Missing books

I culled my library a couple of times over the years, once when we moved from Wilton St to Linden Lane in Princeton in 2003 in anticipation of the birth of Graham (who will be 16 tomorrow) and once more in 2009 as we were paring down to come home to Chapel Hill. So that would have been right around the time of George Sr's passing. So, at watershed moments in life.

My Russian library was what suffered most, of course, as my distance from my academic field grew greater and more pronounced. I have retained a bunch of books, to be sure. Complete sets of Mayakovsky, Turgenev, and partial ones of Goncharov, Belinsky, Pisarev, Pushkin, plus the core canon in translation and a bit of reference.

But getting ready for this Pushkin talk has brought to light that I let go of some important ones. First and foremost, that brown criticism anthology edited by Victor Ehrlich that contained translations of both Shklovsky's article on Pushkin and Sterne -- which I would really have liked to have had over the last couple of weeks -- and, more importantly, Jacobson's "On the Generation the Squandered its Poets," written shortly after the Mayakovsky's suicide in 1930, a very special and rare little gem. Yes I can find these things on the internet, and yet I feel like they are part of my life and I'd like to have them around. I may yet hunt for them again. But not on the internet, that would be like cheating. In the used bookstores of America.