ON LIBRARIES

OLGA RYCHKOVA

Growing up in the dying Soviet Union, my encounters with books were precious and far apart. 

My aunt - married to someone high up in the Soviet nomenklatura - had access to "kartochki" for books: vouchers for the elite to purchase luxury goods that were not available to the general public in the hungry final years of the dictatorship. These luxury goods ranged from fresh sausage to jeans to foreign novels. My aunt managed to amass a fantastic library, with Dickens and Hugo and Dumas and Maugham and Hemingway - and there was no greater treat for the 6-year-old me than family functions at her spacious apartment, with its walls lined with the ceiling-high book shelves. There was only one caveat: I was not allowed to touch the books without adult supervision. And the adults preferred sitting at the lavish dinner table heavy with cold cuts and wine (all procured with "kartochki") to supervising my reading. 

As I started school, I got a membership at our local children's library. It was on the ground floor of a small decrepit building a few tram stops away from our home, on a messy block of low-income housing populated with "a-social elements": poor working class families plagued by alcoholism and domestic violence, where I was not allowed to walk alone after dark. Inside, the library's walls were plastered with faded wallpaper that was the color of dust even when it was new, with shelves covered with well-worn children's books, grime, and mice droppings. I loved that library nonetheless. The librarian, a perpetually tired woman invariably dressed in a shapeless brown cardigan, let me check out as many books as I wanted and never seemed to care when I returned books late. She allowed me to abandon the shelves designated for "elementary school pupils" and to venture into the much more exciting section for older kids. I read the whole collection of Dumas, Sir Walter Scott, and Jack London with her tacit approval (or maybe it was indifference). 

I grew out of that library in the first year though. Its collection was tiny, never updated or restocked, and except for the few volumes by the great classics and Soviet adventure novels (The Two Captains, Sannikov Land), most of the titles aimed to nurture true little Leninists: books by Maxim Gorky, multiple biographies of the young Volodya Lenin, propaganda novels about the Great Revolution and Civil War. I quickly got bored.

The first day after moving to the Netherlands, I walked into a library branch in my new neighborhood. From the outside, it was an unassuming cinder block building (uncannily resembling our branch here, in Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY), but it hid a blindingly bright world inside. As I stepped through the doorway, I froze in disbelief: it had a long wooden communal reading table, with cozy lamps and stacks of latest magazines and newspapers. In the corner, comfortable bright-yellow armchairs invited you to cozy up with a book on a rainy day, which are plenty in Holland. A table with computers for patrons to search the catalogue or look up whatever information they needed nestled in another corner. The well-lit bookshelves offered books in Dutch, English, German and even in my native Russian. For me, coming from a country which had just ceased to exist and where few people had personal computers or a sense of shared future, this was the most futuristic vision imaginable. And it was less than a 5-minute walk from my new home. 

Many years later, in New York, I bought a Kindle. I reasoned a small electronic device would allow me to carry my personal library in a pocket, no matter where my busy travel schedule took me. With enthusiasm, I created an Amazon account and started filling that little machine with titles. Many hundreds, if not thousands, dollars later, as my electronic library grew, my joy of reading dulled. I missed the smell of paper and glue of a freshly printed book, and my memory seemed unable to hold the story when it was not linked to a paper page, with its unique font, feel, shape. My reading also became predictable and lost the excitement of the unexpected: once I started buying books, I was usually staying solidly in the reassuring comfort zone of my interests, not realizing just how narrow it was. 

In the summer of 2016, my partner, Mike, was learning to walk again after a spinal cord injury. We were avoiding talking about what was on our minds: what if he would never ride his bike again, or walk his dog, or work independently as he had done all his life. Trying to navigate the crumbling sidewalks of Brooklyn in a wheelchair, weighted down by the piling up medical bills and disoriented by the incessant noise of the divisive elections campaign, we were struggling to see a future that offered any glimpse of light or hope or joy. And so I did what I did so many times in other dark moments in my life: I wheeled us into the public library.

We started checking out books that sparked our interests when they were mentioned in conversations and on blogs, spotted in the hands of fellow subway commuters, reflected in the windows of local bookstores. Soon my reading list broke free from the prison of “am I interested enough in this book to buy it?”. I found myself floating on a tiny life raft of my library card in the endless ocean of ideas. I was surprised to learn that I love feminist science fiction. The wisdom and wit of Ursula LeGuin’s worlds got my imagination spinning, made me dream dreams I did not know I had. “From now on I am only reading books by women writers”, - I told Mike one day, astonished to realize how few women live on our own bookshelves, either physical or digital. 

Mike was on a reading journey of his own. He would read over 70 titles that year, ranging from Pat Benatar’s memoir to Judith Butler to Brittney Cooper. Soon, weekly trips to the library became the routine. Saturday morning ritual involved leashing up our two mismatched dogs, and walking six long blocks to the library. Over the year, Mike graduated from a wheelchair to a walker, the walker got replaced by a cane, and one day he was able to make the trip on his own two unsteady feet. I am convinced that these weekly journeys made more difference than months of prohibitively expensive physical therapy and medication. 

At the end of each trip, the small cinder block building on the corner of Washington and Greene greeted us with stacks of books, each labeled with our names. Next to our holds were the selections of our neighbors. Someone with the name that started with an R, just like mine, ordered books by Jesmyn Ward or Toni Morrison, Roxane Gay or Arundhati Roy, who all appeared on my hold shelve as well. 

Our neighborhood is no longer populated by strangers. Every night, as I walk our dogs before bed, I look at my neighbors and think: was it your book next to mine on the library shelf this Saturday morning?