André Kozovoi offers a moving account. He recounts a family history
interwoven with archives and personal memories. The author, the child ofdissidents who became a specialist in Soviet history, both presents a
family context and, in the background, offers a nuanced analysis of the
reality of the USSR and the nature of dissidence. His father, Vadim
Kozovoi, was born in 1937 in Kharkiv, in the former USSR (present-day
Ukraine). He belonged to the Jewish communist intelligentsia, whose
social advancement was partly due to their loyalty to the regime. The
author perfectly describes the ideological and social process that
allowed the family to climb the ranks of the Soviet party apparatus. At
17, the young man went to Moscow to study at the University. There he
frequented circles of student dissidents seeking to make sense of
de-Stalinization, initiated by Nikita Khrushchev. Criticism of the
regime had its limits. Arrested the following year, he was interned for
eight years in a penal colony in Mordovia, southeast of Moscow. It was
there that he met Andrei's mother, Irina Emeliova, the daughter of Olga
Ivinskaya, the daughter of Pasternak's mistress. The two women were
incorporated into Doctor Zhivago in a barely disguised form; Lara
represented the hero's lover. Olga Ivinskaya and her daughter were sent
to the camps twice. Irina met Vadim there in 1961.
Two years later, Vadim was released. He was able to return to the world
of Russian literature and began translating from French into Russian.
His success and recognition were international; the era was one of thaw,
and international exchanges allowed him to connect with poets like René
Char and Henri Michaux. Granted permission to travel to France, he chose
to stay. His partner and Andrei were not immediately granted permission
to leave the Soviet Union. For four years, the family lived apart.
Andrei recounts the image of an adored France in stark contrast to the
dreary Soviet years of scarcity. This continued until François
Mitterrand secured the family's reunification in Paris. The couple then
resumed the fullness of their intellectual pursuits. The narrative also
analyzes his mother's efforts during Perestroika to recover the stories
Pasternak had entrusted to her, which had been confiscated by the
political police. Meanwhile, Andrei grew up, shaped by this world, and
became a historian of the USSR... to understand, and perhaps above all,
to explain the Soviet tragedy...
* Andrei Kozovoi
The Exiles. Pasternak and My Family
Grasset 2025 346 p. EUR24
https://monde-libertaire.net/?articlen=8733
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