Between Exile and Asylum
An Eastern Epistolary
Predrag Matvejevic, Distinguished Professor,
La Sapienza University, Rome..
"Matvejevic has written other important books
(Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape; Yugoslavism Today;
I Signori della guerra), but this is a special case.
His personal stake is palpable from the first page,
when he makes it clear that his ideal reader, at least
in the opening, is his father who lies ill in a Zagreb
hospital...
There is a lot of interesting material here on Soviet
and Yugoslav cultural politics, but also much that is
personal and compelling in the author's own story and
in the subtly insinuating manner he chose to convey
it. Fascinating stuff." - Amazon (extract
from a reader's online review)
A collection of letters, written by a most extraordinary
and yet typical representative of the East European
intelligentsia, sent from Moscow, Mostar, and more recently
Paris and Rome, where the author has lived since leaving
war-torn Bosnia.
The writer Matvejevic, vice president of the International
PEN Club, was born in Yugoslavia, the son of a Russian
émigré. He first went to the USSR in 1972,
as a guest of the Writers' Union, and described to his
father the land that Matvejevic senior had not seen
since leaving Odessa in 1921 (and that he would never
see again in his lifetime). The past and the present,
as well as his hopes and fears for the future of Russia
fill the rest of his letters, which are addressed to
members of the intellectual elite of Europe.
"I end this afterword in Saint Petersburg a
quarter century after the first letter of my epistolary.
I observe the unbearable disorder that reigns in this
harmoniously constructed city-thus it is in all of Russia-and
invoke once more Pushkin's lament: 'My God, how sad
our Russia is!'"
Contents
Book One: Heroides To my forbears; Seven
thousand days in Siberia; Sinyavsky-Daniel; Brodsky;
Eurasian letters; The Gulag Archipelago Book Two:
Steles Soviet itineraries; On letters, open and
closed; Kolyma; To Varlam Shalamov; Russian letters;
Hostage to the truth; Cause for dismissal; Yellow star,
white star; Confession Book Three: Epitaphs
Rehabilitations; Nikolai Bukharin; Peter Kropotkin,
the dark prince; Maxim Gorky; Lev Trotsky; Goli Otok,
a different gulag Book Four: Apologias
Mikhail Bulgakov; Nadezhda Mandelshtam; Ariadna Efron;
Kruzhok; Portraits of Stalin; On writers' perestroika;
To Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev; Archives and memory:
to Boris Yeltsin; An interrogation; Our disappointments:
to Brodsky; Final letters; Heirs without heritage; Emigration
and dissidence; The collapse of the intelligentsia;
A perverted slavicism; The gulag so long ago... Afterword:
An open letter to the Reader
2004
240 pages
ISBN 978-963-9241-85-5 cloth $41.95 / €35.95 /
£25.95
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