I’ve had my first couple of days working in the Kluge Centre at the Library of Congress. Aside from getting set up on new systems, registering for passes and cards, actually doing some work, and getting terribly lost in underground basements looking for coffee, I’ve enjoyed a brilliant tour of the Libraries buildings, and the Capitol.  Something, however, in today’s tour stuck in the mind, even more than splendours of the building, the private reading rooms for congressmen, and seeing Woodrow Wilson’s private library.  At one point we were pointed towards a sofa (perhaps I should write couch) were the previous Librarian of Congress used to take power naps, or sometimes bunk down in the building.  This I thought could only have been James Billington, the previous Librarian of Congress who retired at the end of September 2015, after twenty-eight years in the post.

I’ve been telling people at home that really my trip was thanks to Billington, and that he was to blame for my three month trip.  Which in some respects this is true, but in others perhaps a convenient anecdot, much like the one about Billington’s couch.  I’d assume that the reason who the Library of Congress has so much useful material for my research, was that Billington must have prioritised purchasing Russian and Soviet materials.  This, of course, might still be true, and I won’t dismiss my fantasy entirely.  But, when I didn’t quite appreciate before getting here is the enormity of the Library of Congress machine.  Apparently it receives 22,000 new items a day, and that there are a series of warehouses holding materials across Virginia. Indeed, the Library of Congress maintains offices across the globe (including Jakarta and Nairobi).  It struck me as we made our way through the stacks, and basement corridors (at one point descending to where books are processed via a semi-hidden door in the main reading room) that my being being here is also thanks to the huge army of staff cataloguing, preserving, digitising, and moving items.

But, in one final way I am perhaps here because of Billington.  The Icon and the Axe, James Billington’s landmark study of Russian cultural history, first published in 1966, was a really important book for me long ago.  It was a book that I think was on the recommended reading for Lindsey Hughes’s fantastic course of Russian visual culture, and using images as historical sources, which I took in my MA in 2003/4.  If I remember correctly, this was a book that was recommended before the start of the MA, and I read it at home that year.  It certainly made a big impression on me, although not as big as Lindsey.  Her module was one of the best things about my MA at SSEES, and although I didn’t know Lindsey well, being taught by her was always one of the highlights of the week!  The Icon and the Axe, then, was almost an induction into the new world of Russian culture that Lindsey helped open up for me and my peers.  Enabling me to do what I now do.

Billington’s The Icon and the Axe, first published in 1966.