chapter 16 Classical Antiquity in Children’s Literature in the Soviet Union1

Elena Ermolaeva

In this article I outline the use of Classical Antiquity in Soviet children’s literature,2 and then I focus on one subject—books for children written by classical scholars, in particular by professor Salomo Luria (in Russian: Solomon Yakovlevich Lurie). According to Isaiah Berlin, “[t]he October Revolution made a violent im- pact” on “but did not dam the swelling tide.”3 Rigid censorship of authors and ideas was enforced not only for books written for adults but also for those written for children. Children’s literature served as an important tool for creating Homo sovieticus. Nevertheless, a considerable number of tal- ented writers continued to write for children. The fate of many of them was tragic: , Grigory Belykh, and others were executed; , Alexander Vvedensky, , Leonid Panteleyev, , and others were subjected to repression. Some, like Lidia Charskaya, were ostracised, could not find work, and perished of illness and hunger; oth- ers, like Andrey Platonov, continued writing without any possibility of being published; others still, like Arkady Gaidar, were killed on the battlefields of the Second World War. Those who were officially recognised by the authorities,

1 My thanks go to Natalie Tchernetska and Leonid Zhmud for their corrections of this article. A note on transliteration: in transliterating the Cyrillic alphabet we chose the bgn/pcgn ro- manisation system, developed by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names and by the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use. For purposes of simplification, we have converted ë to yo, -iy and -yy endings to -y, and omitted apostrophes for ъ and ь. 2 Soviet children’s literature is a large subject. The following two books, both in Russian, pro- vide a helpful overview: Evgenia [Yevgeniya] Oskarovna Putilova, Detskoye chteniye—dlya serdtsa i razuma [Children’s reading: For heart and mind] (St Petersburg: Publishing House of Herzen University, 2005); Marina Romanovna Balina, Valery Yuryevich Vyugin, eds., “Ubit Charskuyu…”: Paradoksy sovetskoy literatury dlya detey (1920-e–1930-e) [“To kill Charskaya…”: Paradoxes of Soviet literature for children (1920–1930)] (St Petersburg: Aleteya, 2013). 3 Isaiah Berlin, “The Arts in under Stalin,” The New York Review of Books, Oct. 19, 2000, 54–62, esp. 52.

© Elena Ermolaeva, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004335370_018

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.Elena Ermolaeva - 9789004335370 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 12:48:48AM via free access 242 Ermolaeva like and , nevertheless lived and wrote in constant fear.4 Even so, there were sharply critical works by Mikhail Bulgakov, Zoshchenko, and Platonov, as well as an anti-Stalin play—a tale for children and adults, Dra- kon [The dragon]—written by Yevgeny Shvarts (Eugene Schwartz) in 1944. As Mark Lipovetsky wrote:

[…] It was supposedly a satire on German Nazism, and even the most rigid and suspicious censor would not dare to claim that it was about the Soviet totalitarian regime. The Soviet regime pretended not to rec- ognise itself in Shvarts’s parable […]. Soviet censors were no fools. Their tolerance of such works most likely involved some kind of unannounced etiquette: as long as the writer did not violate the conventional rules of the fairy-tale plot and placed his characters and events outside of the con- crete world of Soviet life, he remained under the protection of fantasy.5

As for the theme of Antiquity in children’s literature, it shared a similar fate with classical scholarship and education more broadly. For the classical tra- dition managed to survive during the Soviet period despite harsh repression, including the execution of scholars, the abolition of university chairs, “zom- bifying” ideology, “the dead hand of official bureaucracy,”6 and censorship. As Alexander Garvilov observes: “[t]his survival became possible due to the in- consistent double-faced image of a Bolshevik-Communist who aimed to destroy or, in the other case, to preserve the traditional cultural values.”7

