Literatura: teoría, historia, crítica

Introduction

One of the most frequent promises of distant reading is to reveal previously undiscovered trends and processes in the history of literature by accessing large-scale collections of texts, or so-called “the great unread” . While there is a constant discussion on method application for style and genre analysis, less attention is given to the question of biases involved in the corpus creation process. On the one hand, the largest collections as Google Books cover too many materials to be provided with detailed historical metadata and still are incomplete in various ways. On the other hand, carefully curated small corpora are often biased towards literary canon or other selection features. But even a “simple” correspondence of the corpus size to the total book population size usually cannot be clearly estimated for either of the two. So, what do we study when we study large collections? What is their relationship to the past? How much of “the unread” is in fact missing from our corpora?

This case study addresses the questions of selection and survival bias, taking as an example the process of a poetry corpus creation of a narrow historical span (1830-1850). Not comparable with the large-scale collections like Google Books or HathiTrust, poetry as data is usually rather small. Poems are in most cases collected based on some exclusive selection criteria: poetic form (Diachronic Spanish Sonnet Corpus), canonical, or “representative” authors (cf. Métrique en Ligne, Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive), or scholarly authority (Poetic subcorpus of Russian National Corpus).

The latter provides a specifically telling example. It includes quite a significant collection (13M words) supplied with elaborated morphological, metrical, and stanzaic annotation. The selection of authors in the corpus was in many cases decided by the availability of modern (the 20^th century) scholarly editions (Korchagin 235). As a result, the period of “classical” 19^th century poetry in the corpus is presented not by primary but secondary sources and affected by Soviet literary canon of the middle of the 20^th century (almost all sources of 18-19^th century texts were published in the 20^th century). Furthermore, the bias towards the most studied poets lead to dramatic overrepresentation of authors like Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov, who have their complete works and even drafts included in the corpus, while for the most authors the number of poems in the corpus rarely exceed 10-15 texts. This corpus design though is not accidental but rooted in the earlier tradition of quantitative yet non-computational versification studies, in particular, these on the history of verse forms by Mikhail Gasparov and his selection of scholarly editions of poetry (Korchagin 235-237).

Without a doubt, the Russian National Corpus is a large collection, a “big data” scale of poetic texts. However, the question is simple: given the selection criteria and canonicity bias, how really “unread” is it? Would it be possible to build an inclusive corpus from the primary sources without selection? And how many of these primary sources are available for us?

This article aims to examine the path that precede the “exhaustive” corpus creation, firstly, by discussing the trends visible from historical circulation and current distribution of primary sources and, secondly, by estimating the corpus bibliography completeness with the help of methods from population ecology. I claim that preliminary research into the sources of a digitised collection can bring more understanding of available and even lost data as well as give a clearer vision on what is inside “the unknown” part of a corpus and which aspects of literary history “the unread” can disclose.

The structure of this paper is as follows. The Data section gives the historical overview of the data used for this case study. In particular, the section Smirdin’s library catalogues describes the path of one library collection through two centuries: from its creation in the 19^th century towards its current state; the Contemporary library holdings section summarises the data on preservation of the 19^th century poetry books in 11 nowadays library collections. The Poetry books survival rate section presents a methodology for estimation of the books’ survival rate and applies the method to the data described in the previous section. The last section discusses limitations of the data and methods used for the case study and outlines further prospects of this approach on a large scale.

Data

The object of this study is Russian poetry of the 19^th century, namely the books of poetry issued between 1830 and 1850. To give the necessary context, this period is considered to be the end of the “Golden Age” of Russian poetry, since its political and, partly, aesthetical functions gradually shifted to prose. The 1830s were already named as a period of poetic decline, marked by the symbolic deaths of Aleksandr Pushkin (1799-1837) and Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841). The period of the late 1830s and the 1840s was deemed not worthy as a reading and study object.¹ Despite general unfavourable attitude to this period, selected poets active in the 1830s and 1840s entered the 20^th century literary canon and 102 of them found their way in the national corpus.

