As of June 2014 all the items in the collection have been return to appropriate homes. The largest sets are in Middlebury or the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland.  Several were returned to the University of Basel, three made their way to the Andrej Belyj Apartment-Museum in Moscow, and one is intended for the Russian State Literary Archives in Moscow. A fuller description of the process leading to those determinations can be obtained by reading further.

In late August 2011 I was given two cartons of books that were part of the collection given to me by Michaela Götte, Swetlana Geier’s daughter, and Sonja, her granddaughter.  The so-called Belyj-Reisebibliothek (traveling library) purportedly contained books in the hands of Asya Turgeneva-Bugaeva (Andrei Bely-Boris Bugaev’s first wife), who remained in Dornach, Switzerland at the Anthroposophical colony of Rudolf Steiner after Bely had returned to Russia in 1916 until her death in 1966. Since the fall of 2011 I have been trying to ascertain the provenance or heritage of the books. I am grateful to the more than one dozen individuals who have been gracious with their time and expertise. My major question was how did the volumes that were originally  in the Anthroposophical community in Dornach, or Dornstadt,or Basel travel to Freiburg and then to the United States?

At this point I can identify four distinct sets of materials: books belonging to or by Andrei Bely; books from Asya and Dornach; books of Prof. Dr. Elsa Mahler; and books from the library of the Altenheim Dornstadt (not far from Ulm).

It is clear from my discussions with Dr. Peter Selg in  June of 2013 that Swetlana Geier and Asya Turgeneva were acquainted  and met occasionally both in Freiburg and in Dornach. this explains beyond a doubt the acquisition by Swetlana Geier of the books originally in the possession of Asya.  Frau Geier also knew Dr. Elsa Mahler and was the recipient of several of her books.

My goals are to preserve as well as possible the volumes, to establish the provenance or heritage to the extent possible of these volumes, to offer a digital archive for scholars  with access to covers, titles, inscriptions, notations inside the books, as well as my own informed commentary and that of others. Where appropriate I hope to identify the proper and rightful home of some of the volumes, be it Middlebury, Vermont, Dornach, Moscow  or elsewhere.

A Request for Help. As a  practical matter, I simply will not be able to resolve all the mysteries that each one of these books hold. I turn to scholars and interested parties to help contribute to this effort that will continue to a collaborative work in progress. This project should make a significant contribution to our knowledge of Andrei Bely, his wife and close relatives, as well as of the larger Russian intellectual community in Dornach and Basel. By providing digital access to the materials, I hope to overcome the constraints of geographical boundaries.  This WordPress blog will be open to scholars for commentary and contributions. Those interested in participating should contact me via e-mail at tom.beyer@middlebury.edu.

The beginnings 
My work began in September with an initial examination of the books and sorting according to preliminary indications. What became clear was the need to establish the provenance of each of the items in so far as possible. I also experimented with several formats to identify the works via World Cat to determine if and where other such copies of the books exist. I scanned the covers, inside covers, title pages and any other pages with valuable notations as well as handwritten notes inside the books themselves or on enclosed slips of paper.

I was able to find a student assistant with grant funds to help in the scanning, cataloging and organization of the books. This was no easy task for it required a student with special linguistic expertise, content knowledge and a familiarity with technical aspects of scanning and preserving images. A slow but modest start was made and the hope is for her work to be completed this spring.

In addition I began to make contact with individuals and institutions and archives at the  University of Basel, University of Freiburg and the Anthroposophical Society in Dornach Switzerland. I visited Basel for two days in December of 2011 to make personal contacts and with a generous grant from Middlebury College I returned for work in archives in Freiburg, Berlin, Basel and Dornach in June of 2012.

According to Prof. Dr. Wenzel Götte, Swetlana Geier’s son-in-law, the books belonging to Asja had been given to Prof. Dr.  Elsa Mahler who then gave them to Swetlana Geier. Dr Peter Selg recalls that Frau Geier had known Asya and the two were occasionally together either in Freiburg or Dornach. Frau Valentin Rikoff also recalls seeing Frau Geier, but not Frau Mahler in Dornach with Asya in the 1960s. Swetlana Geier did, however, know Frau Mahler. It would appear that there were two sources of the books from Switzerland, united by the association with Andrei Bely rather than of the two donors.  Andrei Bely was one of Russia’s leading Symbolist poets and philosophers and author  of one of the most important texts of the twentieth century, Petersburg. Bely also closely allied himself with the Anthroposophical movement of Rudolf Steiner and his Memoirs of Steiner were first published in German translation done by Swetlana Geier. Frau Geier had also translated and published Bely’s Memoirs of Blok in German as Im Zeichen der Morgenröte. Work began on that project in the 1960s when she was likely to have met Asya.

The one hundred three books in the two cartons given to me indeed contain a few volumes that can be connected to Bely himself. Most prominent is a copy in Russian of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason that had belonged to Bely’s father and contains significant underlining and several pages of handwritten notes on single sheets of paper folded in.  A second volume of poetry by Nikolai Gumilev is dedicated to Boris Bugaev by the poet. Other volumes are dedicated specifically to Asya Turgeneva. Another is dedicated to Aleksandr Pozzo – the husband of Asya’s sister, and one has the name of Asya’s sister, Natasha Turgeneva, on the inside cover. Then there are those with the name of Elsa Mahler, the first woman professor at the University of Basel. Some are marked as belonging to the library of the Altenheim Dornstadt, a small town outside of Ulm, Germany. That still leaves approximately fifty volumes unaccounted for.

I have made two trips to Basel, Dornach and Freiburg in search of answers. I have corresponded with a score of individuals who have been gracious with their time, their memories, their suggestions and thoughts. I am grateful to them all and have tried to document their contributions in these pages.

My own notes of my first visit to Swetlana’s house in the early 1980s contains a handwritten list of some twenty five volumes I believed to have been inherited from Asja and having belonged to or were connected with Bely. A few are not in the collection given to me. Frau Geier’s major holdings were given to the University of Freiburg library, but are still only partially cataloged. They constitute over 3000 volumes. A search under the Signatur NF 5/* should provide access to that collection.