Nikolay Smirnov and Xenia Leontyeva cataloging Epstein’s books at his house
What can you learn about a person and his intellectual accomplishments by cataloging their personal library? A few years ago, after Emory professor Mikhail Naumovich Epstein generously donated his personal working library to Emory, a group of graduate students and summer interns had the unique experience of cataloging this collection, giving them insight into a scholar’s research and creative process.
Xenia Leontieva, Georgia State University Ph.D. student and Emory Libraries summer intern, collected her own and other graduate students’ and interns’ reflections on their experience.
From Elise Schlecht, Ph.D. candidate in architecture, Emory University
“While cataloging I found Russkiy Postmodernizm by Mark Lipovetsky, who mentored me when I was a student at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. This copy was published 1997 in Ekaterinburg and inscribed to Epstein. I was curious, so I took a photo and emailed Mark, telling him it was clearly a well-loved book, and that as his former student it was my pleasure to be the one to catalog it. He responded: ‘[This] is pretty amazing. This book is my doktorskaia dissertatsiia [doctoral dissertation]. Misha was always very supportive, and actually a few years ago I published a festschrift for him.’ This connection made my work all the more meaningful to me. I felt I understood Lipovetsky’s scholarly position more intimately having been privy to the sources and schools of thought that his own mentor had found impactful, and in a sense, I understood a part of my own academic genealogy more as well.”
Lipovetsky’s monograph, inscribed to Epstein, with the bookplate designed by Epstein for his personal library
The cataloging process uncovered the physical ephemera of daily scholarly life – what Elise called “the story of a life in objects”: “Found objects I kept in my desk: prescriptions, actual bookmarks, receipts, scribbled notes, postcards tucked in pages and used as bookmarks… At first, I found the bookplate inscription ‘language, literature, culture, philosophy, religion’ a bit too capacious. After all, what is left of the humanities when those subjects are removed? But it now seems to me that this list is indeed too limited. Mikhail Epstein is an intellectual omnivore and polymath whose fiercely interdisciplinary work is driven by a desire to understand the human condition, the human mind, and all it produces.”
Book written by D.A. Prigov, with an inscription by his widow to Epstein
Elise also reflected on how encountering Epstein’s intellectual breadth reshaped her own graduate research methodology: “When my advisor, architectural historian Dr. Christina Crawford, learned that I was working on the Epstein collection, on more than one occasion she asked me to adopt his analytical perspective when I was attempting to decipher the meaning of a work of art or architecture. I have certainly become more eclectic in my own research as a result of my experience with the Epstein library. Photographs, obscure poetry, travel guides, propaganda, literary classics, films, popular culture, children’s books, religious doctrines, pulp fiction, and more all inform a lifetime of exploration of culture and the human condition at large. I stopped looking for perfect sources that would make my arguments for me and began to inform myself more broadly on the cultures and concepts I study.”
From Nikolay Smirnov, Ph.D. candidate in Slavic Studies, Brown University
“Working with Professor Mikhail Epstein’s collection was a real gift. The materials he gathered over decades of teaching and research at Emory say a lot about him as a thinker. Epstein has never been afraid to work across disciplines, and his collection moves freely between philosophy, literature, science, and religion. His library captures the essence of the academic call for interdisciplinarity. What ties such different materials together is Epstein himself. You can hear that synthesis in his many articles and books, and it carries a quiet message for younger scholars: Don’t be afraid to step on a few toes when you’re chasing an unorthodox idea.”
The library also has real historical value. Epstein extensively collected tamizdat, the Soviet-era literature smuggled abroad and published in the West. We donated several boxes of these publications to the Tamizdat Project for an exhibition at its library in New York City. Preserving them matters more now than it might seem, since Russia is once again banning books.
Many of the books in Professor Epstein’s collection are unique, and Emory’s is the only library in the United States to hold these titles. Translation studies in particular will benefit from the many works published in the early 1990s. The material translated to Russian straight after the breakup of the Soviet Union is an important cultural marker; it shows what the post-Soviet sphere was reading and how it was thinking at a moment when decades of censorship had just been lifted. Taken together, Epstein’s collection reflects a growing Russian philosophical consciousness, one eager to engage with the world and to define itself anew.