4 Chukovsky and Marshak were well-known to every child in Russia as authors of amusing poems. Chukovsky, nonetheless, also left the gloomiest diaries. Marshak, as noted by contem- poraries, worried that some anti-Soviet hints might be detected in his works; see Nadezhda Abramson, Zhivoye slovo [The living word], manuscript (1985). 5 Mark Lipovetsky, “Introduction” to part 3: “Fairy Tales in Critique of Soviet Culture,” in Marina Balina, Helena Goscilo, and Mark Lipovetsky, eds., Politicizing Magic: An Anthology of Rus- sian and Soviet Fairy Tales (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 233–250 and 240–241. I am grateful to Marion Rutz (University of Trier) for information about this book. 6 An expression of Isaiah Berlin, “The Arts in Russia under Stalin,” 55. 7 Alexander Konstantinovich Gavrilov, “Klassicheskaya filologiya v sssr (1992),” in Olga Buda- ragina, Alexander Verlinsky, and Denis Keyer, eds., O filologakh i filologii [On philologists and philology] (St Petersburg: Publishing House of State University, 2010), 290 (trans. E.E.). The Russian article was based on the English version by Gavrilov, “Russian Clas- sical Scholarship in the XXth Century,” in Victor Bers and Gregory Nagy, eds., The Classics in East Europe: Essays on the Survival of a Humanistic Tradition (Worcester, Mass.: American Philological Association, 1995), 61–81.

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Classical education in the traditional form of the classical grammar school existed in Russia until 1917. In the ussr, the unified Soviet secondary school system excluded any teaching of classical languages. The secondary school cur- riculum included only a one-year course in Ancient History, both Eastern and Western. Soviet children knew Ancient Greek myths mostly from Legendy i mify drevney Gretsii [Legends and myths of Ancient Greece] by Nicholas Kuhn (1877–1940), a professor, first published in Moscow in 1922. This com- pilation had its origins in a course Kuhn created in 1914 for grammar school pupils. In the Soviet Union this book was translated into different national languages and was reprinted many times in large runs, albeit with passages removed by Soviet censors, and with quotations from Engels, Marx, and Lenin added to the preface. The book is still popular today, edited with rich illustra- tions and without any ideological prefaces. Heroism was the main pathos of Soviet children’s literature. From this per- spective Classical Antiquity was a source of rich ideological material. This is why the myths of Prometheus, Hercules, and the Argonauts; heroic historical narratives and novels about Alexander the Great; and translations, such as that of Spartacus by Raffaello Giovagnoli (1838–1915) were in high demand.8 Prik- lyucheniya Odisseya [Odysseus’s adventures], a prose rendering of the Odyssey for children, written by Yelena Tudorovskaya (1904–1986), was first published in 1952 by the publishing house Detskaya Literatura [Children’s Literature], whose adviser was Ivan Ivanovich Tolstoy (1880–1954), a member of the Acad- emy of Sciences. In 1964 Tudorovskaya wrote Troyanskaya voyna i yeyo geroi [The Trojan War and its heroes], a narrative retelling of the stories of the Iliad and the Aeneid. Heroic historical narratives and novels for children were also quite popular, such as Purpur i yad [Purple and poison] about Mithridates. This was written by Alexander Nemirovsky (1919–2007), a scholar and a poet, as well as the translator of Rainer Maria Rilke and Hermann Hesse. The narra- tives by children’s writer Lyubov Voronkova (1906–1976) were devoted to An- cient Greek history (Messenskiye voyny [Messenian wars], 1969); to Alexander the Great (Syn Zevsa [A son of Zeus], 1971 and V glubine vekov [In the depth of centuries], 1973); and to Themistocles (Geroy Salamina [The hero of Salamis],

8 One of the most popular books for youth in the ussr was Spartacus (1874) by Raffaello Giovagnoli. It was first published in Russia before the 1905 Revolution in an abridged version (1880–1881), as a historical adventure for young readers. After 1905 it was reissued by “leftist” publishers as an example of revolutionary literature. A complete edition came out only after 1917. A Soviet sports association founded in 1936 was called “Spartak.” Aram Khachaturian (1903–1978) composed a ballet with the same title which was awarded the Lenin Prize in 1954.

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1975). Also very popular were novels by Ivan Yefremov (1908–1972), such as his Tais Afinskaya [Tais of Athens] published in 1973. He was a paleontologist and philosopher following Nicholas Roerich and Vladimir Vernadsky. There were also translations of foreign historical novels and scholarly books on subjects related to ancient culture, such as the aforementioned Spartacus by Raffaello Giovagnoli; two Polish books: Gdy słońce było bogiem [When the sun was god] by Zenon Kosidowski (1898–1978) and Perykles i Aspazja [Pericles and Aspa- sia] by Aleksander Krawczuk (b. 1922); The Ides of March by Thornton Wilder;­ I, Claudius by Robert Graves; Civilisation grecque by André Bonnard; and others. The outstanding classicist, professor Salomo Luria (1891–1964) also wrote for children (see figure 16.1). His first children’s book, entitled Pismo greches­ kogo malchika [A letter from a Greek boy], appeared in 1930.9 Luria graduated from the Faculty of History and Philology of St Petersburg University in 1913, where he was taught by Sergey Zhebelev, Mikhail Rostovtsev (Michael Rostovtzeff), Tadeusz Zieliński, and Jan Baudouin de Courtenay. We know his correspondence with Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Michael Ventris, and others.10 His wide scholarly interests were reflected in almost twenty books and more than two hundred articles.11 However, the main work

