading—science, history, fiction and drama, classics, economics, travel, memoirs, etc., in French, Latin, or English. The alphabetical arrangement creates curious bedfellows, such as Stanley's Historia Philosophiae and Sterne's Tristram Shandy.

Though they might have the look of impulsive outbursts, marginalia are no more spontaneous than other forms of writing. They occur within a context of material, social, and traditional conventions, and require some expenditure of energy; they are all more or less purposeful. The question that is as much worth asking of this genre as of others is for whom these notes were intended. in this case, they were made for Voltaire's exclusive use, either anticipating some future function or serving to reinforce his image of himself as an authority and a wit. Most of them are nonverbal. When Voltaire did make a note to express an opinion (as opposed to taking one with a heading or précis, or merely marking a passage), it was generally an aggressive move. He liked to correct and ridicule his rivals. On the title-page of a book by Jacob Vernet he describes the author as a tedious bore: 'tres ennuieux bavard'. in one of the most extensively annotated works, the Abbé Paul-François Velly's Histoire de France, he bursts out, 'faquin peux tu imputer au roy cette impertinente harangue de college' ('You good-for-nothing, how can you attribute this impertinent schoolboy speech to the King?').

The Corpus des notes marginales has various limitations that need to be taken into account, some of them built in...