Collecting area: Europe

A poet, critic, and essayist, and close friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth, Charles Lamb was a popular figure in literary circles in late Georgian Britain. Born in London in 1775, Lamb began working in the accounting office of the British East India Company at the age of seventeen. Despite struggling with mental illness in his family, he built a reputation as a writer. With an elegant, eccentric, and somewhat antiquated style, he became known first for his poetry, but soon gained notice for prose and criticism. Written with his sister Mary, Tales from Shakespeare (1808) achieved notable success, however Lamb’s fame rests primarily on the essays he wrote during the 1820s under the pseudonym Elia. Lamb died from erysipelas on Dec. 29, 1833.

From the 1960s through 2010s, Rocco and Barbara Verrilli built this extensive collection of first and early editions of Charles Lamb’s writing. Among the volumes they acquired are Lamb’s personal copy of his first publication, Poems on Various Subjects; a rare copy of his first book for children King and Queen of Hearts (1806); and a presentation copy of his best known work, Elia (1823). The twenty-five manuscript items in the collection are particularly noteworthy. Displaying a characteristic combination of charm, wit, and insight, these include a long letter to Robert Southey discussing poetry; humorous letters to his admirer John B. Dibdin; an acrostic by Lamb on the name of Sarah Thomas; and two particularly fine letters to the poet Edward Dyer, including an eye-witness account of the agricultural rebellion known as the Swing Riots.

The dissolution of the Soviet bloc after 1989 was hastened in the Baltic republics by mass popular resistance waged through non-violent cultural and political means. In Lithuania, the revolutionary efforts that began in the spring 1988 culminated in a formal declaration of independence in March 1990. After demands to submit to Soviet authority were ignored, the Soviets sent troops to occupy key buildings in Vilnius killing fourteen protesters in the process. In the face of a resilient resistance and international pressure, the Soviets held on to power for several months, until turmoil at home forced them to recognize Lithuanian independence on September 6, 1991.

This small collection contains a selection of publications dating roughly from the time of the Lithuanian revolution of 1988-1991. Along with a series of mostly pro-independence newspapers and magazines, the collection includes some interesting ephemera, including a series of scarce appeals for independence issued by Sajudis and their Latvian and Estonian partners, a pair of buttons, posters, fliers, and pamphlets. Although most of the materials are in Lithuanian, the collection includes a few written in Russian or English, and there are a few items relating to Lithuania reflecting a Soviet provenance.

The Red Cross played an important relief role in Yugoslavia, helping the still volatile region recover from the devastation of the Second World War.

The sketches and essays in this scrapbook, accompanied by a handful of photographs, were apparently made by grade school students in Skopje, Macedonia, just after the Second World War. The images depict the city, countryside, and people, with a handful of more abstract designs. Red Cross imagery is prominent throughout. Although the provenance of the album is uncertain, it seems possible that it was assembled to pay homage to the organization’s relief efforts.

Robert H. McNeal, a renowned expert on the history of the Soviet Union, joined the University faculty in 1969 and served as the head of the History department from 1971 to 1975. McNeal wrote authoritative works on Soviet leadership, contributed to the World Book and a number of other reference works, and taught many History courses on Russian and Soviet history. His work, however, came to a tragic end in 1988 when his car was broadsided pulling out of a gas station near Princeton University. Born in 1930 in Newark, New Jersey, McNeal earned his B.A. From Yale University in 1952, his M.A. from Columbia in 1954, and Ph.D. from the same school in 1958.

Representing mainly his work as a teacher at the University of Massachusetts, McNeal’s papers include lecture notes, ordered alphabetically by topic as well as several folders of research and article manuscripts on Pushkanen. Also included in the collection are two years of professional correspondence from 1968-1970, biographical sketches and photographs of important historical figures, and several Soviet Christmas cards from the 1950s.

During the Second World War, the Nazi occupation and subsequent liberation of the arctic regions of northern Norway resulted in the near total devastation of the existing infrastructure and the displacement of most of the population, including the native Sami (Lapps). The end of the war did not signal an end to hardship: the challenges of post-war resettlement was accompanied by a sustained effort by the Norwegian government to modernize and assimilate the Sami, largely through the systematic suppression of Sami culture. The language was banned from use in schools until 1958 and other forms of suppression persisted longer, and it was decades more before the rights of the Sami as an indigenous people were codified into law.

