ABSTRACT
I t felt as if J. L. Borges was looking over my shoulder. He liked stories about mysterious libraries and there are about 1200 of them in Daghestan. In the larger libraries there is a door, discretely marked 'Service', which is where the non-books of non-history and old maps are
kept. I have never seen this door, but I have been given books from there, such as Songs of Stalin, printed in Daghestan in 1949, which silently witnessed how nationalism was suppressed.
