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Being an immigrant means straddling two cultures at once. It means allowing your identity to be spacious, far-reaching, sometimes contradictory. You must simultaneously hold beliefs, customs, and habits that seemingly cannot overlap. These apparent discrepancies meant that it took me a long time to understand and accept my own national identity. Reading and collecting books formed a crucial part of that journey.

My collection is comprised of books by a single publishing house – Ardis Publishers, the first to be dedicated to printing Russian and Soviet literature in America. By today’s standards, Ardis would be described as small press – in the thirty years of its existence (between 1971 and 2002) the founders, Carl and Ellendea Proffer, published every single book in their family home, self-funded by their modest academic salaries. All the editions ran in a few hundred books or fewer (which makes collecting those works now very challenging). In its amateur nature it can be compared to Soviet Union’s own samizdat, but its impact on unlocking the access to Russian literature of the XXth century to American and Soviet readers cannot be overstated, especially given that the Soviet authors Ardis brought to print had no other publishing outlet in their home country.

More specifically, my collection focuses on two authors that are central to Ardis’s existence – the novelist Vladimir Nabokov and the Nobel-laureate poet Joseph Brodsky. Besides being indispensable to Ardis’s history, these authors also affected me in a very personal way. For one, I share my home city – Saint Petersburg – with both Nabokov and Brodsky. Like me, they also immigrated to the United States and wrote in Russian and English. By virtue of sharing those biographical details they helped me come to terms with my own identity as a first-generation Russian immigrant. In my essay I share my own collecting journey as well as explain why I believe Ardis Publishers became the epicenter of Russian literature of the XXth century on both hemispheres.

Pictured below: Carl and Ellendea Proffer at Ardis Publishers, Ann Arbor, MI.

The goal for Proffers became clear from day one – to create a space where works of Russian literature, both from the earlier generations and their own contemporaries behind the Iron Curtain, could be published and, by extension, read in America. Ardis books were printed both in English (for American readers), frequently translated from Russian by the Proffers and their friends, and in Russian for scholars of Russian culture and a small diaspora of Soviet immigrants.

In her memoir, Brodsky Among Us, Ellendea Proffer recalls the couple’s annual trips to the Soviet Union to search for books and manuscripts. In the early years of their Soviet visits, they would meet with local intellectuals and smuggle their manuscripts out of the country to publish them with Ardis. Nobody could export intellectual property out of the country, thus by doing so the Proffers risked never being able to come back to the Soviet Union. But despite the risks, in the later years the smuggling went both ways – the Proffers would bring Ardis books back to the Soviet Union, which would become the first time most authors saw their own books in print, while continuing to bring Russian manuscripts back to the United States. In that, this American couple from Michigan had a colossal impact on supporting the Russian culture of the XXth century, completely stifled behind the Iron Curtain.

Nabokov Time Line Part 1:

Saint Petersburg, Russia (1899 to 1917) Nabokov was born and grew up in Saint Petersburg, Russia. His family was forced to flee during the Bolshevik Revolution. November, 1918 In November 1918 the Nabokovs sought exile in western Europe, along with many other Russian refugees. They settled briefly in England. University of Cambridge Nabokov gained admittance to Trinity College, Cambridge where he studied zoology and later Slavic and Romance languages. Berlin, Germany (1922 to 1937) In 1920, Nabokov's family moved to Berlin, where his father set up the émigré newspaper Rul' ("Rudder"). Nabokov followed them to Berlin two years later, after completing his studies at Cambridge. In March 1922, Russian monarchists shot and killed Nabokov's father in Berlin as he was shielding their target. Nabokov stayed in Berlin, where he had become a recognized poet and writer in Russian. He lived within the lively Russian community of Berlin that was more or less self-sufficient, staying on after it had disintegrated because he had nowhere else to go to. In May 1923, he met Véra Evseyevna Slonim, a Russian-Jewish woman, at a charity ball in Berlin. They married in April 1925. Their only child, Dmitri, was born in 1934. In the course of 1936, Véra lost her job because of the increasingly anti-Semitic environment. Nabokov began seeking a job in the English-speaking world. France (1937 to 1940) In 1937, Nabokov left Germany for France finally settling in Paris. This city also had a Russian émigré community. In May 1940, the Nabokovs fled the advancing German troops, reaching the United States via the SS Champlain. Nabokov's brother Sergei did not leave France, and he died at the Neuengamme concentration camp on January 9, 1945.

Nabokov wrote the first dozen of his books in Russian (such as, in my collection, Mashenka, Invitation to a Beheading, Glory, King Queen Knave, Camera Obscura), and as a result they are deeply entrenched in the Russian culture of the early XXth century: Saint Petersburg intelligentsia playing chess, eating blini, and attending the Imperial Ballet in the evening. Ergo his mastery of American cultural references in his latter dozen or so novels, such as, in my collection, Lolita, Pnin, and Ada or Ardor, is only more astounding. These books overflow with cross-country road trips, American football, and Hollywood films. When reading books from Nabokov’s American era for the first time I reveled in comparing his writing voices in both languages. I was also highly conscious of these cultural references being brand new experiences for the author in a foreign land, and yet he integrated them into his narratives with impeccable incisiveness. As someone who had to adopt a new culture as my own, I felt seen and recognized like never before.

