On Pushkin – Rachel Donadio in NYT (thanks to my friend Phillip who pointed this out to me):

‘In April 2022, soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, two men arrived at the library of the University of Tartu, Estonia’s second-largest city. They told the librarians they were Ukrainians fleeing war and asked to consult 19th-century first editions of works by Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s national poet, and Nikolai Gogol. Speaking Russian, they said they were an uncle and nephew researching censorship in czarist Russia so the nephew could apply for a scholarship to the United States. Eager to help, the librarians obliged. The men spent 10 days studying the books.
Four months later, during a routine annual inventory, the library discovered that eight books the men had consulted had disappeared, replaced with facsimiles of such high quality that only expert eyes could detect them. “It was terrible,” Krista Aru, the director of the library, said. “They had a very good story.” At first, it seemed like a one-off — bad luck at a provincial library. It wasn’t. Police are now investigating what they believe is a vast, coordinated series of thefts of rare 19th-century Russian books — primarily first and early editions of Pushkin — from libraries across Europe.’

(…)

‘In Russia, Pushkin is a national icon with the status of Shakespeare but the familiarity of a friend. A Romantic poet, novelist and playwright, aristocrat, libertine, writer on freedom and empire, he brought Russian literature, and the Russian language itself, into modernity before dying in a duel at age 37, in 1837.
“In Russia for the past 200 years, there were not four elements in nature but five, and the fifth is Pushkin,” André Markovicz, the pre-eminent translator of Pushkin into French, said.
Every leader of Russia has embraced Pushkin in line with his own political vision, from the czars who expanded the Russian empire in the 19th century, to Stalin — who held public celebrations across the Soviet Union on the 100th anniversary of Pushkin’s death in 1937 even while purging intellectuals — to President Vladimir V. Putin, who has cited Pushkin in speeches and unveiled monumentsto him around the world.’

(…)

‘The recent thefts have led to heightened vigilance. “It’s deeply upsetting whenever thefts like these occur,” Susan Benne, the executive director of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America, said. “Libraries are in the business of providing access to scholars and the public, and when a breach of trust like this occurs, necessary changes in security can curtail that access.” The thefts seem to have caused the most public outrage in Poland, which is acutely sensitive to actual and perceived Russian aggression. Last October, the library of Warsaw University, a former Russian imperial university with a large collection of 19th-century Russian books, discovered 78 Russian rare books missing, including first editions of Pushkin. The thefts may have begun in the fall of 2022 and continued until they were discovered 10 months later, a spokeswoman for the university said.’

(…)

‘These days, requesting a 19th-century early edition of Pushkin in the rare books room of the National Library of France will draw nervous looks from librarians and swift requests for further information about a reader’s motives. Last year, thieves lifted eight books by Pushkin and one by Lermontov, with a total estimated value of €650,000 ($696,500), one of the largest thefts from the library in the modern era.
The pattern was the same. A man showed up over a period of months to consult rare Russian books. When librarians asked the nature of his research, he claimed not to speak French or English. The librarians were doubtful, but ultimately gave him access. The man allegedly stole the books, possibly hiding them in the sling of a bandaged arm. He replaced them with such high-quality copies that librarians didn’t discover the thefts for months.’

Read the article here.

Perhaps, this is a secret operation ordered by Putin to bring Pushkin home.
If so, compared to all other operations he ordered, this one is rather benign.

And who is making the high-quality copies?