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[SAMIZDAT & HANDMADE] Historically Significant Samizdat Archive of Alexander Khvoles (1920–?) and his family, consisting of approximately 60 samizdat editions and compilations, together with related correspondence, photographs, and manuscript material

Item #2812

[Tskhinvali–Tbilisi, ca. 1950s–1980s].
Approximately 1,738 pages of typescript and photocopied texts, forbidden for legal distribution in the USSR. Predominantly loose typescript leaves printed on rectos only, stapled. Together with several photocopied samizdat editions (including Sakharov o sebe), four bound volumes of typescripts photocopied manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, and related ephemera. Formats ranging from ca. 30 × 21 cm (11 ¾ × 8 ¼ in.) to 21 × 15 cm (8 ¼ × 6 in.). Manuscript corrections and annotations throughout in the hands of Alexander and Basia Khvoles. Also present are a manuscript copy of poems by Sasha Cherny (18 pp.), approximately 18 pages of correspondence addressed to Basia Khvoles, ten original photographs documenting her life in Tbilisi during the 1980s (ca. 18 × 12 cm [7 × 4 ¾ in.]), and a pencil portrait of Alexander Khvoles by an unidentified artist (21 × 14 cm [8 ¼ × 5 ½ in.]). Condition generally very good, with expected wear from active use.

A remarkable archive documenting the reading culture, intellectual interests, and underground literary networks of a Soviet Jewish intelligentsia family in Georgia during the final decades of the USSR. Collected and preserved by Alexander Khvoles (1920– ?), mathematician, educator, and scholar, the archive contains an extensive body of prohibited and unofficial literature circulated through samizdat channels. Supplementing the family's official library of Russian classics and collected works, these texts were preserved in folders, binders, and loose gatherings, often without title pages or authors' names, reflecting the informal and highly personal nature of samizdat circulation. The complete inventory of texts is available upon request.

Alexander Khvoles was born in Tskhinvali in 1920, then home to a substantial Jewish community (in 1922 Jewish population of Tskhinvali was counted as 36%, by 1989 it remained 0,9%). After graduating from local school, he moved to Tbilisi, where he established himself as a specialist in integral equations and applied mathematics. During the Second World War he commanded an artillery platoon on the North Caucasian and Ukrainian fronts and was demobilized in 1945 as a disabled veteran. Following the war, he served as Vice-Rector of the South Ossetian State Pedagogical Institute and as a member of the Tskhinvali City Council. Returning to Tbilisi in the late 1950s, he taught higher mathematics at the Tbilisi Institute of Railway Transport and the Pushkin Pedagogical Institute. From 1966 until 1990 he headed the Department of Engineering and Physical Problems at the I. N. Vekua Institute of Applied Mathematics. In 1966 he presented a paper on shell theory at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Moscow. In 1990 Alexander and his daughter Basia, a psychiatrist trained at the Tbilisi Medical Institute, emigrated to Israel.

The archive offers an exceptional overview of the literary tastes of a highly educated Soviet family. Particularly well represented are poets whose works remained unavailable or only partially available in official Soviet editions for much of the period. Among them are Marina Tsvetaeva, Nikolai Gumilev, Vladimir Nabokov, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky, Velimir Khlebnikov, Vladislav Khodasevich, Sasha Cherny, Mikhail Kuzmin, Georgy Ivanov, Arseny Tarkovsky, Sergei Gandlevsky, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Vladimir Vysotsky, Konstantin Balmont, Maximilian Voloshin, Bulat Okudzhava, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Valentin Nikitin, Berta Rinenberg, Vladimir Sergienko, and many others. Particularly notable are an almost complete collection of Tsvetaeva's poetry, an extensive corpus of Nabokov's poems, a typescript of Brodsky's Ostanovka v pustyne bearing reference to its original Ardis edition, and numerous early samizdat copies of Mandelstam's works.

The archive also contains a significant prose section, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Tiny Things, Marina Tsvetaeva's The Story of Sonechka, Answer to the Questionnaire, The Incident with the Horses, and Old Pimen's House, Daniil Kharms's Jolly Fellows and diary entries, Lydia Chukovskaya's memoirs of Anna Akhmatova, V. Razumny's Khashi's Story, Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Lecture, photocopies of Sakharov About Himself, and open letter by Fyodor Raskolnikov addressed to Stalin. Together these texts represent a substantial cross-section of the unofficial literary canon that circulated outside Soviet censorship.

Evidence throughout the archive demonstrates that the Khvoles family was not merely reading samizdat literature but actively participating in its reproduction and distribution. A copy of Lydia Chukovskaya's memoirs about Akhmatova survives with each page duplicated five or six times, clearly intended for further circulation. A typescript of Sergei Gandlevsky's poems is preserved in an envelope addressed to Basia Khvoles and bearing the stamp of the Central Photographic Laboratory in Moscow, suggesting assistance from contacts involved in reproducing prohibited texts. References to books and literary exchange recur throughout the accompanying manuscript material. In a notebook of graduation wishes addressed to Basia, one friend expresses the hope that she might have “20 rubles a day for books,” while a 1980 letter notes that “Yura came to see us twice, the reason was to pick up the books.”

The archive also preserves traces of Alexander Khvoles's own engagement with the texts. Numerous corrections appear throughout the manuscripts, especially in early copies of Mandelstam's poetry, where alternative readings are supplied in the margins, mathematical calculations and equations occasionally appear on sheets interleaved with literary texts, including Maximilian Voloshin's Sten'kin Sud. These details transform the collection from a mere accumulation of samizdat into a vivid record of intellectual life, reading practices, and literary transmission within the Soviet educated class.

Of particular interest are approximately two hundred unidentified poems that could not be traced through published sources. Some may derive from the literary circles surrounding the Khvoles family in Tbilisi and may never have been formally published. One identified example is a collection by Mark Berkolayko, the Baku-born Jewish mathematician and poet, inscribed by the author and dated 1984. Such material suggests the archive may preserve otherwise unrecorded evidence of local literary activity in the Caucasus.

An important and unusually comprehensive archive documenting the preservation, circulation, and reception of prohibited literature in the Soviet Union. The overwhelming majority of the texts represented here remained unavailable through official publishing channels when collected, surviving only through samizdat networks until their eventual publication during Perestroika and the post-Soviet period, when they entered the recognized canon of twentieth-century Russian literature.

The full inventory of texts is available upon request.