A Holocaust of Words

By LANCE MORROW

The library in Leningrad burned for a night and a day. By the time the fire was out at the National Academy of Sciences, 400,000 books had been incinerated. An additional 3.6 million had been damaged by water. In the weeks since the fire, workmen have been shoveling blackened remains of books into trash bins and hanging the sodden survivors on lines to dry in front of enormous electric fans.

The mind cracks a little in contemplating a holocaust of words. No one died in the fire. And yet whenever books burn, one is haunted by a sense of mourning. For books are not inanimate objects, not really, and the death of books, especially by fire, especially in such numbers, has the power of a kind of tragedy. Books are life-forms, children of the mind. Words (in the beginning was the Word) have about them some of the mystery of creation.

Russians have always loved their books profoundly. Literature has sometimes sustained the Russians when almost everything else was gone. During the siege of Leningrad, the city's population, frozen and starving down to the verge of cannibalism, drew strength by listening to a team of poets as they read on the radio from the works of Pushkin and other writers. "Never before nor ever in the future," said a survivor, "will people listen to poetry as did Leningrad in that winter -- hungry, swollen and hardly living." Today Russians will fill a stadium to hear a poetry reading.

There is of course some irony in the Russian passion for books. Knowing the power of written words, Russian authority has for centuries accorded books the brutal compliment of suppression. It has slain books by other means than fire. Book publishing first flourished in Russia under Catherine the Great, and yet it was she who used local police, corrupt and ignorant, to enforce the country's first censorship regulations. Czar Nicholas I conducted a sort of terrorism against certain books and writers. He functioned as personal censor for Pushkin and banished Dostoyevsky to Siberia. Revolution only encouraged the Russian candle-snuffers. Lenin said, "Ideas are much more fatal things than guns," a founder's nihil obstat that culminated in the years of poet destruction (Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva) and book murder under Stalin.

For generations of Russians, books have been surrounded by exaltation and tragedy. In a prison camp in the Gulag during the 1960s, the poet and essayist Andrei Sinyavsky hid hand-copied pages of the Book of Revelations in the calf of his boot. He wrote, "What is the most precious, the most exciting smell waiting for you in the house when you return to it after half a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, mouldering books."

Vladimir Nabokov carried his love of Russian into exile: "Beyond the seas where I have lost a sceptre,/ I hear the neighing of my dappled nouns,/ Soft participles coming down the steps,/ Treading on leaves, trailing their rustling gowns . . ."

Americans don't take books that seriously anymore. Perhaps Russians don't either: their popular culture has begun to succumb to television. In America one rarely encounters the mystical book worship. Everything in the West today seems infinitely replicable, by computer, microfilm, somehow, so that if a book chances to burn up, there must be thousands more where that came from. If anything, there seem to be entirely too many words and numbers in circulation, too many sinister records of everything crammed into the microchips of FBI, IRS, police departments. Too many books altogether, perhaps. The glut of books subverts a reverence for them. Bookstore tables groan under the piles of remaindered volumes. In the U.S. more than 50,000 new titles are published every year. Forests cry out in despair that they are being scythed so that the works of Jackie Collins might live.

It was the Dominican zealot Girolamo Savonarola who presided over the Bonfire of the Vanities during Carnival in Florence in 1497. Thousands of the Florentine children who were Savonarola's followers went through the city collecting what they deemed to be lewd books, as well as pictures, lutes, playing cards, mirrors and other vanities, and piled them in the great Piazza della Signoria of Florence. The pyramid of offending objects rose 60 feet high, and went up in flames. One year later Savonarola had a political quarrel with Pope Alexander VI, was excommunicated, tried and hanged. His body was burned at the stake. Savonarola went up in smoke.

The Leningrad library fire was a natural disaster. Deliberate book burning seems not only criminal but evil. Why? Is it worse to destroy a book by burning it than to throw it into the trash compactor? Or to shred it? Not in effect. But somehow the irrevocable reduction of words to smoke and, poof!, into nonentity haunts the imagination. In Hitler's bonfires in 1933, the works of Kafka, Freud, Einstein, Zola and Proust were incinerated -- their smoke a prefigurement of the terrible clouds that came from the Nazi chimneys later.

Anyone who loves books knows how hard it is to throw even one of them away, even one that is silly or stupid or vicious and full of lies. How much more criminal, how much more a sin against consciousness, to burn a book. A question then: What if one were to gather from the corners of the earth all the existing copies of Mein Kampf and make a bonfire of them? Would that be an act of virtue? Or of evil?

Sometimes it seems that the right books never get burnt. But the world has its quota of idiotic and vicious people just as it has its supplies of books that are vicious, trashy and witless. Books can eventually be as mortal as people -- the acids in the paper eat them, the bindings decay and at last they crumble in one's hands. But their ambition anyway is to outlast the flesh. Books have a kind of enshrining counterlife. One can live with the thought of one's own death. It is the thought of the death of words and books that is terrifying. For that is the deeper extinction.