9 See Solomon Yakovlevich Lurie, Pismo grecheskogo malchika [A letter from a Greek boy] (Moskva–Leningrad: giz [State Publishing House], 1930). The print run was big—10,000; the price was very cheap—35 kopeks. 10 See Alexander Konstantinovich Gavrilov, “S. Luria i U. Wilamowits” [S. Luria and U. Wilamowitz], in Budaragina, Verlinsky, and Keyer, eds., O filologakh i filologii, 122–143. 11 Luria’s main works are: Antisemitizm v drevnem mire [Anti-Semitism in the ancient world] (Petrograd: Byloye, 1922, repr. 1923 by Izdatelstvo Grzhebina Publisher); Antifont [Anti- phon] (Moskva: Golos Truda [The voice of labour], 1925); Istoriya antichnoy obshchestven- noy mysli [The history of ancient social thought] (Moskva—Leningrad: Gosizdat [The State Publishing House], 1929); Teoriya beskonechno malykh u drevnikh atomistov [The infinitesimal theory of the ancient Atomists] (Moskva—Leningrad: Izdatelstvo an sssr [Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences ussr], 1935); Istoriya Gretsii [The history of Greece] (vol. 1, Leningrad: Izdatelstvo lgu [Publishing House of Leningrad State Uni- versity], 1940; vol. 2 published only in 1993, St Petersburg: Izdatelstvo SPbGU [Publishing House of St Petersburg University]); Ocherki po istorii antichnoy nauki [The outlines of Ancient Greek history of science] (Moskva—Leningrad: Izdatelstvo an sssr [Publish- ing House of the Academy of Sciences ussr], 1947); Arkhimed [Archimedes] (Vienna: Phoenix-Bücherei, 1948); Yazyk i kultura mikenskoy Gretsii [The language and culture of Mycenaean Greece] (Moskva—Leningrad: Izdatelstvo an sssr [Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences ussr], 1957). Throughout his life he was interested in the history of science and mathematics—from Babylonian times up to Bonaventura Cavalieri and Leonhard Euler, whom he translated into Russian.

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Figure 16.1 Professor Salomo Luria (1891–1964) with his son Yakov Luria in the 1920s private archive, © by Lev Luria. of his life—Democritea, the annotated fragments of Democritus—was pub- lished only after his death.12 In 1949 Luria was accused of cosmopolitanism for “unprincipled grovelling before West European science, the stubborn pushing through of ideas of the so-called ‘world’-science, etc.”13 He was expelled from the Academy of Sciences and the Department of Classical Philology of Leningrad University, where he had been working as a professor of Ancient Greek. The Soviet Labour Code did not have an article for dismissal for ideological transgressions, which is why Luria was released for unprofessionalism, an obviously ridiculous reason.14 In 1953 Luria became professor at Lviv University in —at that time a part of the Soviet Union.

12 See Salomo Luria, Democritea (Leningrad: , 1970). 13 Yakov Luria, Istoriya odnoy zhizni [The story of one life] (St Petersburg: European Univer- sity at St Petersburg, 2004), 184. 14 See Y. Luria, Istoriya odnoy zhizni, 187. Many people were arrested then. In 1950 Luria left for . In 1953 “The Doctor’s Plot” campaign started blaming doctors of Jewish origin for causing intentional harm to patients.

