Richard Shryock, Archive Editor

The Gustave Kahn Digital Archive is a web-based, on-line archive of correspondence received by the French Symbolist writer Gustave Kahn and his wife Rachel. The correspondence has remained in family hand and is almost entirely unpublished. As such, these documents are presently unavailable to scholars.

The letters from the best-known correspondents (Mallarmé, Laforgue, some neo-impressionist painters) have already been published in the 1940s and 50s. I have also published a book of 176 letters from this collection (Lettres à Gustave et Rachel Kahn [Librairie Nizet: Saint-Genouph, 1996]). However, a sizeable correspondence remains.

Although Gustave Kahn has slipped into relative obscurity, he was at the center of the French Symbolist Movement in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Usually considered to be the inventor of free verse in France, he published numerous books of poetry, novels, short stories, a history of the Symbolist movement, art criticism.

He also played a leading role in creating the Symbolist movement in the late 1880s through his poetic contributions and his work on the editorial boards of avant-garde Symbolist journals such as La Vogue, Le Symboliste, and La Revue Indépendante. Since he was a writer and art critic, he received correspondence from many of the most important authors and painters of his day. The letters were written between 1881 and the 1930s.

Although the total number of letters is in the range of 2000-3000 pieces of correspondence, many letters are two or more pages in length. Thus, the total number of images could eventually be several times this number. Access to this full range of materials in The Gustave Kahn Digital Archive will be password protected and available only to scholars approved by the archive editor. To access the site, click on the photo of Gustave Kahn to the right.

An interdisciplinary colloquium on Gustave Kahn will be held at the Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme in Paris November 22-23, 2006. At the same museum, from October 24, 2006 to January 28, 2007 is the first-ever exhibition on Kahn.

For further information, please contact Professor Richard Shryock (shryockr@vt.edu).