The dozen photographs that comprise this collection document Sami life in northern Norway during the period just after the end of the Second World War when Sami people were returning home after years as refugees. Taken by the Norwegian Information Service and presumably associated with the Norwegian modernization program, the collection includes images of traditional Sami sod dwellings, men at work on construction of sled and boat, and portraits of women and children.

A student of Bronislaw Malinowski, the Polish ethnographer Jozef Obrebski was a keen observer of cultural change among eastern European peasantry in the years before the Second World War. After working with the resistance in Warsaw during the war, Obrebski went on to do additional ethnographic research in Jamaica (with his wife Tamara), taught at Brooklyn and Queens College and C.W. Post University, and from 1948-1959, he was senior social affairs officer with the United Nations. He died in 1967.

The Obrebski collection consists largely of ethnographic data collected by Obrebski in Macedonia (1931-1932), Polesia (1934-1936), and Jamaica (1947-1948), including field and interview notes, genealogies, government documents relating to research sites, and ca. 1000 photographs; together with correspondence (1946-1974), drafts of articles, analyses of collected data, and tapes and phonograph records, largely of folk music; and papers of Obrebski’s wife, Tamara Obrebski (1908-1974), also an ethnologist and sociologist.

An East German screenwriter and playwright, Ulrich Plenzdorf was born into a Communist family in the working-class Kreuzberg district of Berlin in 1934, settling in East Germany after the war. Abandoning his undergraduate studies in philosophy at the University of Leipzig, Plenzdorf worked as a stagehand at the DEFA film studio while studying at the film academy in Babelsberg. His breakthrough as a writer came with the play Die neuen Leiden des jungen W (1972), which enjoyed enormous success internationally, selling more than four million copies in 30 languages. A year later, he followed up with the popular film, Die Legende von Paul und Paula (1973), and his popularity as a writer continued through unification. Plenzdorf died in Berlin on Aug. 9, 2007, at the age of 72.

This small collection includes research files on the screenwriter Ulrich Plenzdorf assembled by Albert R. Schmitt, a professor of German at Brown University. In addition to an early edition of Die neuen Leiden and a mimeograph copy of an English translation by Herbert Lederer, the collection includes a handful of letters and a few pieces of ephemera from early productions of Die neuen Leiden, along with reviews and scholarly articles of Plenzdorf’s work.

Born in Germany on Aug. 4, 1934, Hans Joachim Ring was a film enthusiast with an encyclopedic knowledge of German cinema. During the Second World War, movie theatres became a refuge for the young boy, whose family was forced several times to flee due to Allied bombing. The hardships of post-war life cemented the role of film in his life and as he grew older, he became an ardent collector of materials relating to film.

The Ring Collection includes hundreds of programs, fliers, and handbills published by the official East German film distributors Progress Film-Vertrieb and the Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA) and sold to patrons at theatres. This extraordinary assemblage includes several hundred programs covering the immediate post-war period (1945-1950) and hundreds more relating to films released up to and beyond the end of the Communist era. Offering insight into the evolution of graphic design in East Germany and the marketing of film, the collection is one of the largest of its kind in the United States.

A scholar of East German literature and cultural politics, Jay Rosellini completed his doctorate at Indiana University in 1976, and held faculty positions at MIT and Purdue before becoming Professor of German and Humanities at Suffolk University in 2001. His writings include monographs on the writers Volker Braun and Wolf Biermann and a study of the right-wing tradition in German literature from the Romantic era to post-unification. Rosellini retired in 2017.

The Rosellini Collection contains novels, poetry, and drama from East German writers, primarily from the 1960s to 1989.

In the mid-1970s, the Center for the Study of New Russian Literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UMass Amherst began collecting the self-published and underground literature of the Soviet Union as a means of documenting social and political dissent in the Communist state.

The Samizdat collection includes writings in several genres — chiefly fiction, poetry, drama, and literary, social, and political criticism — in handwritten, photocopied, and printed form, as well as photos, a passport application for Mikhail Baryshnikov, and memorabilia from an American production of one of the plays in the collection.