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During the last years of his life Luria kept in touch with his Polish colleagues: Kazimierz Kumaniecki, Stefan Srebrny, Lidia Winniczuk, and others. Benia- min Nagel wrote an obituary for Luria in the Polish classical journal Meander in 1965. So why did Professor Luria start writing for children? There is an amusing story about this in his biography, Istoriya odnoy zhizni [The story of one life], which was written by his son Yakov Luria, also a professor and a prominent scholar in the field of mediaeval Russian history and literature. As this biog- raphy could not be published in the Soviet Union, it was published in Paris in 1987 under the name of Bogdana Koprjiva-Luria—Salomo Luria’s sister, who had emigrated from the ussr. By that time she had already passed away. In Russia the book was not published until 2004.15 Yakov Luria wrote:

The magazine Yezh [The hedgehog] was published by the children’s branch of Gosizdat [The State Publishing House] led by Samuil Marshak. It started in Leningrad in 1928. Salomo Luria together with his son, who had already learnt to read, became enthusiastic about the magazine. So Salomo Luria decided to write an article for this magazine about an un- usual papyrus of Oxyrhynchus—a letter of a Greek boy to his father who had not taken him with him on a journey. Surely the young readers of The Hedgehog would be very interested in what happened later—whether the boy’s father received the letter and what followed afterward.16

Marshak was excited by the idea and suggested that Luria write the book.17 Through his role as editor, Marshak had already asked some of Russia’s finest writers, as well as experts in different scientific fields, to try their hand at writ- ing for children. Luria studied epigraphy and papyrology and was even on the editorial council of Supplementum epigraphicum Graecum in the 1920s. Having read a letter from the boy Theon to his father in a papyrus of the third century ad, he decided to write a book about it. He liked Theon for his daring character. As he said:

15 See Bogdana Yakovlevna Koprjiva-Luria, Istoriya odnoy zhizni [The story of one life] (Paris: Atheneum, 1987). See also above, n. 13. 16 Y. Luria, Istoriya odnoy zhizni, 113. 17 Samuil Marshak (1887–1964) was one of the founders of Russian (Soviet) literature for children, a children’s poet, and the translator of Robert Burns, William Blake, Lord By- ron, John Keats, T.S. Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, , A.A. Milne, and many others. From 1924 on he was the head of the children’s department of the State Publishing House, a position he held for over a decade.

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From this letter we see that even in those times children’s life was not so bad, and of course there were children who could keep their parents in awe.18

The text of the papyrus which inspired Luria was published by Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt in 1898:19

Θέων Θέωνι τῷ πατρὶ χαίρειν. καλῶς ἐποίησες οὐκ ἀπένηχές με μετὲ σοῦ εἰς πόλιν. ἠ οὐ θέλις ἀπενέκκειν με- τὲ σοῦ εἰς Ἀλεξανδρίαν, οὐ μὴ γράψω σε ἐ- πιστολήν οὔτε λαλῶ σε οὔτε υἱγένω σε, εἶτα ἂν δὲ ἔλθῃς εἰς Ἀλεξανδρίαν οὐ μὴ λάβω χεῖραν παρὰ [σ]οῦ οὔτε πάλι χαίρω σε λυπόν. ἂμ μὴ θέλῃς ἀπενέκαι μ[ε] ταῦτα γε[ί]νετε. καὶ ἡ μήτηρ μου εἶπε Ἀρ̣- χελάῳ ὅτι ἀναστατοῖ μὲ ἄρρον αὐτόν. καλῶς δὲ ἐποίησες δῶρά μοι ἔπεμψε[ς] μεγάλα ἀράκια πεπλανηκανημ̣ω̣σεκε[. τῇ ἡμέρᾳ ιβ’ ὅτι ἔπλευσες. λύρον πέμψον εἴ[ς] με παρακαλῶ σε. ἂμ μὴ πέμψῃς οὐ μὴ φά- γω, οὐ μὴ πείνω· ταῦτα. ἐρῶσθέ σε εὔχ(ομαι). Τῦβι ιη’. On the verso ἀπόδος Θέωνι [ἀ]π̣ὸ Θεωνᾶτος υἱῶ.

Theon to his father Theon, greeting. It was a fine thing of you not to take me with you to the city! If you won’t take me with you to Alexandria I won’t write you a letter or speak to you or say goodbye to you; and if you go to Alexandria, I won’t take your hand nor ever greet you again. That is what will happen, if you won’t take me. Mother said to Archelaus, “It quite upsets him to be left behind [?].” It was good of you to send me presents… on the twelfth, the day you sailed. Send me a lyre, I implore you. If you don’t, I won’t eat, I won’t drink; there now!20

18 Y. Luria, Istoriya odnoy zhizni, 113. 19 See Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt, Oxyrhynchus Papyri, vol. 1 (: Egypt Exploration Fund, 1898), 185–186 (POxy, document 119r, date: third century ad). Luria could have used the edition: Selections from the Greek Papyri, ed. with translations and notes by George Milligan (Cambrige: Cambridge University Press, 1927), 102–103. 20 Trans. Grenfell and Hunt, Oxyrhynchus Papyri, 185–186.

