Saved from the Fire

My father told me what his most important books were. He named Laura as one of them. One doesn't name a book one intends to destroy.

Wonder (along with The Literary Saloon who wondered first) why Dmitri Nabokov didn't think of this earlier, instead of getting us all hot and bothered about whether he was going to torch his father's last novel or not?

(See also Chris Green's piece in the Independent and an excellent summary of all that's happened at Gawker.com.)

You can also watch an interview with Dmitri from the BBC's Newsnight.

The Dissident Author

How often does a novelist change the society he lives in?

One who definitely did was Nobel prize-winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn who died on Sunday age 89.

Michael Scammell in the Guardian describes him as :

... a moral and spiritual leader, whose books were noted as much for their ethical dimension as for their aesthetic qualities. Between 1968 and 1976, he was a towering figure in the twin worlds of literature and politics, expressing the pain of his long-suffering people and single-handedly challenging the autocratic government of one of the world's two superpowers. ... Solzhenitsyn's moral authority was not easily earned. It was the fruit, in part, of bitter personal experience in Stalin's labour camps. But the lessons he drew from his experience, and the manner in which he voiced the sufferings of three generations of Soviet victims in powerful novels such as One Day in Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward, and The First Circle that secured for him the role of conscience of the nation.

Michael T. Kaufman in the New York Times writes of the man :

... whose stubborn, lonely and combative literary struggles gained the force of prophecy as he revealed the heavy afflictions of Soviet Communism in some of the most powerful works of the 20th century.

On a personal note, I came to the novels of Solzhenitsyn in a very strange way. My dad and I used to attend mass at a Catholic church some distance away, instead of our own parish church. The reason? An amazing priest called Father O'Mahoney who preached social justice from the pulpit, single-handedly raised the funds that supported Mother Theresa's mission in India, and who was as likely to reach for The Gulag Archipelgo as the Bible in his sermons.

If you are stirred to read this author for yourself do begin with A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, which isn't a long or difficult read, yet I find it haunts me decades after I first picked it up and still teaches me to take nothing I have for granted.

Bulgakov Museum Vandalised

A museum dedicated to famous Russian author, Mikhail Bulgakov has been largely destroyed by a religious fantantic, reports the Australian. Alexander Morozov, a bitter critic of Bulgakov's work and a tenant in the same building which houses the museum, locked himself in and began chucking :

... many objects out of the window, including valuable illustrations of Bulgakov's works signed by great Russian artists, not to mention several computers. About half the contents were damaged.

The Russian Orthodox church had denounced Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita as a 'satanic gospel' and it was not published until 26 years after Bulgakov's death in 1940.

But the book is, in fact, a political satire, which comments on communist-era Moscow. According to the Marriam-Webster Encyclopedia the novel was:

... published as Master i Margarita in a censored form in the Soviet Union in 1966-67. The unexpurgated version was published by the Soviets in 1973. It is considered a 20th-century masterpiece. The novel is witty and ribald, and at the same time a penetrating philosophical work that wrestles with profound and eternal problems of good and evil. It juxtaposes two planes of action--one set in Moscow in the 1930s and the other in Jerusalem at the time of Christ. The three central characters of the contemporary plot are the Devil, disguised as one Professor Woland; the "Master," a repressed novelist; and Margarita, who, though married to a bureaucrat, loves the Master. The Master has burned his manuscript and gone willingly into a psychiatric ward when critics attacked his work--a portrayal of the story of Jesus. Margarita sells her soul to the Devil in order to obtain the Master's release from the psychiatric ward. A parallel plot presents the action of the Master's destroyed novel, the condemnation of Yeshua (Jesus) in Jerusalem.

The Australian reports that Morozov had been campaigning for years against the presence of the museum, which looks out to a park where the writer lived and where he placed the action of The Master and Margarita. In 2004 Morozov organised a successful protest by residents against the construction of a monument to the writer.

This is a book I bought to read on Raman's recommendation, especially after enjoying Bulgakov's zany The Heart of a Dog but haven't got round to reading yet. (And Animah is currently reading it, anyway.) But now my interest is piqued ...