A hundred poets might seem like a significant number; however, these two decades were also an active period of professionalisation and democratization of Russian literature: many new poets of different social backgrounds had entered the literary field and tried to push literary activity away from leisure to financially successful endeavour. The transformation started in the middle 1820s with the appearance of an unprecedently popular and profitable literary almanack “The Polar Star” . It introduced high wages per line and caused a flood of copycats. Annual collections of selected poems and short stories that were published in the middle of the 1820s and early 1830s gave name to the period known as “The Epoch of Almanacks” (Smirnov-Sokol’skiy 16-21). Individual books of poetry followed this stream of nice-looking compilations of works by multiple authors. The wave of published poetry was noticed by an unknown critic in 1838:

How to get away from verses? Where to hide from the inspiration that relentlessly manifest itself in little poetry collections printed on white and grey paper with typos and mistakes in grammar? You take these little books with sweet expectations but then leave them in an unbearable ennui.² (Russkaya literatura 791)

The sarcasm on the quality of poetry of this period was a very common point, though the “expectations” in this case might be connected with the idea that publishing a book of poetry is an outstanding act, permitted only for the greatest, recognised authors, as it was in the 1810s and 1820s. Decade later, however, the total cost of issuing a book not only lowered, but even promised some financial profits (Rose & Eliot 343). Numerous novice authors -often completely unknown to their contemporaries and academics alike- started to publish poetry collections and standalone editions of narrative poems. This is the reason this period is an underexplored source for gathering and examining the “unread”.

No reliable bibliography listing the books of poetry published between 1830 and 1850 exists. The archival materials that comprise registers of the books going through censorship are incomplete and hardly available; despite state-controlled recording of all printed books started in 1837, no centralised register for the books printed in Russia had been ever published (Reyser 75-7; Levin 147-53). Literary scholars name the 19^th century booksellers’ and library catalogues as the most valuable sources for that matter, as well as several contemporary library collections, with the biggest one in the National Library of Russia which was the legal deposit library between 1810 and 1917. To my knowledge, the only attempt to create a list of books of poetry of the 1830s and 1840s belonged to Aleksey Balakin, though his bibliography covered only the period between 1834 and 1850 and was not finished and officially published (Balakin).

Thus, the real number of the allegedly increasing population of poetry books was never quantified, nor was it evaluated if (and how much) these books are still being preserved in the library collections. It can be assumed that despite the low reputation of the poetry of this period, the books might still be preserved because of the high status of poetry itself. Using 19^th century indexes and digitalised library catalogues, I will try to assess whether these sources can provide enough data for creating an extended bibliography of poetry books (1830-1850) and for examination of the physical items (re)distribution in contemporary collections. The major goal behind compilation and evaluation of the bibliography is to find whether we can reach an understanding of what is “the unread” in the future corpus of poetry, how good it is preserved and which part of the already known poetic texts “the unread” forms.

Smirdin’s library catalogues

Among many 19^th century catalogues printed by booksellers and bibliographers, the exceptional role belongs to the catalogue of Aleksandr Smirdin’s library. Besides the literal value of the catalogues as sources for bibliography, these catalogues also reflect different stages of the collection’s diffusion. That case can be an illustration of how poetry books were redistributed and lost between the 19^th and 21^st centuries.

For literary historians Smirdin is mostly known as a bookseller and publisher who greatly influenced the development of cheap and profitable bookselling in Russia and established flat fees for authors.³ He is less remembered for maintaining⁴ a commercial library and publishing its catalogues,⁵ which later were recognised as one of the most complete (Koblents 82-88) existing bibliographic sources on Russian books printed in the 1820s and 1830s (four-part catalogue appeared in 1828; annexes added in 1829 and 1832). It is especially valuable that the catalogues are organised and allow to immediately find books written in verse. In 1842 the library was passed to Mikhail Ol’khin and then to Petr Krasheninnikov in 1847 (Kishkin 151), both of them also published printed catalogues of the expanded Smirdin’s collection (in 1846 and 1852, respectively).

By the general rules of Smirdin’s library, the catalogues were used by readers mainly for ordering books as well as for learning prices in case of purchasing “no matter how many items” (“Rospis’ …” II-III). The same functionality applied to later catalogues by Ol’khin and Krasheninnikov. Thus, even if the catalogues present exceptionally rich information on books published and read in the 1830s and 1840s, they were not designed as complete bibliographical registers. This limits the direct interpretation of the items not passing from one catalogue to another because a book absence could have been caused by number of factors starting from direct loss (all copies of the book were sold from the library) to other reasons, as a book’s low popularity, an editor’s mistake or even reasoning that a book was already mentioned in the earlier catalogue. Nevertheless, these three library catalogues issued in 1832, 1846, and 1852 presents the different stages of extension of the same library, giving almost a live broadcast on books of poetry read and sold from 1830 to 1850.