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In the beginning Luria introduces the captivating story of the letter: a certain professor Knight, an expert in archaeology from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, once came to the Soviet Union to “make an acquaintance with the new-Soviet lifestyle,”21 and for three days Luria showed him the best places in Leningrad. Before his departure the American colleague gave him a small en- velope with an unexpected present. It was not the professor’s photo, as Luria had thought, but a sheet of papyrus which he had found in Oxyrhynchus. He wanted Luria to read it, and asked him if he would later write a small report on it. This detail—a friendship with a mythical colleague (i.e., one invented by Lu- ria) from America, even if at that time still possible, could hardly be imagined only a few years later. Luria then tells his young readers about papyrus making, about ancient trash being such a treasure for archaeologists, and about the Greek alphabet, which he compares to Russian and demonstrates their similarity. Then he shows the original text of the letter line by line with a Russian transcription and translation, and his comments. As the story develops we follow the Greek boy in his daily life. For example, we find ourselves with him in a grammar lesson at school (see figure 16.2). His teacher, Lampriskos, is forcing the pupils to write proper names according to the letters of the alphabet: Achilleus, Bion, Gaios, Dion, etc. One boy cannot manage to find a name beginning with Kappa, and writes Krokodeilos instead. Our lively Theon is bored, he looks at the wall and suddenly sees a recent in- scription in a corner: ἀναγίγνωσκε ἀνωτάτω πρὸς δεξιά (“read up to the right”). He looks with curiosity and reads: ὁ ἀναγιγνώσκωv πίθηκος (“the one who reads is a monkey”). Then Lampriskos makes the boys write a long dictation, in which after each sentence they add the phrase: φιλοπόνει, ὦ παῖ, μὴ δαρῇς (“be diligent, boy, so you won’t be whipped”). The book was a big success and a second extended edition was published six years later with a print run of 20,000 copies. Some of Luria’s ideas found a place in this book—for example, the professor created a new character, a Jewish cosmopolitan Apollonius-Jophan, who is Theon’s paidagogos.22 Apollonius-­ Jophan starts an uprising against the Romans in Alexandria. The uprising fails and Apollonius perishes. So our boy witnesses a slave revolt. Later Luria re- jected this version as artistically poor. In the Soviet Union slavery was the key theme covered in ancient history at each educational level—from school to the academy—so that the slave

21 Solomon Yakovlevich Lurie, Pismo grecheskogo malchika [A letter from a Greek boy] (St Petersburg: eidos, 1994, republished with some changes from the 1930 edition, see n. 9), 7. 22 We should remember that Luria’s book Antisemitizm v drevnem mire [Anti-Semitism in Antiquity] was published in 1922.

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Figure 16.2 Pages 20–21 from Salomo Luria’s Pismo grecheskogo malchika [A letter from a Greek boy] (Moskva–Leningrad: giz [State Publishing House], 1930, reedited Moskva: mk Periodika, 2002), © by Lev Luria.

­uprising was an almost obligatory element of Antiquity featuring in children’s books. For example, a Scythian revolt under the leadership of a certain slave called Saumakos took place in the Bosphorus (which later became a Russian territory) around 107 bc according to the hypothesis of the academician Ser- gey Zhebelev, which was based on his reconstruction of The Edict of Diophan- tus. This reconstruction gave birth to a great number of works supporting the theory that this event had been “the first revolutionary uprising within Soviet territory.”23

23 Alexander Konstantinovich Gavrilov, “Skify Savmaka—vosstaniye ili vtorzheniye? (ipe I2 352–Syll.3 709)” [Saumakos’s Scythians: Revolt or invasion? (ipe I2 352–Syll.3 709)], in Alexander Konstantinovich Gavrilov, ed., Etyudy po antichnoy istorii i kulture severnogo Prichernomorya [Studies in the ancient history and culture of the northern Black Sea littoral] (St Petersburg: Glagol, 1992), 53–73 (the book was dedicated to the memory of S. Luria). This article was republished in Budaragina, Verlinsky, and Keyer, eds., O filologakh i filologii, 293–306. For the quotation, see p. 295 in this edition. After the Octo- ber Revolution: “[…] the proletarian Byronism having won in Russia, the government joy- fully started to search for uprising movements in human history […]. The October Revolu- tion 1917 in Russia was then considered as their telos—the final aim and the highest point.

