ISBN: Ostalo
Godina izdanja: 1991
Jezik: Ruski
Autor: Strani

U odličnom stanju, sa potpisom autora

Лев Копелев
УТОЛИ МОЯ ПЕЧАЛИ
Третья книга воспоминаний

Утоли моя печали. – М.: СП «Слово», 1991. – 336 с.


Это заключительная книга автобиографической трилогии известного писателя, литературного критика, германиста Льва Копелева, вышедшей на Западе в издательстве «Ардис»: «И сотворил себе кумира», «Хранить вечно» и «Утоли моя печали». В последней описана та самая «шарашка», где вместе работали «зеки» – А. Солженицын, Л. Копелев, Дм. Панин, ставшие прототипами героев романа А. Солженицына «В круге первом».

ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ
Глава первая. МАРФИНСКАЯ ШАРАШКА
Глава вторая. ДВАЖДЫ ИЗМЕННИК
Глава третья. ИЗУЧАЕМ РУССКУЮ РЕЧЬ
Глава четвертая. ПРИЗНАНИЕ
Глава пятая. ЗАЧЕМ ВИДЕТЬ ЗВУКИ
Глава шестая. СЕРЫЙ
Глава седьмая. ФОНОСКОПИЯ. ОХОТА НА ШПИОНОВ
Глава восьмая. «БЕГУМА» И ДРУГИЕ КАПИТАЛИСТЫ
Глава девятая. ШКУРА ЗЕБРЫ
Глава десятая. ГОРЕ ОТ ЛЮБВИ
Глава одиннадцатая. КОНЕЦ ЭПОХИ
Глава двенадцатая. АСФАЛЬТНОЕ РАСТЕНИЕ
Глава тринадцатая. ПРОЩАЙ, ШАРАШКА!
Глава четырнадцатая. ХОЧУ БЫТЬ СВОБОДНЫМ
ПРИМЕЧАНИЯ

Lev Kopelev was born in 1912, five years before the Bolshevik revolution, and died in 1997 six years after the collapse of communism – a reminder of how relatively short that period was. His experiences and writings throw light on a number of the grimmer aspects of Soviet history as he went from enthusiast to victim to dissident. Through all this his humanity shines through and his belief that, in relations between people, ‘we need firm and definite moral laws and tenets – truth, unselfishness, compassion’. Unusual individual that he was, he also gives us a way into the lives and ideology of the ‘true believers’ who played an important part in the implementation of Stalin’s policies in the 1930s.

Lev Kopelev’s memoirs have been abridged in three volumes in their English translation. The Education of a True Believer (1980) describes his early years and his participation in the horrors of collectivisation. No Jail for Thought (1977) continues with his war experiences and arrest in 1945 and the convoluted aftermath of prison, trials and the camps. (Rather confusingly the book was published in the USA as To Be Preserved Forever, the phrase stamped on the files of those convicted of ‘crimes against the state’.) Ease My Sorrows (1983) takes its name from ‘Our Lady of Ease My Sorrows’, the church on the outskirts of Moscow that was converted into a sharashka – a special prison camp reserved for scientists. In the last two books his own description of life in prison and in the camps is interspersed with the stories of fellow prisoners.

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Lev Z. Kopelev, a scholar, dissident author and revered figure in the human rights movement in the Soviet Union in the 1970`s, died in St. Elisabeth Hospital in Cologne on Wednesday. He was 85.
The cause was heart disease, relatives said.

He had lived in Germany since he and his wife, Raissa Orlova, emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1980, before being stripped of citizenship by the Communist authorities.

Heinrich Boll, a close friend, welcomed them in his native Cologne. Germany revered Mr. Kopelev as a hero for serving a 10-year sentence in Soviet prison camps for antistate crimes, after he tried to keep Russian soldiers from raping and pillaging in German territory in 1945. Germany gave both Mr. Kopelev and his wife honorary citizenship in 1981.

Born in Kiev on April 9, 1912, into a middle-class Russian Jewish family, Mr. Kopelev grew up an enthusiastic and idealistic Communist, though his independence of mind and physical exuberance -- he was well over 6 feet 3 and as robust as a Russian bear -- often got him in trouble with the authorities.

