An Inspired Publisher: Alexander Smirdin

Alexander Smirdin, 1837-1912 

If someone wanted to create a symbolic image of Russian culture, they would have to put a book in the very center of it. Art, music and theater have never been able to achieve the same significance in Russian life as literature. 

There is a reason why paintings in Russia are often valued for their subjects and not for how well they were painted, while people are judged by how many books they have read. And proud (if somewhat doubtful) assertions that we read more than any other nation on Earth were repeated throughout the entire Soviet period.  The writer Fazil Iskander’s offers an ironic treatment of this subject in his story, “Little Giant With a Big Libido.” The protagonist, a photographer, takes a candid picture showing a metro car where everyone sitting on one side of the car is reading, while on the opposite side nobody is. The photograph was rejected for publication, because it was felt it could be misinterpreted. Finally, one publisher advised cutting it in half and putting captions underneath: “Our Metro,” “Their Metro.”

Russia has not always been so “literature-centric.” In the 18th century and even into the early 19th, books were the province of a tiny elite. By no means everyone who could afford to buy books did so – it simply was not considered necessary. Witnesses recall how shocked the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko was when he heard that, in Pushkin’s lifetime, his books were printed in quantities never exceeding 3,000 copies. For a popular Soviet poet, success was measured in hundreds of thousands. 

The expansion of the reading population began in the mid-19th century. This was probably a natural process. Literature was becoming more and more democratic and, accordingly, accessible to an ever-greater number of people. But this might never have happened if there had not been people for whom culture was synonymous with books. 

Alexander Smirdin must have been one of those people. How did he wind up falling so madly in love with reading, a love that stuck with him his entire life? Why was it that he wanted to trade not in textiles, as his father had, but in books, like his uncle, in whose shop Smirdin spent much of his childhood? How did a boy who grew up a member of the Moscow bourgeoisie develop such an interest in books and such a talent for the book business that even in his youth one major bookseller would recommend him to another in the most flattering terms? This latter, the famous Plavilshchikov, several years later would bequeath his entire business to Smirdin.

It is easy to see that Smirdin inherited a certain business know-how from his forebears. It is also easy to see why his entire life he tried to deal not in elegant or expensive publications, but in nice-looking books that could nevertheless be afforded by civil servants, provincial landowners and merchants. Smirdin, who had to scrape together funds for his own education, likely understood what a book means to someone who did not grow up seeing vast library shelves in his father’s study. 

It is clear how important Smirdin’s merchant skills were, although his business practices were well ahead of his time. He advertised his editions in newspapers and magazines, sent out books by mail-order, organized lotteries and discount sales. He studied the market, conducting surveys among potential customers, and used the results to determine the size of print runs. 

But despite all this, commerce never became more important to Smirdin than books. He never lowered himself to printing cheap and mediocre works. To a certain extent, what Smirdin did for Russia can be compared with the transformation that many years later would take place in a very different country, the UK, thanks to Penguin Books. 

Alexander Smirdin tried to publish good books. After inheriting Plavilshchikov’s bookshop, he made certain to emphasize its metamorphosis. In 1831, he bought a house on Nevsky Prospect and held a big “housewarming” celebration to mark the opening of his establishment, inviting all the best writers of the day. Then he did everything he could to ensure that his store would become a gathering place for anyone with an interest in literature, that his library would be a place where people could take out books at a price many could afford, that his journal, Library for Reading (Biblioteka dlya chteniya), would provide entertaining and accessible reading to a large audience.

Alas, it was Smirdin’s very love of books that was his downfall. He may have come up with brilliant advertisements and been blessed with business acumen, but he always put books and their authors before money. Smirdin became the first person in Russia who began to offer writers reasonable compensation. In the 18th century, authors had not been paid for their work. Writers either were supported by wealthy patrons or were themselves wealthy, following their literary pursuits in their hours of leisure. In the early 19th century, the situation changed. By the Pushkin era, writers were attempting to live by their literary labor and did not hide the fact that this was their main and sole occupation. It was still not a simple matter, however, to make a living as a writer. Yet those who were being published by Smirdin had nothing to complain about. And it can be said to his credit that he had wonderful taste. There were rumors that Pushkin received ten rubles a line from Smirdin – in those days that would have been the price of an entire book – and Krylov was given 300 rubles per fable. He also paid less famous authors fairly. 

This did not end well. By the late 1840s, the famous publisher was up to his ears in debt. His Library for Reading could be found in every educated provincial home in Russia and his shop on Nevsky Prospect was a fashionable meeting place, but money slipped through his fingers like sand. The government tried to help the popular publisher and held several lotteries to benefit him. 

Alas, he did not have the will to reduce writers’ fees. As a result, all his businesses went bankrupt and he was forced to sell his house. He tried to stabilize the situation by sending books out into the provinces, but it was all in vain. The man who had done so much for Russian culture developed a serious mental illness. In September 1857, Alexander Filippovich Smirdin died. 

Smirdin’s business may have failed, but the undertaking he began left its mark. If we look at the subsequent history of Russian book publishing, in every era we see talented booksellers trying to publish good and affordable books read by hundreds of thousands of people throughout the country: Sytin and Soldatenkov, Surovin and Sabashnikov, the literary supplement to the popular magazine The Cornfield (Niva), Gorky’s World Literature... 

Today, when we hear constant talk about the death of literature, about the younger generation not reading and movies (along with television, computers, and the Internet) replacing books, in Moscow there is a proliferation of cafés that also serve as bookstores. Romance novels and idiotic mysteries are on display everywhere, but all bookstores also carry inexpensive editions of the classics and the best contemporary novels. Books are sold in supermarkets, in theater lobbies and in the metro. After all, “You can’t sell inspiration, but you can sell a manuscript,” as the bookseller remarked in Pushkin’s “Conversation between a Bookseller and a Poet.” We are all lucky to have it that way.