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Here a word of explanation is needed: after Stalin’s speech at the Udarnik (Shock-producing) Collective-Farmers’ Congress in 1933, historians were given the task of searching for traces of slave revolutions in Antiquity. Zhebelev’s reconstruction appeared at the same time. He was an old school academician suffering ideological pressure. There is an anecdote that he responded to the Communist Party’s demand with the words: “If you want a revolution—you will get it.”24 It was during this period that the second version of A Letter from a Greek Boy was written, including the episode of the slave rebellion in Alex- andria. Significantly, Luria later played an important role in the critical discus- sion of The Edict of Diophantus. He pointed out clearly that Saumakos was not a slave. Indeed, Luria openly said that Zhebelev’s theory was “an emperor with no clothes.” Luria’s article, not conforming to the official point of view, was not published in the ussr, even after Stalin’s death—it appeared only in 1959 in the Polish journal Meander.25 A Letter from a Greek Boy was extremely popular and it was the only Luria’s book reprinted in his lifetime, with a total of eleven editions. It seems to me that Luria’s artistic method—namely, to “choose an ancient boy” and to look at the world through his eyes and in this way enable modern boys and girls to discover the ancient world for themselves—became very fruitful and popular in Soviet children’s literature concerning Classical Antiquity. I have found sev- eral epigones. Natalia Bromley’s and Nadezhda Ostromentskaya’s book Priklyucheniya malchika s sobakoy [The adventures of a boy with a dog] (Moscow, 1959), for example, tells readers about an ancient boy Cleonus, who was kidnapped by pirates, later sold into slavery, and finally liberated by the rebellious gladiators of Spartacus. This was also an imitation of an ancient novel, paying great atten- tion to the Spartacus story.26

The lower-class uprisings that all had failed in the past, legitimised the Proletarian revolu- tion and even its cruelties. […] Let us not discuss how the ideologically censored Soviet literature on slavery and various lower class rebellions, etc., developed, because the main result of their efforts was quite accidental—they gave rise to thorough studies of these historic events in the West, where Marxism was treated even more seriously than in the Soviet Union” (285). 24 Ibid., 296. 25 See Salomo Luria, “Jeszcze o dekrecie ku czci Diofantosa” [The edict of Diophantus again], Meander 14 (1959): 67–78. 26 Joanna Kłos from the Faculty of “Artes Liberales” at the University of Warsaw drew my attention to the similarity of plot of this book to Halina Rudnicka’s Uczniowie Spar- takusa [The disciples of Spartacus] (Warszawa: Nasza Księgarnia, 1951). For Rudnicka,

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Kseniya Kolobova, one of the beloved disciples of the famous poet and translator Vyacheslav Ivanov and later a professor of Ancient Greek and Ro- man History at Leningrad University, wrote Kak zhili drevniye greki [How the Ancient Greeks lived] (Leningrad, 1959) with Yelena Ozeretskaya. There are chapters called “Afinsky malchik” [An Athenian boy], “Raby v Afinakh” [The slaves in Athens], and so on. Ozeretskaya also wrote a didactic book Olimpiyskiye igry [The Olympic games] (Leningrad, 1972). The main characters are Linus, an Athenian boy who goes to Olympia as a spectator, and Hephaestus, his Scythian paidagogos-slave who follows him. The parallel story of a slave is depicted especially well. After the slave has saved his life the sensitive boy suddenly realises that his paidago- gos is not just a “speaking instrument.” The boy insists on freeing Hephaestus. Finally the clever and educated former slave goes back home to Scythia. The theme of his love for the Motherland sounds like a refrain and is expressed as a standard Soviet ideological cliché with its typical pathos. A number of the books probably inspired by Luria’s model were written by professors of Egyptology who received their education before the Soviet era at the higher education courses for women and later worked at the Hermi­ tage Museum. One of these was Miliza Mathieu, who wrote Den yegipetskogo malchika [A day in the life of an Egyptian boy] (Moscow, 1954). Another was Revekka Rubinshteyn (Rebecca Rubinstein). Her book Glinyany konvert [A clay envelope] (Moscow, 1962) tells of two boys living in Babylon in the time of King Hammurabi. In yet another book by Natalia Landa and Samuell Fingaret, Iz lotosa rozhdayetsya solntse [The sun is born from a lotus] (Leningrad, 1963), the hero is also an Egyptian boy, and there is again a rebellion of the lower classes. Luria’s colleague Maria Sergeyenko (1891–1987), a scholar and translator, and pupil of professor Zieliński and professor Rostovtsev, also wrote for children. Her book was Padeniye Ikara [The fall of Icarus] (Moskva, 1963). It is worth noting that this so-called “boy method” has deeper roots. Let us remember Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce dans le milieu du IVe siècle pub- lished in 1788 by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, a French writer and member of the

