Scope and Content Note
The papers of Boris Leo Brasol (1885-1963) span the years 1919-1954. The collection consists of correspondence, drafts and typescripts, notes, memoranda, reports, printed matter, and miscellaneous material relating to Russia and the Soviet Union, criminology, the Zionist movement, and Brasol's writings and various subjects of his literary criticism. The papers are in English and Russian and are organized into the following series: Political Correspondence, Personal Correspondence, Anti-Soviet Campaign, Scrapbook, Post-Revolutionary Russia, Legal File, Vladimir von Koeppen File, Speeches, Literary File, Newspaper Clippings, and Addition.
Subjects of interest include investigations into the assassinations of the Romanovs and crime detection in European countries as compiled by the Criminological Survey of the Columbia University Law School. The Literary File contains material relating to Oscar Wilde including correspondence with Vyvyan Holland, John H. Wheelock, and Allan Wade concerning Wilde and typescript copies and extracts of Wilde's letters located in other repositories which Brasol used for his book Oscar Wilde: the Man, the Artist, and the Martyr.The series also includes the printer's typescript draft with handwritten corrections of Brasol's translation of Diary of a Writer by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and material relating to Edgar Allan Poe including correspondence of the Edgar Allan Poe Society.
Brasol was purported to have aided in the translation of the American edition of the anti-Semitic tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,and the papers contain correspondence and related reference material exploring various Jewish issues in the Newspaper Clippings series. Brasol also participated in arranging a series of commentaries on the protocols that were to be published in Henry Ford's paper the Dearborn Independent.The Legal File contains correspondence and other papers concerning the legal case brought against Ford by Henry Bernstein, who, in 1921, had written a book exposing the protocols as fraudulent and sued Ford to retract their publication.
The Anti-Soviet Campaign series highlights efforts of White Russian émigrés to deny the Soviet Union official international recognition as the legitimate government of Russia.