In the early 1930`s, he became a worker in a locomotive factory and joined the Communist youth movement, from which he was ejected from time to time -- once because a cousin was arrested and accused of Trotskyism --but he always admitted his mistakes and was let back in.
Acquiring perfect German as a student at the Foreign Languages Institute in Moscow in 1938, and later a doctorate at the Institute of History, Philosophy and Literature, Mr. Kopelev joined the Red Army in 1941 when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. He was a major in a propaganda unit with the front-line troops in East Prussia when he was arrested in 1945.

Transferred to a prison camp in Moscow, he met his fellow inmate Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, who based the character Rubin in his novel "The First Circle" on Mr. Kopelev, an unflattering portrait of a loyal Communist unable to see the system`s flaws.

Describing his work as a party propagandist among Ukrainian farmers in the 1930`s, when millions of people starved in the wake of the enforced collectivization of Soviet agriculture, Mr. Kopelev later wrote:

"Those years were for me a heroic tragedy. Instead of fate, as in the days of antiquity, historical necessity ruled, and I believed in it more unconditionally than I had believed in God as a child. So I was proud to help take bread away from the farmers, proud as a 20-year-old ignorant city slicker to teach old, wizened farmers how they should behave, what was good for them and what was bad.

"Everything was so clear and simple: I belonged to the only true party, was a fighter in the only just war for the victory of the most progressive social class in history and thus for the betterment of all humankind."

His first marriage, to a fellow student in the 1930`s, did not survive his imprisonment.

His loyalty to Communism did. He believed that petty jealousies and other human failings of his wartime superiors, not some fatal flaw in the Communist system, had put him in jail. Rehabilitated like other victims of Stalinism after his release in 1954 (a year after the dictator`s death), he kept his party membership until 1968.
He was expelled from the party then for taking part in a public protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Between 1954 and 1968, he became the leading expert on German culture in the Moscow literary world, writing a biography of Bertolt Brecht and teaching in various institutes of higher education. In 1956, he married Miss Orlova, a literary critic whose specialty was American literature.

He remained a member of the Soviet Writers` Union until it expelled him in 1977. By that time, he had become a member of the literary and intellectual circle around Andrei D. Sakharov, the father of the Soviet atomic bomb who had been converted by the destructive potential of his own creation into his country`s foremost advocate of human rights.

Mr. Kopolev cut a distinctive figure in the Moscow of those days, with a flowing white beard and carrying a cane that looked like a prophet`s staff around the courtyard of the building where he and Miss Orlova lived -- not far from the Butyrka Prison where he had served with Mr. Solzhenitsyn.

Striding through the courtyard one summer day a month or so before he left for Germany, Mr. Kopelev was spotted by a group of children who swarmed all over him. "Santa Claus! Santa Claus!" they cried joyously, some complaining that he had not delivered the presents they had expected the previous New Year`s Day. "Next year," he soothed them, taking the mistaken identity in his stride.

But when Dr. Sakharov was exiled internally to Gorky, now renamed Nizhny Novgorod, in January 1980, Mr. Kopelev was persuaded that he had no choice but to leave.

In Germany he devoted himself largely to a monumental project, a dual literary history of Germany seen through Russian writers` eyes and Russia as seen through German literature, with research supported by a higher-education institute, the Gesamthochschule, in Wuppertal.
He was the author of 10 other books about Russia and his own experience. The most important of them, "To Be Preserved Forever," was smuggled out of Russia and first published by Ardis Publishers in Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1975, and later published in English by Random House.

Just before Miss Orlova died of cancer in Germany in 1989, they went back to Moscow to visit friends. Mr. Kopelev was remarried, to Maria Leonene, last year.

His own humanistic values, he said, were derived from a lifetime of reading such great figures of German literature as Goethe and Heine.
"I don`t believe in isms or ideologies," he said in an interview in 1977. "What I believe in is humanity, in the responsibility of all human beings for each other."

Besides his wife, Mr. Kopelev is survived by two daughters from his first marriage, Maya Litvinova and Svetlana Ivanova, both of Los Angeles, and two daughters of Miss Orlova`s, six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.