In the second half of the 19^th century the collection stopped functioning as a library and was resold⁶ several times, until it had finally landed in Nikolay Kymmel’s bookshop in Riga, in the 1870s. Kymmel, in turn, also published a number of catalogues aiming to sell the books as rare and valuable parts of Smirdin’s collections: the bookseller used the library’s founder name as a part of the catalogues’ title: “Antiquarian catalogue n.^o 39: Comprising the list of books from Smirdin’s library, nowadays belonging to N. Kymmel, a bookseller in Riga” (1889). To some extent Kymmel even used the system established by Smirdin’s catalogues, separating poetry and fiction in two neighbouring catalogues (n.^o 39 and 40 respectively, both issued in 1889).⁷ The primary interest of this study is the catalogue n.^o 39, that reflects the shape of the collection in the late 1880s.

It is worth mentioning that not long before Kymmel’s catalogues publication, a part of Smirdin’s collection was bought by a bibliophile Pavel Shсhapov whose collection is currently kept in the Russian State Public Historical Library (“Knizhnaya kollektsiya…”). According to the lists of books that are now preserved in the library, Shchapov focused on the early 19^th century - only five items of the poetry books he bought were printed after 1830. Many others remained in Kymmel’s bookshop for sale.

It seems that Kymmel was successful in selling Smirdin’s collection, since the next and the final owner of Smirdin’s library received only a small part of it. In 1932 the collection was bought and transferred to the Slavonic library of the National library of the Czech Republic; compared to the 1850s, only 10 to 20 percent of volumes reached Prague (Savitskiy 96-97). The least preserved were humanities-related books, especially the sections of history, fiction and, finally, poetry, where “out of 82 registered [in some part of Smirdin’s catalogue] items were received only 13” (Savitskiy 97). Nevertheless, the library tried to replenish Smirdin’s collection using its older catalogues and nowadays this collection can be considered one of the richest and also digitised collections of 19^th century books in Slavic languages.

Incarnations of Smirdin’s library allow us to follow the collection’s path from its initial state in the 1830s to the present restored condition. I collected data on all books of poetry⁸ published between 1830 and 1850 and mentioned in the four 19^th century catalogues (shortened as Smirdin 1832, Ol’khin 1846, Krasheninnikov 1852, Kymmel 1889) and one modern library database (online catalogues of the Slavonic library). Figure 1 presents the number of shared books between each of the catalogues. It must be noted that the figure reflects only the shared number of books between each two catalogues but by no means displays the complete path of each book from one collection to another (the data derived from the catalogues is not enough for this tracing).

Figure 1: The number of shared books by each of the catalogues presenting Smirdin’s library in different time periods (only poetry books issued between 1830 and 1850 included)

It is striking that the original catalogue almost does not share any poetic books with its direct successor, but, instead, has the largest intersection with the 1889 catalogue. The latter can include many of earlier books due to the potential customer’s interest in the early-nineteenth-century Russian poetry or, moreover, possibly reflecting a shift in the catalogue’s function: from day-to-day to antiquarian bookselling. Proportionally-wise Kymmel’ s catalogue includes 46 % of the books (1830-1832) mentioned in catalogue of the 1832 and have a bigger overlap of 59 % with chronologically closest list of 1852. However, the proportion of books it shares with 1846 catalogue is much lower (32 %). The small number of shared books between the catalogues of 1846 and 1852 is questionable, but it might be not connected with an actual loss of books from the collection, although some sources confirm that its parts may have been sold to other booksellers (“Knizhnaya kollektsiya…”). Another possible explanation is that some part of the books was afterwards added in a later version of Krasheninnikov’s catalogue (1856, not included in the figure).

It is curious that the number of shared books between the Czech library collection and the 19^th century catalogues is also very similar and in all the cases (about 30 %) except for Ol’khin catalogue (19 %). This may indicate that some of the books listed in 1846 were neither transferred from Ol’khin to Krasheninnikov’s possession, nor recovered in the 20^th century: in other words, these books were lost.

