Salon

Today's consumers, fed up with copies and mass production, yearn for authenticity. In literature, what can be more authentic than writers' archives, the very pages with their scribbles and doodles? The advent of electronic media has de facto canceled the very notion -- any electronic text is just a sequence of ones and zeroes. This gives the real, paper archives all the more significance as a relic of a bygone era.

It is natural, then, that the question of archives, their handling and ownership, should incite a passionate response. Recently, several such scandals spilled into newspapers. One was a suitably Kafkaesque story of a part of Franz Kafka's archive. Kafka, who died at the age of 40, asked his friend Max Brod to destroy his unfinished novels. Brod didn't and published the three novels that are now considered Kafka's masterpieces. When he died in 1968, he left the remaining unpublished manuscripts to his Israeli secretary, Esther Hoffe. She tantalized specialists with rumors, and probably attempted to sell off parts of Kafka's legacy, until her recent death at the age of 101. The legal battle with her heirs is likely to continue.

In Russia, the author whose archive is always the center of the nation's attention is, of course, Alexander Pushkin. Almost all of his manuscripts are kept at the Institute of Russian Literature in St. Petersburg -- the so-called Pushkin House. The largest collection of writers' manuscripts is at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts. It is to that collection that the daughter of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva handed over the family's papers in the 1970s, under the condition that they would be sealed until 2000. Readers are still eagerly awaiting the publication of the papers.

The archive of another great 20th-century poet, Osip Mandelshtam, is in Princeton University's library. The poet's widow, deeply distrustful of Soviet authorities, gave the papers to a U.S. scholar, who successfully smuggled them into the country. In recent years, Princeton has provided access to the archive to numerous students of Mandelshtam from Russia and other countries.

It is worth noting that many archive-related activities in Russia are sponsored by Western foundations. The publications of Pushkin's facsimile manuscripts for the poet's bicentennial in 1999 were sponsored by the Prince of Wales and George Soros; the RGALI web site is supported by the Ford Foundation. Russian authorities, though, have purchased for a reported $300,000 a manuscript of a poem by Pushkin, which then-President Putin handed over to the Pushkin House in 2004. In view of what the archives mean for all of us, such support is essential.