The Herbert P. J. Marshall Papers

Bulk 1925-1980. 120 containers (about 60 linear feet).

Herbert P. J. Marshall (1906-1991) was a British film and theater director, scholar, writer, and translator of contemporary Soviet literature. He studied film in Moscow in the 1930s under the tutelage of Sergei Eisenstein at the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK). During the late 1930s and 1940s, Marshall worked in London with various theatrical groups, served as director of the Old Vic Theater, and, along with Huntly Carter, was one of the leading members of the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR founded in London in 1924. After the Second World War, Marshall moved to India, where he lectured and produced government films. From 1966 until his retirement in 1979, Marshall served as director of the Center for Soviet and East European Studies in the Performing Arts at the University of Southern Illinois in Carbondale.

In the early 1990s the Hesburgh Libraries acquired Marshall's extensive collection from his widow, Fredda Brilliant (1903-1999), an actress and sculptress. The collection includes Marshall's diaries and the notebooks related to his studies and life in the Soviet Union, his work in London, India, and the United States, as well as Sergei Eisenstein's lecture notes and original drawings. The greater part of the collection consists of Marshall's correspondence with prominent cultural figures as well as such materials as: research notes, translation drafts, photographs, published and unpublished manuscripts, theater plans from Europe, India, and the Soviet Union, and audio interviews with Soviet poets and writers.

The Marshall collection also includes his personal library of over 1000 volumes. Most titles have been cataloged and can be found in the circulating collections. Such rare periodicals and books as the titles published in the 1920s by Proletkult, Vladimir Mayakovsky's poetry illustrated by Russian avant-garde artists El Lissitzky and David Burliuk, as well as over 50 volumes from the personal library of the African-American singer and actor Paul Robeson, are located in Special Collections.

MSE/MN 5001