- Olga Bukhina
Russian Samizdat, Children’s Literature, and the Sunset Years of the Soviet Empire
For this post, we invite back translator Olga Bukhina who shares her fascinating account of Samizdat children's literature--part of the underground publishing movement in the Soviet era. Olga's work in Samizdat was mentioned briefly in her recent interview. We are delighted to share more with you about this little known piece of children's literature history.
The historians of the Soviet era consider Samizdat a very important part of the dissident movement in particular and of the cultural landscape of the urban centers in general. In her article “Samizdat and Soviet Dissident Publics” published in the Slavic Review (Vol. 71, No. 1, Spring 2012), Ann Komaromi writes about the importance of Samizdat especially in the late Soviet era, and its functioning “as a mixed “private-public” sphere” (p. 71). Samizdat (literally, self-publishing) was the underground publications that existed in just a few type-written carbon copies of various books or manuscripts. These texts could not be published by the official Soviet state presses because of their political, religious, or even sexual content. Samizdat copies of these texts were passed from reader to reader among friends. According to Komaromi, “the most interesting Samizdat is original Samizdat, that is, writing originally created for Samizdat” (p. 78). Pointing to the importance of literary Samizdat written in Russian, Komaromi, nevertheless, underestimates a translated part of Samizdat that was extremely important and included a diverse list of titles: from the anti-utopian 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley to the religious writings of G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis, as well as Archibald Joseph Cronin’s The Keys of the Kingdom, to the Hebrew language textbooks, self-help psychology manuals, and the Kamasutra. In the Soviet Union where any religion was not “approved” by authorities, religious affiliation or just a simple interest in religion often became one of the possibilities of protests against the totalitarian regime. So religious Samizdat was a significant part of the protest movement. As a whole, religious Samizdat was a mixture of original and translated titles: books written by Russian philosophers and theologians, such as Nikolai Berdyaev and Vladimir Soloviev, volumes of Alexander Men’s History of Religion, works of European and American writers of various Christian denominations, along with some Judaic literature and with Buddhist or other Eastern religious writings.
For obvious reasons, children’s books were not too often circulated in Samizdat. First, it was a dangerous enterprise to produce the Samizdat publications, and their producers did not count children’s books important enough. Second, children like their books illustrated and nicely bound, which was difficult to achieve with carbon copies. The rare exceptions were the seven books of The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis that were widely circulated in Samizdat in the 1980s. What would be published, and what would not be, was determined by the enormous army of state censors: they were reading all books, journals, magazines, brochures, and newspapers in the entire Soviet Union before anything would hit the printing presses. These censors either would prohibit the book as a whole, or would demand some changes in the text, whether an original work or in translation. The first Narnia book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, was translated by Galina Ostrovskaia and published in Leningrad by the state-owned publishing house “Children’s Literature” in 1978—and even in the case of a children’s book, Soviet censorship did not stay idle. Censors prescribed changes to just a few lines – but very important lines – to eliminate the most obvious Christian connotations of the book. A Godfather became an uncle, Christmas was changed into New Year’s Eve, and all mention of the great Emperor-beyond-the-Sea who symbolized God the Father were eliminated from the text.
C.S. Lewis’ book was published with some lovely illustrations and a small preface about the author. The following lines described Lewis in the preface: “The author of this fairytale is an English scholar, a collector of the oral tradition, a professor of Cambridge University, and a famous writer who wrote some science-fiction novels for adults as well as children’s books.” A very innocent and an extremely deceptive description. Omitting a large part of Lewis’ writing, particularly his Christian works, was a necessary pay-off and the only way for the book be published. At first, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was just one more British story translated into Russian, a fairytale just like those of Lewis Carroll or A.A. Milne. Still, the second book (or first, depending on how one prefers to count – by the order of publication or by the Narnia chronology), The Magician’s Nephew, did not pass the censors’ barriers. The religious connotations of this story – a creation of the Narnia world – were much too obvious.