Image 1: Nabokov in the 1920s. Image 2: Mašen'ka [Mary or Mashenka] by Vladimir Nabokov (1926), Michigan: Ardis, 1974. Image 3: Dar [Gift] by Vladimir Nabokov (1938), Ann Arbor, Mich: Ardis, 1975.

Nabokov Time Line Part 2:

New York City (1940 to 1941) Nabokov began volunteer work as an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History. Wellesley College (1941 to 1948) Nabokov joined the staff of Wellesley College in 1941 as resident lecturer in comparative literature. The position, created specifically for him, provided an income and free time to write creatively and pursue his lepidoptery. The Nabokovs resided in Wellesley, Massachusetts, during the 1941–42 academic year. In September 1942, they moved to nearby Cambridge, where they lived until June 1948. At the same time he was the de facto curator of lepidoptery at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology. In 1945, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Cornell University (1948 to 1959) Nabokov left Wellesley in 1948 to teach Russian and European literature at Cornell University, where he taught until 1959. Montreux, Switzerland (1961 to 1977) After the great financial success of Lolita, Nabokov returned to Europe and devoted himself to writing. Nabokov died on July 2, 1977 in Montreux.

Image 1: The house at 957 East State Street in Ithaca, NY where Vladimir Nabokov lived with his family while teaching at Cornell University. Image 2: Vladimir and Vera Nabokov, Montreux, October 1969.

Image 1: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955, self-translated to Russian 1965), Michigan: Ardis, 1976. One of the first non-Russian books by Nabokov that Ardis published. Image 2: Ada: or, Ardor, a Family Chronicle by Vladimir Nabokov (1969), New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981. Image 3: Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Alexander Pushkin and translated by Vladimir Nabokov, New York: Pantheon Books, 1964. – this four book edition of Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin has been my dream for many years and I’ve been thrilled to finally have found it. Image 4: A drawing by Vladimir Nabokov of the wing of a Karner blue, a butterfly species that he discovered and named in 1944. Image 5: Nabokov's Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings by Robert Michael Pyle and Brian Boyd, Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. Image 6: TriQuarterly: For Vladimir Nabokov on his seventieth birthday by Alain Nicolas, No. 17, Winter 1970, Illinois: Northwestern University, 1970. Northwestern’s literary magazine issued a special edition for Nabokov’s seventieth birthday, and it is an incredible collection of both Nabokov’s own uncollected works and contemporary authors writing on how much Nabokov impacted them.

Images 1 and 2: A Book of Things About Vladimir Nabokov by Carl Proffer, Michigan: Ardis, 1974. Images 3 and 4: Vladimir Nabokov: A Pictorial Biography by Ellendea Proffer, Michigan: Ardis, 1991. Image 3 is the cover. Image 4 left is Nabokov in 1938. Image 4 right is Nabokov in Paris in 1939. It is Vera's favorite photograph of him. The Proffers’ own scholarship on Nabokov. The first one is a collection of peculiar facts throughout all of Nabokov’s oeuvre. The last one is a collaboration between Carl and Ellendea retelling Nabokov’s biography through archival images of his family. Ardis published pictorial biographies of a number of their authors, and I’ve enjoyed all of them, I wish it gained more adoption as a genre.

Brodsky Time Line:

Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg (1940 to 1972) Brodsky was born in 1940 to a Russian Jewish family in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg). He refused to work at a factory, declaring that he endeavors to be a poet instead. For that he was deported to a labor camp in Siberia, where, in a cruel irony, he taught himself English by reading John Donne and W.H. Auden. Being of Jewish descent under antisemitic Soviet law made him ineligible to become a professor or a writer, only a factory worker in the most brutal working conditions. But even after his return from the camps Brodsky still refused to work at a factory. In 1971, Brodsky was invited twice to emigrate to Israel. When called to the Ministry of the Interior in 1972 and asked why he had not accepted, he stated that he wished to stay in the country. Within ten days officials broke into his apartment, took his papers, and on June 4, 1972, put him on a plane for Vienna, Austria. Vienna, Austria (1972 to 1973) After a short stay in Vienna, Brodsky settled in Ann Arbor, with the help of the poet W.H. Auden and Carl Proffer, and became poet-in-residence at the University of Michigan for a year. United States (1973 to 1996) Brodsky became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1977.

