Koblenz Ioel Naftalievich (31 March [12 April] 1900, Jakobstadt, Courland Governorate – 5 May 1983, Moscow) — book scholar, bibliographer, and historian.

After the suppression of the Riga uprising of 1905 — in which his older sisters and brother took part — political repression forced his mother to flee with her younger children (his father had died in 1903). In 1906, the family left for Moscow, and later emigrated abroad. After living in Leipzig and London, they returned to Jakobstadt in 1909, and in 1915 moved to Rostov Veliky, where Ioel Koblenz graduated from A. L. Kekin Classical Gymnasium in 1918, one of the best private schools in Russia.

As a student, he was active in social and cultural life — library work, student self-government, and various study circles.

In 1918, he entered the Faculty of History and Philology of Moscow University, later reorganized as the Faculty of Social Sciences, graduating in 1924. His studies were interrupted between September 1919 and October 1921 due to military service in the Red Army, where he headed the library section of the Political Department of the 10th Red Army (Vladikavkaz), took part in the First Congress of Red Army Library Workers (1920), and worked in the Political Education Department of the Terek Republic (1921).

Beginning in November 1921, Koblenz embarked on a long and distinguished career in bibliographic institutions. His university specialization was book science (книговедение), and his diploma thesis, “The History of the Agrarian-Collectivist Policy of Soviet Power, 1911–1923,” helped shape his future interests in bibliography and agrarian history.

From mid-1924 to March 1926, he served as editor of the socio-economic literature department of Gosizdat. In April 1926, he was invited to work at the International Agrarian Institute, where he headed the bibliographic department, organized the publication of current Soviet and international bibliographies on agrarian literature, and edited the bibliographic section of the journal Agrarian Problems.

In 1931, this department became the All-Union Association for Agricultural Bibliography (VASKhB), where Koblenz served as Deputy Chairman for Research.

From July 1947 to 1959, he was a research consultant at the Fundamental Library of Social Sciences (FBON) of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and from 1957 to 1962, head of the Historical Science History Group at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences.

During this period, he developed an ambitious program: the creation of a “Biobibliographical Archive of Russian and Soviet Scholars” — a comprehensive collection of biographical, archival, and bibliographical materials, intended as the basis for a printed biographical dictionary.

His Biobibliographical Section became an autonomous collection, incorporating major documentation complexes from other parts of the research archive. Koblenz and his team also developed a reference system and questionnaires sent to historians and their families, forming the empirical basis for projected dictionaries — “Dictionary of Historians,” “Dictionary of Jurists,” “Dictionary of Orientalists,” etc.

The project envisioned a 10-volume Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Figures, 35–40 volumes of “Materials for the Dictionary,” and a 450–500-volume “Chrestomathic Encyclopedia” (including microfiche editions). None were completed, but their typescript versions and reference apparatus are preserved in the research archive.

In his later years, Koblenz focused on a biography of historian V. N. Tatishchev, preparing a comprehensive bibliography on the subject.

His major monograph, “Essays on Book Science: From the Past and Future of Book Civilization in the USSR” (1965, typescript, 854 pp.), was conceived as a doctoral dissertation (never defended). It synthesized decades of research on the prehistory of state bibliography (15th–18th centuries) and explored the future forms of the book — a theme that increasingly preoccupied him from the late 1960s through the early 1980s.

He also conducted extensive studies on the history of Russian journals and journalism, Russian encyclopedias, and periodical press, as well as the spread of Marxism in Russia, and archival materials on Russian education, science, and art.

In 1982, he completed his major research project, “The Patriotic War of 1812 (A Corpus of Sources in Light of a Historiographical Review),” in four parts. He also investigated the bibliography of the Old Believers in the Russian Orthodox Church.

Koblenz participated in numerous conferences, congresses, and scholarly meetings devoted to library and bibliographic science.

Selected works:

“Some Questions of Bibliographic Methodology: An Attempt at Typology of Bibliographic Sources,” Kniga i proletarskaya revolyutsiya, 1935, no. 6.

Andrei Ivanovich Bogdanov, 1692–1776: From the Past of Historical Science and Book Studies. Moscow, 1958.

“Historical Bibliography: A Historical Outline of Its Development in the 18th–19th Centuries,” in Essays on the History of Historical Science, vol. 2, Moscow, 1960.

“Project for a Complete Bibliographic Corpus of Russian Books of the Late 18th Century,” Archeographic Yearbook for 1962, Moscow, 1963.

“The Catalogue of A. F. Smirdin’s Library and Its Importance for the History and Statistics of Printing in Pushkin’s Era,” Kniga: Research and Materials, vol. 26, Moscow, 1973.

Sources and Figures of Russian Bibliography, 15th–18th Centuries. Moscow, 1991.

References:

Belenky, I. L. “I. N. Koblenz: Life Path and Scholarly Legacy,” Archeographic Yearbook for 1986, Moscow, 1987.

Evening in Memory of Ioel Naftalievich Koblenz (1900–1983), Soviet Bibliography, 1985, no. 2.

Danchenko, O. “Historian, Bibliographer, Book Scholar,” Knizhnoe obozrenie, 7 Dec 1984.