That is where Samizdat came into the picture. By then, C.S. Lewis’ name was already known, and his books were already circulating in Samizdat. Lewis came into the Samizdat sphere first as a religious nonfiction writer when The Problem of Pain was translated in 1972 by Natalia Trauberg, a well-known Russian translator and a daughter of a famous Soviet movie director Leonid Trauberg. As she recalls in one of her interviews many years later, the book was given to her by a famous priest and writer Father Alexander Men who was close to the dissident circles. He, in turn, received it from Nadezhda Mandelstam, a widow of the poet Osip Mandelstam; Osip Mandelstam was killed by authorities during Stalin’s repressions in the late 1930s. Trauberg was a professional translator of English, Spanish, and French; among writers translated by her were G.K. Chesterton, Pelham Wodehouse, Dorothy Sayers, Graham Greene, children’s author Frances Hodgson Burnett, Jean Webster, Paul Gallico, and Katherine Paterson, as well as Federico García Lorca, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, and Eugène Ionesco. Not wanting to be a part of the system, Trauberg became a freelance translator, and never held a “regular” job; not an easy choice in the Soviet Union. As a labor of love, she decided to translate at least one book of Lewis a year without any hope for publication or monetary compensation. All of them were circulating in Samizdat. Besides Lewis’ apologetics texts (The Allegory of Love, The Problem of Pain, Miracles, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, The Pilgrim's Regress), Trauberg translated two of the seven Narnia stories, The Magician’s Nephew and The Horse and His Boy, and also supervised the translations of two more books, The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’ and The Silver Chair. As a result, four Narnia books entered Samizdat. A few years later, I translated two remaining stories, Prince Caspian and The Last Battle, and showed my work to Trauberg for her approval. Soon after, they also entered Samizdat, and the set of seven was completed. Since the first book that was published had a rather small run, it also was often copied for the Samizdat publication. These seven books were copied again and again by multiple readers. Another Trauberg’s translation, Paul Gallico’s Thomasina, also could not be published at this time and became a part of children’s Samizdat. Often these self-made books were put into nice colorful self-made binders. They were children’s books after all and the adults tried to make them to look like ones.
The creation of the Samizdat books required some courage: producing and distributing Samizdat might result in arrest and incarceration. Someone would initiate the process by typing several carbon copies on a personal typewriter. Multiple carbon copies (4 or 5 usually) of the book would often be typed on onion-skin paper. These copies would be given to others to read – to the most trustworthy friends only. These friends might produce new typed (or, later on, Xeroxed) copies of the book and also give them to their friends. Of course, we talk mostly about politically charged texts or novels read by adults; the children’s Samizdat was very small and, besides translations of The Chronicles of Narnia, consisted mostly of poetry. Some Russian poetry for children was not “publishable” for various political reasons, mostly due to the arrest and execution of the writer during Stalin’s repressions. The children’s poetry of Osip Mandelstam, for example, or poetry of Daniil Kharms, an absurdist poet of the 1920s and a founding member of the OBERIU group (a short-lived avant-garde collective of Russian Futurist writers, musicians, and artists in the 1920s and 1930s) who also was arrested and died in prison in 1942, were not yet published in full even in the 1970s and 1980s. Some interesting poetry collections were published in very small editions. These rare books were also “reprinted” as Samizdat books, for example, Oleg Grigoriev’s Vitamin rosta (The Vitamin of Growth). Grigoriev was an underground poet who was able to publish only two children’s books. Later, translations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels also entered Samizdat. That happened just before perestroika, and Tolkien’s books soon were published by the regular press.
The Chronicles of Narnia were read in Russia by all kinds of readers, young and old. In the time of Samizdat, these books became popular reading of intelligentsia, educated city dwellers. Narnia books soon became a part of family reading, but they also were read by adults, even by those who did not have children of an appropriate age. For some, the Christian message was the most important; others read these books as wonderful fairytales; and yet others saw in them an introduction to the English culture. Only initially was the Christian aspect of the Narnia tales pivotal for their dissemination in Samizdat. These stories were read for their fascinating plots and interesting cast of characters, for portraying a drastically different style of life, for C.S. Lewis’ sense of humor, and for an appealing theme of victory of Good over Evil. Lewis’ fairytales brought to Russia not just Narnia but also “Good Old England” with its five-o’clock tea and other traditions. Just remember the scene of the tea party with the Beavers in the middle of the chase when the White Witch is about to get three Pevensie children. The elements of England and Narnia are constantly mixed together, from the war-time English country house with the magic Wardrobe to magic Cair Paravel with its quite English royal court entourage. The Narnia kingdom is both fairytale and very English at the same time.
