The depth of text and the “depth” of the Internet

The publishing house “New Literary Review” published “Diary” by L.V. in the memoir series. Shaporina (Yakovleva) in two volumes (an excerpt from this book relating to the siege of Leningrad was published on the OpenSpace portal). I hope to write about this book in detail in a more free format; now I will dwell only on some scientific and practical issues related to the publication of books of this kind.

Lyubov Vasilievna Shaporina (1879-1967), née Yakovleva, a noblewoman, a graduate of the Catherine Institute, lived her entire long and difficult life in St. Petersburg-Leningrad and left us a diary, unique in various respects. Firstly, she kept a diary from 1898 until her death - almost 70 years, and what! Secondly, she wrote down her thoughts and observations without any regard to the unsafety of this activity; thirdly, Shaporina survived the entire siege of Leningrad and thoughtfully kept detailed notes about these times; fourthly, being a talented artist, director of the puppet theater she founded and the wife of the famous Soviet composer Yu.N. Shaporin, she observed the Leningrad intelligentsia from the inside and herself participated in many important events of her time. Moreover, understanding their historical importance.

Following Akhmatova, with whom Shaporina was friends, she could well say about herself: I was then with my people / Where my people, unfortunately, were. She was there and wrote about all this in detail.

Shaporina was poor and hungry, selling things that still belonged to her parents, parting with books and albums dear to her, chopping wood and lighting the stove, working as a nurse during the siege, earning money by teaching and translating in order to feed and treat first her children, then her grandchildren. (We note that in these times, when the modern pension system had not yet been introduced, at least some penny pensions were paid to some categories of citizens.) Lyubov Vasilievna also raised two girls, whom she took in with her in 1936, after her arrest their father, journalist and writer A.O. Starchakova. (Their exiled mother survived and returned to Leningrad, but even after the camp she was placed in such conditions that for many years she could neither live there nor earn food for herself.)

The tragedy of Lyubov Vasilievna was the death (in 1933) of her beloved youngest daughter, eleven-year-old Alyonushka, whom she would mourn until the end of her days. Every year, even with his last money, L.V. orders a memorial service, even a sick person goes to the grave, takes care of the monument; Moreover, her grief was not shared with her by the child’s father, although Shaporin loved his daughter and dedicated the romance “The Spell” to her memory based on the words of Pushkin (in my opinion, the best thing that Shaporin ever wrote).

Marriage L.V. with Shaporin was not successful; It’s even difficult to say exactly when it finally broke up. And against this background - by all accounts bleak - I read unusually lively and sharp observations of the beauty of nature, I experience, together with the author, the special silence in Leningrad coming to life after the siege, I share her delight in the performance of M.V. Yudina's Beethoven sonatas (I also listened to Yudina, more than once), I look at the famous etchings of Ostroumova-Lebedeva, with whom L.V. I was in close friendship...

And at the same time I catch myself in numerous perplexities associated with my ignorance of names, structures, realities, configurations of human relations - despite the index and commentary. This is what the commentary will be discussed next.

It is clear that with such a volume, both the main text and comments to it of such a volume had to be divided into two volumes, and the name index was given at the end of the second. For the reader, this is fraught with inconvenience: it is necessary to have both volumes at hand at all times and leaf through first one, then the other. However, these are minor things compared to the fact that in a significant number of cases the information provided in the comments turns out to be insufficient to understand the text.

If I had not been born in 1931, if I had not been interested in “World of Art” artists at a time when they were not exhibited anywhere, if I had not been, for example, to the monastery in Pechory, I would have had a lot more bewilderment. And here a problem arises for which there is no simple solution in sight.

Recently I read the late diaries of V.I. Vernadsky (see about this http://polit.ru/article/2011/06/24/vernadsky ), where almost every single entry is provided with extensive comments, so that often the volume of commentary, also typed in petit, exceeds the main text. But Vernadsky’s “Diaries” is a scientific publication, while the memoir series UFO, in which Shaporina’s diaries were published, is a mass publication. So what was said above is not at all a reproach to the commentator, the famous St. Petersburg philologist V.N. Sazhin.

In such cases, the modern Russian reader, not understanding the realities, finding it difficult to find the source of the quote, foreign words, etc., turns to Google or Yandex. I am no exception, but in relation to Shaporina’s “Diary” I suffered many failures. Here is her husband, the famous Soviet composer Yu.A. Shaporin, although a three-time winner of the Stalin Prize, the text of his biography (judging by some characteristic “stamps”) is clearly very old: it is simply reproduced without changes on different sites. There is very little information about the Shaporins’ son, Vasily Yuryevich (b. 1915), a fairly well-known theater artist.

Of course, this does not mean that nothing is written about them on paper. Simply (and this is not news) the Internet has little “depth” along the time axis. The farther from today, the less likely it is to find information about people who were quite famous in their time. Vasily Shaporin, for example, from 1955 to 1966 was the main artist of the famous Novosibirsk Red Torch theater, i.e. in the profession he was a man of solid reputation. But Vasily Shaporin did not become a celebrity, so information about him on the Internet takes up four or five lines.

When looking for online information about people (in this case, I mean compatriots), I usually search everywhere - including Books of Memory, execution lists, variants of family trees, regional sites (by the way, often carefully collecting information about famous compatriots). So far it seems to me that in terms of information that is called personalia in library catalogs, the Russian Internet is far behind.

It’s natural to object here: in order to learn more about the “ not the best”, you need to look directly in national libraries and archives.

Of course! The researcher does just that.

The reader, even one oriented towards leisurely and thoughtful reading, towards a conscious appeal to our cultural past - and for the sake of such a reader, publications like L.V.’s “Diary” are published. Shaporina, deals only with the result of research work. And the help he needs, i.e. reference materials should also be publicly available.

It is precisely such materials - in the absence of Russian publications like Who is who in... - that we expect to find using the Internet. And we don’t find it.

The happy owner of five volumes of a unique publication with an unfortunate fate (I mean the “Dictionary of Russian Writers 1800-1917”, which has so far been brought to the middle of the letter C with great difficulty), I can only dream that at least to C it will once Someday they'll digitize it...