1 hemingway's library - John F. Kennedy Library and Museum

"Madame Bovary"--Flaubert
"Remembrance of Things Past"--Proust
ABuddenbrooks"--Mann
"Taras Bulba"--Gogol
"The Brothers Karamazov"--Dostoevski
"Anna Karenina" and "War and Peace"--Tolstoy
"Huckleberry Finn"--Twain
"Moby Dick"--Melville
"The Scarlet Letter"--Hawthorne
"The Red Badge of Courage"--Crane
Although this list contains many of the works that were basic to Hemingway's literary pronouncements, it is notable
for its inclusion of Moby Dick and The Scarlet Letter, which are not mentioned elsewhere.
Hemingway's most reflective and discursive comments on literature are found in his posthumously
published A Movable Feast (1964). This collection of somewhat nostalgic and at times cruel reminiscences of the
Twenties in Paris presents this period of his life in the way in which Hemingway himself wanted it to be
remembered. The writers that he chooses to emphasize are the Russians. His first borrowings from the lending
library at Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company are carefully detailed:
I started with Turgenev and took the two volumes of A Sportsman's Sketches and an early book by D.H.
Lawrence, I think it was Sons and Lovers, and Sylvia told me to take more books if I wanted. I chose the
Constance Garnett edition of War and Peace, and The Gambler and Other Stories by Dostoyevsky.(63)
Later, the Russian writers are commented on at length and the shortcomings of two authors writing in English are
emphasized:
From the day I had found Sylvia Beach's library I had read all of Turgenev, what had been published in
English of Gogol, the Constance Garnett translations of Tolstoi and the English translations of Chekov. In
Toronto, before we had ever come to Paris, I had been told Katherine Mansfield was a good short-story
writer, even a great short-story writer, but trying to read her after Chekov was like hearing the carefully
artificial tales of a young old-maid compared to those of an articulate and knowing physician who was a
good and simple writer. Mansfield was like near-beer. It was better to drink water. But Chekov was not
water except for the clarity. There were some stories that seemed to be only journalism. But there were
wonderful ones too. In Dostoyevsky there were things believable and not to be believed, but some so true
they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness and the insanity of
gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in Turgenev and the movement of
troops, the terrain and the officers and the men and the fighting in Tolstoi. Tolstoi made the writing of
Stephen Crane seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy....(64)
Finally, it is the Russians who are central to the idylls in the mountains of Austria:
... there were always the books, so that you lived in the new world you had found, the snow and the forests
and the glaciers and their winter problems and your high shelter in the Hotel Taube in the village in the day
time, and at night you could live in the other wonderful world the Russian writers were giving you. At first
there were the Russians; then there were all the others. But for a long time there were the Russians.(65)
When, back in Paris, Hemingway mentions Dostoyevsky to Ezra Pound, Pound admits that he has Anever read the
Rooshians@, Hemingway's confidence in his tutor is shaken: "It was a straight answer ... but I felt very bad ....(66)
Two more lists appear in reminiscences by members of Hemingway's family. Both lists are intended for
prospective writers. Shortly after Hemingway's death, his brother Leicester, published a volume of reminiscences in
which he described the time when he was considering a writing career. He asked his brother for advice. Hemingway
replied by insisting that Leicester would have to prepare himself by reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
Kipling, Crane, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Henry James (the short stories), Guy de Maupassant, Flaubert
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