Russia in the tropics: in pursuit of Nicholas Rubakin’s biobibliography

Objective:   This paper is a (meta)documental research, in the form of a biobibliography, of the Russian librarian Nicholas Rubakin (1862-1946), founder of what became known as Bibliopsychology (or Bibliological Psychology). It presents, panoramically, the life and work of Rubakin. The objective is to analyze the influence of Rubakin and his theory on national bibliographical territories. After verifying the scarce appropriation of Rubakin's work by the scientific literature of the field in Brazil, the study focused on researching other sources of information, on a path that goes from the investigation on specialized databases to general sources of information.

Methods:   This study is theoretical, exploratory and based on a quantitative-qualitative approach. The corpus is based on primary documentary sources collected in the Hemeroteca Digital of the Brazilian National Library, examined through metric analysis of its metadata. The epistemological panorama is produced by Marianna Choldin, Gustavo Saldanha, Robert Estivals, Sylva Simsova, and Elena Savova. The paper's methodological research proposal innovates by linking the triangulation of the notion of biobibliography, national primary sources, and the "Rubakin-territory" (life and work of the Russian theorist).

Results:   The research points to a genealogy of the Rubakinian thought in Brazil that follows a different path from the specialized literature, its absence in the traditional academic and scientific scope of scientific communication, starting from the results retrieved on primary documentary sources and its different forms of appropriation of the ideas formulated and discussed by Rubakin.

Conclusions:  In considering the lack of a solid doxography of the Rubakinian thought in the international scientific literature in face of historical and biographical constraints that involved the circulation of the author’s ideas, this study suggests the need for a better appropriation and dissemination of revolutionary theories of the Russian theoretician by the Library and Information Science field.

KEYWORDS:
Nicholas Rubakin (Nikolai Rubakin, 1862-1946) - Brazil; Bibliopsychology; Biobibliography; Serial resources; Brazilian Digital National Library