This is CBS Islanderworld, Labjeon Batch with Professor Jeffrey Roberts, the author of

the new book, Stullin's Library, a dictator in his books.

The tragedy is the suicide of Nadia, his second wife.

His first wife died of typhus after childbirth, so he has a child by his first wife, and

he has two children by his second wife, but Nadia, and we know very little about the

cause.

I don't believe there was a suicide note.

After an argument or some kind of friction at a party, she went in another room and shot

herself with a pistol that had been brought from Europe, I believe.

And we don't have a great deal of an explanation for this, but it looks to have changed the

library because Stullin then moves from the family dacha, which was in a compound of

other dacha's, to Blitznaia, the one we've talked about, the vast room.

And in this change, Professor, from the scattering of books in the apartment or in the dacha

where he raised his children to this new one, does the nature of the library change?

Or does it just get larger?

Yeah, as you say, Nadia, Nadia was the second wife, she was quite young when she married

her daughter, she was 18, 19, I think, yeah, when she married daughter in 1919, so he was

like considerably older, they had two children in the 1920s.

There's a lot of evidence to show that they had a lot of real evidence, documentary evidence,

not just people's claims of memoirs, they had reasonably happy family life in the 1920s

yet, but whatever reason things went wrong, and then there's this episode in 1932 and

Nadia shoots herself.

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