For the Soviet reader of the 1980s, both kingdoms, British and Narnian, were equally out of reach. A very important topic in the Narnia tales is borders and an ability to penetrate borders between various worlds. They are not only the borders between England and Narnia, but also borders with other magic lands. Unlike the iron-curtained borders of the Soviet Union, Narnia borders can be crossed at particular points – through the Wardrobe made out of Narnian wood, for example. The grim reality of the fact that the borders of the Soviet Union were totally sealed and never could be crossed by ordinary people was challenged by Narnia tales’ attitude to borders as something that can be opened and become passable. Narnia promised a magic escape from Soviet reality into the world with completely different rules. A political challenge of Narnia that made the books unpublishable in the Soviet Union and, at the same time, very attractive for a reader of the underground literature. While it is unlikely that censors understood precisely this challenge, they were trained to sense possible sedition in the books. The general air of freedom has permeated Narnia stories.
So Narnia was not just a religious threat; in the Soviet context, it was clearly political. The message of these fairytales turned out to be much more dangerous than particular words and images that could be eliminated by censorship. The words of the faun Mr. Tumnus, “It is winter in Narnia, and has been for ever so long… Always winter and never Christmas; think of that,” in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (The Chronicles of Narnia. New York: HarperCollins Publisher, 2001, p. 118), resonated to the reader as an image of the Soviet political winter without any hope for change; the change being symbolized by Christmas. Khrushchev’s Thaw had been long gone, and the country was back into the bleak Soviet wintery stagnation. In the 1980s, the religious protest in the Soviet Union was almost always a part of a political protest. Nowadays, when the Russian Orthodox Church is not oppressed any more, but has become a powerful part of the Russian authoritarian system, it is reversed; what looks like the anti-church protest of the Pussy Riots group in Moscow can be actually seen as a political, anti-government protest.
All of the Narnia books were officially published at last in 1991 by the publishing house “Dva slona” in a set of seven colorful books, each with a cover of a different color of the rainbow. I had the privilege of helping with the unification of the characters’ names and especially the geographic names throughout all seven books translated by four different translators. Since then, the Narnia books have been published, republished, and re-translated again and again by many publishing houses, but even now I meet people who tell me that they read these carbon copies in their childhood, and how important these stories were for them. Be ye young or be ye old, you never need to say goodbye to Narnia, especially if it came to you on the onion-skin paper of the underground publication with all the excitement of reading a prohibited book.
ABOUT OLGA BUKHINA: Olga Bukhina is a translator, a writer, a children’s books specialist, and an independent scholar based in New York City. She has translated almost forty books from English into Russian: American, British, and Canadian young readers’ novels and picture books as well as historical fiction, non-fiction, and scholarly books. Among the authors translated are Louise Fitzhugh, Carl Sandburg, Elizabeth George Speare, Jacqueline Kelly, B.J. Novak, C.S. Lewis, Enid Blyton, Philippa Pearce, Elizabeth Goudge, Philippa Gregory, and Jean Little. She translated into Russian Ben Hellman’s Fairy Tales and True Stories: The History of Russian Literature for Children and Young People (1574 - 2010). Bukhina’s last translations (with G. Gimon) are the Meg Rosoff’s YA novels How I Live Now and What I Was as well as Sean Rubin’s graphic novel Bolivar. Bukhina has co-authored three children’s books for the Children’s Project of Lyudmila Ulitskaya. She writes about children’s literature for various journals, collections, and online publications in Russia and in the U.S. Her book The Ugly Duckling, Harry Potter, and Others: A Guide to Children’s Books About Orphans was published in Moscow (KompasGid, 2016). She serves as an Executive Director of the International Association for the Humanities.
More about Olga Bukhina may be found on her website: http://olgabukhina.com/