see ­Katarzyna Marciniak, Elżbieta Olechowska, Joanna Kłos, and Michał Kucharski, eds., Polish Literature for Children & Young Adults Inspired by Classical Antiquity. A Catalogue (Warsaw: Faculty of “Artes Liberales,” 2013), 314–315 (entry by Joanna Grzeszczuk, Michał Kucharski, and Helena Płotek). Ostromentskaya also wrote a novel Veteran Tsezarya [Cae- sar’s veteran] (Moskva: Izdatelstvo Detskaya Literatura [Children’s Literature Publishing], 1969) about a young Gavius who took part in Spartacus’s rebellion.

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French Academy. The Russian emperor Alexander i paid a Moscow professor, Petr Strakhov, 6,000 rubles to publish a Russian translation of this work.27 Back to Luria. In the last years of his life (1960–1964) he returned to chil- dren’s literature and wrote books about Archilochus and the deciphering of Mycenaean script. He promised himself that when he finished with serious scholarly research, he would write a children’s book based on the material he had explored, in order to demonstrate in an accessible manner what he had learnt. With Mark Botvinnik (1917–1994), his former student, he also wrote a book for children: Puteshestviye Demokrita [Democritus’s journey] (Moscow, 1964). Botvinnik was the author and co-author of a huge number of scholarly and popular books on the history and culture of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as a brilliant interpreter and lecturer.28 In 1938 he was arrested based on an unjust accusation. He later said:

The case for which I was arrested was called “The Case of an Antiquity Circle.” The interrogator accused us of a strong interest in Antiquity, thus proving our refusal to accept the happy Soviet modernity.29

So was there any influence of Soviet ideology in Luria’s books? He seems to have remained outwardly loyal to Soviet power, but, in secret, was inclined to risky dissent. For example, an old writing book with yellowed pages and with- out a cover was discovered in his archive (see figure 16.3).30 Its text was partly

27 Puteshestviye mladshego Anakharsisa po Gretsii, v polovine chetvyortogo veka do Rozhdest- va Khristova [Voyage of young Anacharsis to Greece in the middle of the fourth century bc], vols. 1–9 (Moskva: Tipografiya Avgusta Semyona [Avgust Semen Publishing], 1803– 1819; re-edited Revel: Gymnasia, 1890). 28 Later Botvinnik contributed to a book of amusing collected stories, Drevnyaya Gretsiya [Ancient Greece] (Moskva: Prosveshcheniye [Enlightenment Publishing], 1974), written by a group of philologists and historians and intended for reading in secondary school. 29 Mark Naumovich Botvinnik, “Kamera nomer 25” [Cell number 25], in Irina Suzdalskaya and Natalia Botvinnik, eds., Pamyati Marka Naumovicha Botvinnika [In memory of Mark Naumovich Botvinnik] (St Petersburg: Obshchestvennaya pravozashchitnaya organizatsi- ya “Grazhdansky Kontrol” [Human Rights ngo “Citizens Watch”], 1997), 114. Botvinnik was sentenced to five years in prison. When Yezhov was replaced by Beria in 1938 some of the cases were reviewed and resolved. “The Antiquity Circle” was among them, and Botvinnik was released. 30 See Yakov Lurie and Lev Polak, “Sudba istorika v kontekste istorii (S.Y. Lurie: zhizn i tvorchestvo)” [The fate of the historian in the context of history (S.J. Lurie: Life and work)], Voprosy istorii yestestvoznaniya i tekhniki [Journal for the history of science] 2 (1994): 3–17, esp. 14.

