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Descriptive Summary

Biographical Note

Collection Overview

Arrangement

Administrative Information

Controlled Access Headings

Collection Inventory

Series 1: Personal

Series 2: Original works

Series 3: Blue Faun/Publishing

Series 4: Anthologies

Series 5: Manuscripts and galleys

Series 6: Unpublished

Series 7: Translation/Other

Series 8: Correspondence

Series 9: Clippings

Series 10: Oral Histories and Microfilm

Series 11: Unprocessed Additions

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Collection Overview

Biographical Note

Bernard Guilbert Guerney (1894-1979) was born Bernard Abramovich Bronstein in the city of Nikolaev (known today by the Ukrainian name Mykolaiv) on the Black Sea, not far from Odessa. His Russian-Jewish family was comprised of mother Olga Grigorevna, father Abram Iosipovich Bronstein, and younger sister Ethel. Guerney spent his first eleven years in Russia, in Nikolaev and then Dnepropetrovsk, before immigrating to New York City in 1905. It is unclear if he received any formal education in Russia. According to the recollections of Guerney’s sister Ethel Bronstein (see Series 10), the children were tutored at home by their mother. Both parents were literate in a number of languages (including French, German, and Russian), and the children had access to the wide variety of books in the house. As an adult, Guerney would refer to himself as an autodidact, and he claimed to have learned to read at age two. He did attend school in New York City, and graduating from Townsend Harris High School seems to be the extent of his academic career. Guerney began writing a teenager, taking his pen name from the title character of Theodore Hook’s novel Gilbert Gurney. In 1917, soon after his own first novel was accepted for publication, Bernard Abramovich Bronstein legally changed his name to Bernard Guilbert Guerney. He began working as a translator in the early 1920s, and in 1922 he became the owner of the Blue Faun Bookshop, which may have moved between a few locations in Manhattan over the next five decades or so. The shop was also home to Guerney’s small press, Blue Faun Publications. Of his many literary endeavors—publisher, poet, author, editor—Guerney received his greatest recognition as a translator of Russian literature. Some of the works he selected had previously only been translated from an intermediary language and his was the first translation from the original Russian; some had never appeared in English before. His 1942 translation of Gogol’s  Dead Souls is the project that most consider his masterpiece. (Nabokov himself approved of Guerney’s translation, calling it an “extraordinarily fine piece of work” in his 1944 study of Gogol.) Other major works include the four separate anthologies of Russian literature that Guerney edited:  A Treasury of Russian Literature (1943),  The Portable Russian Reader (1947),  New Russian Stories (1953), and  An Anthology of Russian Literature in the Soviet Period from Gorki to Pasternak (1960). These projects included his own translations as well as others, and introduced American readers to a wider range of Russian authors, classic and contemporary.

Guerney got married in 1927 to a woman named Bessie. Their son, Dr. Bernard Guilbert Guerney, Jr., became a clinical psychologist and family counselor and, along with his wife, Dr. Louise Guerney, was a professor at Penn State for many years.

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Collection Overview

The Bernard Guilbert Guerney Papers include a variety of text formats: correspondence, journals, manuscripts, typescripts, paste-ups, galleys, printed booklets, newspaper clippings, and advertising ephemera. There is a smaller amount of personal artifacts, greeting cards, photographs. Biographical information is sparse, but supplemented by the audio recordings of interviews with Guerney’s sister, Ethel Bronstein (Series 10). Although Guerney’s translation work makes up the bulk of the collection, these documents are almost entirely in English; the Russian sources he worked from are not present. The collection also contains Guerney’s original literary works, in the form of short stories, poems, plays, and articles. A large number of his writings and translations remain unpublished. The unprocessed materials, temporarily filed as Series 11, consist primarily of printed matter in Czech, Polish, and possibly a mix of other Slavic languages.

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Arrangement

The collection is arranged into the following series: 1. Personal, 2. Original Works, 3. Blue Faun/Publishing, 4. Anthologies, 5. Manuscripts and Galleys, 6. Unpublished, 7. Translation/Other, 8. Correspondence, 9. Clippings, 10. Oral History, and 11. Unprocessed Additions.

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Administrative Information

Access Restrictions

Collection is open for research.

Copyright Notice

Copyright is retained by the creators of items in these papers, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.

Preferred Citation

[Identification of item], Bernard Guilbert Guerney Papers, RBM 2347, Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University.

Acquisition Information

Bernard Guilbert Guerney donated the collection in February 1974 and material continued to be added until his death in 1979, both by Guerney and by his son, Bernard Guilbert Guerney, Jr.

Processing Information

Processed by Vijaya Narayanan, December 2012.

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Controlled Access Headings

Personal Name(s)

• Guerney, Bernard Guilbert

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Collection Inventory

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