I am highlighting two books from the collection, both inscribed for Professor Epstein by their authors: Yuz Aleshkovsky and Dmitry Prigov (whose widow wrote the inscription to Epstein), two prominent figures of Russian postmodernism. Through their writing, both questioned the legitimacy of the Soviet state. They unearthed languages that had been intentionally hidden from the official press; Aleshkovsky brought in the speech of the prison camp and the street, while Prigov exposed what the official language concealed, placing its ideological clichés in the mouth of the ordinary Soviet person, side-by-side with the trivia of everyday life. By morphing these styles together with the official language of the state, they presented a new understanding of Socialist Realism, revealing the distance between what the state proclaimed and how people actually lived and spoke. Professor Epstein was directly a part of these movements as a writer and critic. Interpreting and teaching this literature, he contributed directly to its evolution, and the inscriptions in these two books are a small reminder of that conversation.
My own research benefited greatly from working with this collection. Going through the boxes, I kept coming across titles I had never heard of, and many of them took me in directions I would not have found otherwise. Professor Epstein’s collection reflects decades of Emory’s direct engagement with Slavic studies; it is the work of a scholar who built bridges between disciplines and between cultures. We hope that engagement will not wane. A strong foundation has been built, and it is now up to the next generations of scholars to build on it.
From Xenia Leontyeva, Ph.D. student in Film Studies, Georgia State University
Mikhail Epstein’s collection struck me with its sheer diversity. Alongside philosophical and literary-critical research, it contained esoteric treatises, legal guides, prayer books, sheet music with notations, saints’ lives, dictionaries, children’s tales, comic books on the lives and works of famous artists, erotic and psychological advice, precious Soviet subscription editions carefully brought out of Russia by Mikhail Naumovich with the help of his friends, and modern editions of popular Russian and foreign writers in Russian. Shining through all these “transparent things” is a living human life, full not only of varied interests, but also of friendships, disappointments and losses, goodbyes and reunions with loved ones, raising children and grandchildren.
The inscriptions leave a distinct impression: very often, they trace the history of the authors’ relationships with M. N. Epstein and his family. Expressions of gratitude from students intermingle with words of support from creative peers or fellow travelers. It is amazing how much our books can tell us about ourselves and our country, and how they can unite us across time and space.
I remember how my heart ached when I came across a pre-war edition of the novel Russkaya narezka [Russian Sliced Cuts] by musician and artist Pavel Kushnir, who perished in a Russian prison in 2024 following a months-long hunger strike. He ended up behind bars on charges of “public calls for terrorist activity”, the label given to his poetic critique of the invasion of Ukraine on his personal YouTube channel with five subscribers.
Mikhail Epstein’s 1972 undergraduate diploma thesis from Moscow State University
The last book I cataloged during my 4-month internship at the Emory library was perhaps Mikhail Epstein’s very first manuscript: his 1972 undergraduate diploma thesis at Moscow State University. It is devoted to the types and functions of the resolution in literary works. I was struck by how many references to Marx and Engels the work contains, as well as the fact that their monographs appear at the beginning of the bibliography. Meanwhile, foreign-language sources occupy the very end of the reference list and are written by hand, just like all the foreign text throughout the thesis itself, since typewriters at that time were only Cyrillic. What a genuine time capsule I held in my hands – the beginning of the creative journey of our protagonist, Moscow State University student Misha Epstein, now a distinguished professor at Emory University in the United States and a world-renowned thinker.
The cataloging of the Mikhail Epstein gift represents an important contribution to Emory Libraries’ Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies collections. Rather than simply shelving them in the stacks among other books, their provenance has been carefully noted ensuring that researchers, students, and future generations can reconstruct Epstein’s personal library as a cohesive intellectual environment.
Whether accessible directly on the open shelves of Woodruff Library or requested from the high-density Library Service Center (LSC), these 1,500 volumes stand as an record of humanities scholarship. In every marginal note, inscribed title page, and tucked bookmark, they invite future scholars to keep asking: how do we understand and represent ourselves in an ever-shifting world?
—by Xenia Leontyeva, ASEEES-grant funded graduate intern, summer 2026
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