Times Literary Supplement (March 9, 1967)

Sir, – It may interest your reviewer, your readers, and other students of present-day Russian literature that Lydia Chukovskaya’s The Deserted House (February 16) was to be brought out by the same publisher (Cinq Continents, Paris) towards the end of 1965 under a different title, viz. Povest’ o skorbnoy materi (The Tale of a Dolorous Mother). The book was printed already (last summer I saw a copy of it in Paris) when the news of the arrest and the forthcoming trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel made the publisher decide to withhold the publication. About six months later the first installment of it appeared, under the title “Sofya Petrovna,” in the Russian quarterly Novy Zhurnal (The New Review) published in New York (No. 83). The story was concluded in the September issue of the same periodical (No. 84). I do not know why the name of the heroine was changed in the Cinq Continents edition from Sofya Petrovna to Olga Petrovna, but I happen to know that it was Sofya Petrovna in the version about which some American visitors to Moscow had heard as early as 1962. I have not otherwise compared the two versions, but it seems more than likely that the Novy Zhurnal had received a copy of the story (also, as we learn from the editorial note, without the knowledge or consent of the author) independently of the Paris publisher. This work of Korney Chukovsky’s daughter belongs to the increasing number of what I call “émigré books by non-émigré Russian writers.”

GLEB STRUVE
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of California, Berkeley