And henceforth the second half of his life, now in the United States, began. He would continue living at the Proffers’ house for the first few years of his life in America, and Ardis would become the first publisher of his books (most of which would not be published in Russia until the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union). Much later Brodsky went on to teach poetry and Russian literature at various universities throughout the country (including Massachusetts’s own Mount Holyoke), wrote numerous books of poetry and criticism, became a denizen of New York cultural life along with his friends Susan Sontag and Mikhail Baryshnikov, and finally won the Nobel Prize in 1987. Thus, I feel incredibly lucky to be able to collect works by Brodsky and Nabokov, authors who were cornerstones of both Saint Petersburg’s and American cultures of the XXth century. They are rare examples of immigrant writers who became an integral part of their adopted cultural landscape, and by that virtue their stories always inspired me with hope.

Image 1: Carl Proffer snapped a photo of Joseph Brodsky with Ellendea outside Leningrad’s Transfiguration Cathedral in 1970. (Photo copyright: Casa Dana) Image 2: Brodsky's first days in the U.S. (Ann Arbor, Michigan), 1972.

Image 1: A picture of Joseph Brodsky from poetryfoundation.org. Image 2: Urania by Joseph Brodsky, Michigan: Ardis, 1987. Image 3: Chastʹ rechi [Part of Speech] by Joseph Brodsky, Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1982. Image 4: Brodsky Among Us: A Memoir by Ellendea Proffer, Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2017. Image 5: Brodsky Among Us: A Memoir by Ellendea Proffer (Russian edition). Ellendea’s memoir retelling her own version of Ardis’s founding as well as the couple’s friendship and collaboration with Joseph Brodsky. She decided to wait until after Brodsky’s death to publish it. Image 6: Homage to Robert Frost by Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott, New York: Noonday Press, 1997. Image 7: On Grief and Reason: Essays by Joseph Bodsky, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.

Point 1: My Local Library as a Child Point 2: Saint Petersburg, Russia Point 3: Russian Village District, Claremont, CA Point 4: Brighton Beach in New York Point 5: Ukrainian Village in Chicago Point 6: Ann Arbor, Michigan

I made a trip to Ann Arbor, the birthplace of Ardis Publishers, for the first time. My hope was that the bookstores around the University of Michigan would be overflowing with Ardis books. But in the end, I discovered only two books on that trip, Sasha Sokolov’s Palisandria and Carl Proffer’s autobiographical The Widows of Russia.

Image 1: Palisandrija by Saša Sokolov, Michigan: Ardis, 1985, front cover. Saša Sokolov is a contemporary Russian writer living in exile in the US. He is not widely read in the US because his works are so experimental they are completely untranslatable. Image 2: Palisandrija by Saša Sokolov, Michigan: Ardis, 1985, back cover. Image 3: The Widows of Russia by Carl Proffer, Michigan: Ardis, 1987. A memoir by Proffer which details the early days of Ardis as well as their early visits to the Soviet Union where they met the widows of Russian writers such as Michail Bulgakov and Osip Mandelstam. The widows had a crucial impact on collecting and sharing the work of their husbands under the oppressive regime, but their work frequently goes completely unnoticed.

To me, Ardis stands as a reminder that individual citizens can transcend the belligerent politics of hostile nations. If two Americans could find a way to publish timeless poems by Brodsky smuggled out of the Soviet Union at the peak of the Cold War, thus we can find ways to create something beautiful during highly turbulent, polarized, even violent times. And despite the increasingly pervasive xenophobic sentiments, perhaps we can help ourselves and others around us feel a bit more at home.

Image 1: My half century by Anna Akhmatova, edited by Ronald Meyer, Michigan: Ardis Publishers, 1992. Collection of autobiographical writing by another great poet Anna Akhmatova, who was Joseph Brodsky’s first and most important mentor. Images 2 and 3: Selected Poems by Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, translated by Carl Proffer, Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1969.

Image 1: Sobranie sochineniĭ [Collected writings] by Mikhail Bulgakov, Michigan: Ardis, 1988. Ten-tome collection. I could not believe my luck when I found this ten-tome collection of Bulgakov’s work by Ardis. Ellendea Proffer is a scholar of Bulgakov, so his books were probably the first collected works Ardis has published. Image 2: Elena and Bulgakov. Image 3: Bulgakov and his wife Elena, c. 1939. Images 4 to 7: A Pictorial Biography of Mikhail Bulgakov by Ellendea Proffer, Michigan: Ardis, 1984. Image 4 is the cover. Image 5 are scenes from a 1954 production of his play "The Days of the Turbins." Image 6 is a picture of Bulgakov in the 1930s. Image 7 is from 1926. Bulgakov is the third from the left.

Image 1: Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam. Image 2: Mozart and Salieri by Nadezhda Mandelstam, translated by Robert A. McLean, Michigan: Ardis, 1973. Collection of writings by Osip Mandelstam’s wife, who became instrumental in spreading the gospel of Ardis’s work from within the Soviet Union.

Images 1 and 2: Tsvetaeva: a pictorial biography by Mikhail Baltsvinik and Irma Viktorovna Kudrova, Michigan: Ardis, 1989. Image 1 is the cover. Image 2 is the title page. Another pictorial biography by Ardis, this time on another accomplished Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva.