On Founding One of Literature’s Most Beautiful Collections

The Pléiade. The name resonates far beyond the world of literary history.

The Pléiade collection is truly part of French heritage. It could, in fact, be considered a lieu de mémoire, as described by Pierre Nora: an item of historical significance, an object that runs through the collective imagination and is in some part a basis of our common identity. In France, a country where literature occupies a special, almost religious, place, the Pléiadeis considered as highly as the Panthéon. Emmanuel Macron, the president of France elected in 2017, understood this fact: In the background of his official photograph, taken in the Élysée Pal-ace, are three books: Mémoires de guerre by Charles de Gaulle (open on Macron’s desk), The Red and the Black by Stendhal, and The Fruits of the Earth by André Gide. All are Pléiade editions.

The Pléiade founded by Jacques Schiffrin includes the classics of world literature. Since it was established, only 224 authors have been published in this prestigious collection. The great majority of these authors were no longer alive when they made their “entrance” into the Pléiade, from Plato and Cervantes to Rimbaud and Proust. Their publication in the Pléiade resembles a kind of accolade: These authors have been brought into the temple of great literature. Only eighteen authors have been published in the Pléiade in their lifetimes, including Milan Kundera, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Eugène Ionesco, as well as Jacques Schiffrin’s great friends André Gide and Roger Martin du Gard. Little by little, the Pléiade became a “cultural monument,” with the role of defining what is considered great literature, both from the past and the present.

Why did Jacques Schiffrin choose to give his collection the name Pléiade? According to his son André, it was his father’s Russian origins that were the deciding factor: “The name did not come from either Greek mythology or from the French Renaissance, but from a group of classical Russian poets” in Pushkin’s circle whom Jacques Schiffrin admired. Alice Kaplan and Philippe Roussin, however, offer a different explanation, but one also linked to the Russian origins of the collection’s founder: “Schiffrin’s Pléiade was from the Russian pléiada, and according to oral tradition at Gallimard, it meant ‘to package up’: The books would be beautifully produced.”

When he founded the Pléiade, Schiffrin’s idea was to make the greatest literary works in the world available to as many people as possible in an accessible format. Schiffrin wished to make quality more generally available by targeting the Pléiade collection at a broad readership rather than producing books only for the elite. As André Schiffrin noted, “the Pléiade Proust would be less expensive to buy than all the volumes in the regular editions, for example.”

“I wanted to create something useful and practical, you see. …And since I also loved books, I was determined that they be as beautiful as possible. That’s all there is to it.”

In addition to making works of great literary quality widely accessible, Jacques Schiffrin also wished to make his Pléiade editions physically beautiful. The books were and continue to be printed on paper used for bibles and are wonderfully illustrated, in particular by Russian painters living in Paris in exile. In 1933, an advertisement in one of the leading French literary reviews, the Nouvelle Revue Française, described the typography used in the Pléiade editions in detail:

The Pléiade Editions have been produced according to entirely new principles: elegant, easy-to-handle, small books (11 × 17.5 cm), with a soft leather cover, we provide an enormous amount of text. … The font we chose, a magnificent Garamond, is perfectly legible. … Even though there are a great number of pages, the thickness of the volumes is normal, around 2 cm. The use of very expensive India paper, fine, opaque and sturdy, allowed us to attain the desired result.

From its inception, the Pléiade represented a type of literary modernity, which coincided with the launch of its first collections of paperback books. Jacques Schiffrin’s collection met the needs and expectations of a new generation, living in smaller spaces and always on the go. Books had to be smaller and easy to carry. As Alice Kaplan and Philippe Roussin emphasize, “The Pléiade was not ‘junk reading,’ but train reading. The advantage of the bible paper (actually obtained from cigarette paper manufacturers!) was that you could fit many, many pages of print in a volume small enough to take in a suitcase.”

The idea for publications suitable for these new uses was discussed in an interview given by Jacques Schiffrin to the magazine Toute l ’édition in 1933, in which he looked back on the early days of the Pléiade:

You mustn’t give me more credit than was my due in this business. I’ve traveled a lot: it was the English and the Germans who made me think I should publish the works they found so successful in France. However, as always when it is a matter of doing something innovative, I had to overcome a great many obstacles. French readers, I was told, do not like bound books. Today, I don’t think anyone would reproach me. I wanted to create something useful and practical, you see. I took into account that the size of modern apartments requires fitting the maximum number of things into the smallest of spaces. And since I also loved books, I was determined that they be as beautiful as possible. That’s all there is to it.

As Kaplan and Roussin point out, in the apartments of the modern world, the books published in Pléiade editions would always have a special place: “If you walk into the library of anyone who reads in French, chances are strong that the Pléiades will not be mixed with the other books but displayed together on the shortest shelves, their leather bindings touching one another.”

If the physical form of the works published contributes to the fame of the collection, it is also the choice of works that distinguishes the Pléiade. Schiffrin surrounded himself with specialists. In particular, he worked with his friend, the translator and essayist Boris de Schloezer. Born in the Russian Empire in 1881, Schloezer emigrated to France after the 1917 revolution. In the 1920s, Schiffrin published Russian titles in the Pléiade in a collection called Classical Russian Authors, which he translated with close friends. This included works by Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, and others. The first book, published in 1923, was a translation by Jacques Schiffrin, Boris de Schloezer, and André Gide of Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades, with illustrations by the Russian-born Vassili Choukhaeff. As mentioned earlier, Schiffrin’s Russian friends often illustrated these works; for example, Alexandre Alexeïeff, a Russian illustrator born in Kazan in 1901 who emigrated to France at the beginning of the 1920s and whom Jacques Schiffrin would meet again a few years later in New York, created a hundred lithographs for The Brothers Karamazov, published in the Pléiade in 1929.

And so it was that Jacques Schiffrin, born in Baku at the end of the nineteenth century, contributed to the publication of treasures of Russian literature in France during the interwar period. He was a vigorous promoter, and through his efforts, the great-est Russian authors crossed borders and made a name for themselves in Paris. While paying homage to his country of origin by bringing the “Russian soul” to life, he participated in making France international, a country open to the world, which, with Schiffrin, would turn toward new horizons.

The above was translated by Sandra Smith. Smith is the translator of Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française and Camus’s The Stranger, among others. She has won the French-American Florence Gould Foundation Prize, the PEN Translation Prize, and the National Jewish Book Award.