The gaps in the overlap between one current library holding and the number of historical catalogues already lead to the question of the rate of loss of the 19^th century editions. Smirdin’s collection was one example of this process, but more insights can be obtained using the data from multiple library collections.

Contemporary library holdings

The data from the 19^th century catalogues served as a starting point for the bibliography of the poetry books issued between 1830 and 1850. During the search of these books in today’s library collections, it soon became evident that these catalogues have significant gaps and some collections include books which were never mentioned in either of the four 19^th century sources. Thus, the bibliography gradually expanded, mostly drawing from the catalogue of the National library of Russia (NLR). The total number of the poetry books issued between 1830 and 1850 and included in the bibliography resulted in the list of 967 unique titles.

Eleven library collections were used for compiling the bibliography, among them two largest Russian libraries (NLR and Russian State library, RSL), as well as two special collections devoted exclusively to poetry books (Ivan Rozanov’s collection of poetry and digitised collection of poetry prepared by the library of the Saint Petersburg State University).⁹ The other collections considered are held outside Russia, as the large Slavonic libraries of the National Library of Finland and that of the National Library of the Czech Republic as well as the Harvard Kilgour collection focused on Russian history and literature (Jackson 13). Number of smaller collections that historically belonged to the western provinces of imperial Russia were also taken into account, since these parts of the empire had their own censorship departments and printing houses and their current holdings may include unique items.

The search in the NLR and RSL started from finding the books listed in the 19^th century catalogues and then refined with additional tags -and keyword-based search.¹⁰ For the rest of the library catalogues the whole collection in Russian language dated between 1830 and 1850 was reviewed de visu. The list of libraries with the number of poetry books found is presented in Table 1.

As it is clear from the table, the NLR takes a particular place in preserving the 19^th century books, being the legal deposit library¹². Among other collections, four libraries reach the number of poetry books close to Rozanov’s special poetry collection size. Though only about 80 % of the books were sent to the NLR during the first half of the 19^th century (Reyser 75-90), it is interesting to see the ratio of poetry books to the total number of books obtained by the library in each year (Table 2). In terms of total numbers, poetry books make up about 3-4 % of all printed editions, so some of the contemporary library collections with a higher ratio are obviously biased towards preserving literary works.

According to the annual library reports (1830-1850), the number of books deposited to the library doubled towards the end of the 1850s. However, this increase is not visible in the quantity of the poetry books. This can point to two competing reasons: an actual decline in printed poetry, or the lower rates of preservation of 1840s poetry.

To answer the question if the deposit library has a monopolist position keeping books not available anywhere else, Figure 2 displays the distribution of books in the libraries outside NLR in relation to their presence in the 19^th century catalogues and the National Library.

As it is visible from the flows’ sizes, only a small share of poetry books is unique to the NLR. In reverse, a comparable number of books can be found only outside the NLR. Although the 19^th century catalogues missed roughly one third of the poetry books found in contemporary libraries, the majority of these books also have at least one copy outside the NLR and only a very small portion of books was lost. Does this fact evidence that the rate of survival for poetry books is very high, despite apparent public indifference to the poetry of the 1830s and 1840s?

Figure 2: Distribution of poetry books (1830-1850) in other collections in relation to the book presence in the 19th century catalogues and the legal deposit library (NLR)

Poetry books survival rate

Using the compiled bibliography as well as the data on copies distribution in the libraries, it is possible to estimate the survival rate of the books, drawing from the field of population ecology and the problem of biological diversity.

The pioneering attempt to perform an estimation like that was made by L. Egghe and G. Proot who tried to statistically predict the number of lost printed theatre programmes issued in the middle of the 18^th century (Egghe and Proot 257-268). As their model was based on the number of existing copies for each edition and aimed to quantify those which had been lost, the question Egghe and Proot were trying to solve was quickly identified as the unseen species problem and their model criticised for being not as robust as already existing solutions (Burrel 101-105). In biology the estimation of species richness in a particular area is made using so-called abundance data, i. e., the data on the number of encounters of each species in a given sample. While some species are found very frequently, the others have been “seen” only once or twice during the observation period. The least observed species provide data for estimation of the number of even more rare species, which have not been found but, as one suggests, there is still some probability to observe them at least once. Knowing this, Egghe and Proot’s estimation of the number of lost or, in other words, unobserved printed documents proves to be “the same context but with time reversed” (Burrell 104).

