Comparative Criticism: Volume 16, Revolutions and Censorship

‘Revolutions and Censorship’ is concerned not only with recent momentous changes in the political landscape of Europe and their reverberations in the arts, but with the perennial problems of outside control which writers and artists face. The fall of the Iron Curtain, and the internal collapse of the Soviet Union have opened the floodgates of recovery of lost or secret documents, such as Lunacharsky’s Letter to Stalin on the censorship of Mikhail Bulgakov, and of suppressed and censored work, whether by classics like Chekhov, whose bowdlerized letters are here restored to their intimate frankness by Donald Rayfield, or by modem writers such as Yevgeni Shvarts, whose full-length satirical play The Shadow Alan Myers here translates, or David Bergelson, shot in the Lubianka prison on his sixty-eighth birthday, whose fine story ‘Remnants’ is translated and introduced by Golda Werman (commended in the 1991 BCLA Translation Competition). Peter France details the difficulties of translating the dissident Chuvash poet Gennady Aygi. Julek Neumann describes at first hand the ‘indirect censorship’ of the Czech theatre during the years up to 1989.