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Figure 16.3 A page from Salomo Luria’s diary, the so-called “Cypriot Writing Book,” published in Yakov Lurie and Lev Polak, “Sudba istorika v kontekste istorii (S.J. Lurie: zhizn’ i tvorchestvo)” [The fate of historian in the context of history (S.J. Lurie: life and work)], voprosy istorii yestestvoznaniya i tekhniki [Journal for the history of science] 2 (1994): 15, © by Lev Luria.

Elena Ermolaeva - 9789004335370 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 12:48:48AM via free access 254 Ermolaeva written in the Latin alphabet, and partly in strange characters resembling hi- eroglyphics. This turned out to be his diary, encoded in the Ancient Cypriot “syllabarium.” In this, from 1947 onward, he gave a true estimation of the Soviet regime as slavery. In doing so he committed a heavy political crime according to Soviet laws and if discovered would have faced the Gulag, but he still pre- served that “Cypriot writing book,” which was a real Historia arcana. Luria and Botvinnik’s account of the impressions of Democritus in Democri- tus’s Journey follows Herodotus’s stories about Egypt, Babylon, and Greece. It seems to me that thoughts about a slavery-based regime and personal freedom appear in this children’s book about the “Laughing Philosopher,” albeit in code:

[Democritus:] “So don’t you really feel regret for all that has happened to you? The civil war is a disaster for both sides. You must sincerely love your country as you have dared to openly dispute the violators and now have to live in exile far away from your home?” [A young man:] “No, I don’t regret it! Here, at least, I can speak loudly everything that I think, tell people the truth about what happened, and prepare for new battles together with my friends. The day will come and we shall return to Megara!” “So maybe you are right,” replied Democritus, as if reflecting. “Poverty in a democratic state is better than this ‘happy life’ for fools in a state con- quered by invaders. It is clear as well that freedom is better than slavery.”31

[…] An Egyptian who is a defender of Cheops argues against Democritus: “The Egyptians died of heavy labour but Pharaoh was a divinity for them and loyalty to him was the highest law. People understood that happiness was not in wealth or tasty food but in feeling their duty done. The pres- ent generation cannot imagine even what happiness it was to definitely believe in Pharaoh. Human consciousness becomes free from so much suffering and doubt due to the belief that the state is ruled by the living god. In Cheops’s time such a belief was compulsory.”32

31 Solomon Lurie and Mark Botvinnik, Puteshestviye Demokrita [Democritus’s Journey] (Moskva: MK-Periodika, 2002; ed. pr. 1964), 75 (trans. E.E.). 32 Ibid., 82. Compare this with some lines from the “Cypriot writing book” of Luria, in Y. Lurie and Polak, “Sudba istorika v kontekste istorii (S.Y. Lurie: Zhizn i tvorchestvo),” 14: “The typical features of the Soviet system are its special ‘two realities.’ The citizens of the Soviet Union not only suffer a hard and dull life but also must play their roles through all of it—as the actors in a joyful, spectacular show of an earthly paradise not corresponding with everyday reality […]. From the point of view of the Marxist methodology of history the Soviet regime is a slave-owning system” (trans. E.E.).

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It is worth noting that the book was published about two years after published his Odin den Ivana Denisovicha [One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich]. That was a symbolic event of “Khrushchev’s Thaw,” the pe- riod after the death of Stalin in March 1953. In conclusion, why did Luria, Botvinnik, and other scholars write books for children?33 One of my colleagues cynically answered: “For money.” This is hard to deny, but there must have been other reasons as well—I am convinced that they were simply open-minded people who loved Classical Antiquity and wanted to share their love and knowledge of it.34

33 The books written for children by Luria, Botvinnik, Rubinshteyn, Mathieu, and other scholars were reedited in 2002 (Moskva: MK-Periodika) in the series “Uchyonye Rossii detyam” [Scholars of Russia for children], see: https://www.livelib.ru/pubseries/10050 (accessed June 1, 2016). 34 For the newest analytical discussion on this topic in Russia, see Balina and Valery ­Yuryevich Vyugin, eds., “Ubit Charskuyu…”; especially the sections “Obshchiye problemy” [General problems], 7–19, and “Nedetskiye pisateli dlya detskoy literatury” [Non-children writers for children’s literature], 262–287.

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