In the most recent studies on survival of cultural artefacts Mike Kestemont, Folgert Karsdorp, and their colleagues have directly borrowed methods and basic theoretical frame from population ecology to examine the loss rate of mediaeval fictional narratives and manuscripts (Kestemont and Karsdorp 44-55; Kestemont et al. 765-769). As they explain the transition,

medieval works can be treated as distinct species in ecology, and that the number of extant documents for each work can be regarded as analogous to the number of sightings for an individual species in a sample. Thus, if we treat the available count information for medieval literature as “abundance data”, then one can apply unseen species models to estimate the number of lost works in a corpus or assemblage. (Kestemont et al. 767)

The concepts of “works” and “documents” in this case oppose immaterial individual narratives and their material mediums (manuscripts) existing in any number of copies. The unseen species model can provide an estimation of the survival rate for both of the categories. As the study revealed, the survival ratio of a mediaeval work (of narrative fiction) is about 68 %, though only about 9 % of the physical documents that contained these texts are estimated to be preserved (Kestemont et al. 767).

Since the direct transfer of the method from the natural sciences and its application to the data from humanities may cast doubt on the obtained results, in their earlier work Kestemont and Karsdorp performed an experiment with simulated data loss. Their results proved that Chao1 delivered the most conservative and robust estimation which is the closest to the ground truth (Kestemont and Karsdorp 50-51). In addition, it is argued that Chao1 estimator brings robust results with little assumptions about data distribution.¹³ Thus, we assume that this approach is also feasible for application to the collected data on the poetry books issued between 1830 and 1850. In this case each unique book title will be taken as a species (as a work)¹⁴ and each copy of the work found in the library collections counted as a sighting (a document).

However, it would be unreasonable to calculate the survival rate for all the books together. Five distinct groups of poetry books emerge when dataset is filtered by the content¹⁵ and book volume in the number of pages¹⁶ (Figure 3): 1) short lyric poems either gathered in poetry collections (Lyric-Collections) or 2) issued individually as a small separate editions (Lyric-Booklets); 3) long narrative poems mostly published individually in separate editions (Narrative-Booklets) but 4) sometimes also formed collections (Narrative-Collections); 5) finally, the almanacks and few other collective issues (Almanacks) that unite texts of multiple genres (the books of this group are the only ones in the dataset containing prose).

In general, the distribution of the five types of books confirms scholarly intuitions about this period. Firstly, as expected, the early 1830s are characterised by a large number of almanacks and long narrative forms. Soon after both lost their appeal, most poetry was published as individual poetry collections (Lyric-Collections). The distribution of the number of individually published lyrical poems is less smooth and hints that these editions might be worse preserved than the others. This hypothesis is to be tested statistically using the model of unseen species.

Figure 3: Distribution of poetry books on the timeline

For the estimator Chao1, proposed for use by Kestemont and his colleagues (Kestemont et al. 767), the number of species observed once (singletons) or twice (doubletons) are the most important values. Significantly simplifying the logic behind the estimator explained in (Karsdorp), Chao1 tries to derive the probability of unseen species from the probabilities of singletons and doubletons, assuming that the probability to spot an unseen species will be close to those of singletons and higher than 0. In addition, there is the “improved” Chao1 estimator that corrects the estimation based not only on singletons and doubletons but also considering the number of species observed three and four times. The latter is important for our data, as shown in Table 3.

After the transformation¹⁷ of the bibliographical data to the counts of sightings, or abundance data, the difference between the five book types becomes more visible. For Lyric-Collections and narrative poems of both types there are many instances of two to three copies for one work to be found, while the Almanacks were preserved even better, in majority of cases having three copies. The distribution of the items observed once (f1) and twice (f2) in our case is drastically different from what was observed for the mediaeval manuscripts, where singletons are much more numerous than works in multiple copies (Kestemont et al. 769). This feature underlines the printed nature of the observed collection and questions the applicability of the estimators.

