a question about Russian tourist guides (post-1960)

[Victoria Donovan]

Dear all,


I'm hoping that someone can help me with part of a paper I am writing on the
changing representations - post-1960 - of three provincial Russian towns
(Novgorod, Pskov, and Vologda) in Russian tourist guides. I want to find out
how tourist guides in general were acquired and used (or, alternatively,
ignored) by foreigners, or non-local Russians, in the late-Soviet period,
and what has happened to them since. I have been told by several
Britain-based scholars that they were given tourist guides as presents by
visiting Russians in the 1960s and 1970s, and I also know that tourist
materials of this type were available from some Russian-language shops in
London. Could anyone offer any anecdotal evidence of how these things came
into their possession, and if they were then employed in their intended
capacity, or rather left to gather dust on a bookshelf or in an attic?

I was also hoping that people who are in possession of such guides,
particularly those to the three towns mentioned above, and are not too
sentimentally attached to them, would consider donating them to a good
academic cause. Please let me know if this is the case.
Thanks for your help!

Victoria Donovan
DPhil Candidate in Russian
University of Oxford

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