Levchenko Tatiana Viktorovna – PhD, chief expert, Center for Digital Archival Research, Faculty of humanities, Higher School of Economics
Until now, it was believed that the reaction of critics to B. Okudzhava’s novel Poor Avrosimov (Friendship of Peoples, 1969, Nos. 4–6) was sluggish and small. Two main critical responses by Vl. Bushin and G. Shtorm were published in October 1969 in Literaturnaya Gazeta. The archive materials of the literary critic F.M. Levin (1902–1972) opened in 2014 allow us to say that in the period the active response of critics to the novel Poor Avrosimov (the story A Breath of Freedom (1971)) and the controversy in its support were purposefully restrained by censorship and literary opponents of Okudzhava. Levin’s article Through the Prism of Time was written in August 1969 specifically for the newspaper Literaturnaya Rossiya. The critic assumed that it would be published in September. But the historical parallels, and most importantly the moral and moral issues discussed in Levin’s article, were so modern and sharp that the editors of Literaturnaya Rossiya hesitated to publish it for a long time. After the publication of reviews in Literaturnaya Gazeta, Levin’s article with an added polemical remark, defending Okudzhava’s novel from Bushin’s unfounded remarks, was placed in the last November issue of the newspaper. However, on November 27, 1969, Through the Prism of Time was withdrawn from the make-up issue and was never accepted for publication again. The article presents for the first time the text of F.M. Levin’s remark and discusses the reasons for the censorship ban on the first professional response of critics to the novel Poor Avrosimov and the story A Breath of Freedom.
Bulat Okudzhava; Poor Avrosimov; Fedor Levin; literary criticism; controversy