With the abundance data it is possible to estimate survival ratios for each of the groups of the poetry books. As the data contains several groups with majority of tripletons and even some quadrupletons, to take them into account I will mainly discuss the results of the improved Chao1 (iChao1) estimator (for comparison with other estimators see Table 5). The resulting survival ratios for the works and estimation of the population sizes are shown in Figure 4 and Table 5.

Figure 4: Estimated survival ratios for each of poetry books’ groupings

It is visible that for the Almanacks and Narrative-Collections all estimators put the lower bound of species richness at the exact number of already found books. Although there might be simply not enough data for the Narrative-Collections works which are quite rare, this result may confirm that almanack is the best-preserved type of books of this time that include poetry.

For the Lyric-Collections and Narrative-Booklets survival ratio is slightly lower (about 89 %), in other words suggesting that at least 30 individual titles from each group are missed. This result corresponds to the fact that the full bibliography contains 15 collections of lyric poems and 2 narrative poems that are mentioned in the 19^th century catalogues, but not found in the library collections.

The comparison of estimators (Table 5) shows that for the two groups of editions with lyrical poems the improved Chao1 estimator gives less conservative results and predicts a higher number of works than both Chao1 and Egghe & Proot estimators. It is especially clearly seen in the estimated number of Lyric-Booklets. Quite predictably, this group was evaluated as the least preserved type of poetry books with the lower bound richness estimated as at least twice bigger than the number of works that have been found in the bibliography. Figure 5 illustrates the model prediction on the correspondence between the number of found works and documents for Lyric-Collections and Lyric-Booklets groups.

Figure 5: Accumulation curves for Lyric-Collections and Lyric-Booklets

The solid line of the accumulation curves indicates the number of observed works (vertical axis) and documents (horizontal axis) for each group corresponding to the abundance data (Table 3). The dashed line shows the model estimation on how many physical copies are to be observed to find books that have not been found yet. This can be read as: it would take about five hundred more lyrical collections to be found in the library catalogues (quite unrealistic task) to have a probability to find about 30 “unobserved” ones. In the case of Lyric-Booklet, the same amount of observed new documents would likely double the bibliography of this type of editions.

Conclusion

The path of this small-scope bibliography of poetry books shows how different sources and methods can possibly bring new knowledge on the features of a particular sample of literary works. In terms of bibliography, the cases of Smirdin’s library and distribution of copies in contemporary libraries are not considered here as exhaustive. Obviously, more contemporary collections can be taken into account as well as additional data added for the better tracing of books from Smirdin’s library.

However, as I tried to show, computational methods can be used to assess the incompleteness of samples when collecting data on printed sources. In our case the estimation of survival ratios demonstrates that data contains completely different types of poetry books that survived at different rates. In general, the results provided by the model are consistent with evidence from the literary history of this period. Thus, the application of the unseen species model seems to be an appropriate way to examine the survivorship bias in a particular collection.

Some notes still can be added regarding the use of conservative estimators for not-that-rare species as multi-copied books. It is predictable that the model estimates almost perfect survivability for almanacks (with the majority of tripletons), however, the assessment of the booklets is the most insightful. Considering the size of the dataset and assuming that for most books print run size should have been larger than few dozens of copies, it was realistic to use sampling with replacement, assuming that the appearance of one copy in a collection does not influence its presence in another one.¹⁸ However, this might not be true for the small booklets as this print form was usually occasional and could be published in scarce copies. As the estimation of the number of lost booklets seems one of the main findings of this study, it is to be verified if the resulting estimation was not impacted by the sampling issue.

Nevertheless, the mere possibility to estimate the original population size seems to be missing part of the bias correction in computational literary research. Returning to the question of differences between existing corpus of Russian poetry and the “exhaustive” one assessed in this paper, it should be concluded that in this case the selection of secondary sources makes the two assemblages almost incomparable. At the same time, it is certain that quite adequately preserved poetry collections of the 1830-1850 would give a lot of data for compiling “the unread”part of the corpus presenting a large fraction of the true literary population. Moreover, the estimation suggests that the loss of poetic texts most likely happened in small occasional booklets, a bit less relevant in terms of corpus building. Finally, obtaining these conclusions from quantifiable data seems to be more valuable than just relying on intuitions or tradition.