Metropol

Fülszöveg

" Russians clustered in the small room in an intent little group. Heads close together, they murmured almost reverentially over what lay on Lev's desk— I craned over their stocky frames and got my first glimpse of Metropol. The almanac, as Russians traditionally call such broad-gauge collections of prose, poetry, and criticism, was folio-sized .deliberately large to proclaim its intended public nature. Symbolism with a dash of street theater.
'"No smudges, please,' Kopelev commanded .He knew this to be an unneeded reminder; no one there dared such carelessness. This was one of only eight copies, painstakingly produced after two years of thought and effort. As an extraordinarily bold new challenge to Soviet censorship, it demanded respect."
From the foreword by Kevin Klose, former Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post.
"Metropol is assured an important place in the history of challenges to censorship, largely because of its artistic and intellectual excellence."... Tovább

Fülszöveg

" Russians clustered in the small room in an intent little group. Heads close together, they murmured almost reverentially over what lay on Lev's desk— I craned over their stocky frames and got my first glimpse of Metropol. The almanac, as Russians traditionally call such broad-gauge collections of prose, poetry, and criticism, was folio-sized .deliberately large to proclaim its intended public nature. Symbolism with a dash of street theater.
'"No smudges, please,' Kopelev commanded .He knew this to be an unneeded reminder; no one there dared such carelessness. This was one of only eight copies, painstakingly produced after two years of thought and effort. As an extraordinarily bold new challenge to Soviet censorship, it demanded respect."
From the foreword by Kevin Klose, former Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post.
"Metropol is assured an important place in the history of challenges to censorship, largely because of its artistic and intellectual excellence."
—Publishers Weekly
Metropol
LITERARY ALMANAC
Edited by Vasily Aksyonov, Viktor Yerofeyev, Fazil Iskander, Andrei Bitov, and Yevgeny Popov Foreword by Kevin Klose
In January 1979 twenty-three Soviet writers submitted a collection of their work entitled Metropol to the official Writers Union and demanded publication without censorship. The Union refused. After a fruitless appeal to Leonid Brezhnev, copies of Metropol secretly circulated inside the Soviet Union and eventually two were brought to the West. Metropol included stories, poems, essays, and plays by prominent writers such as Vasily Aksyonov, Andrei Voznesensky, and Bella Akhmadulina, as well as work by less-established writers just beginning to contend with the powerful bureaucracy that governs the Soviet literary world.
Since the initial demand for publication, several Metropol contributors have resigned or been expelled from the Writers Union; Aksyonov's citizenship has been renounced; others have had difficulty in publishing new work. A worldwide emblem of the conflict between government and artist in the Soviet Union, Metropol is assured an important place in the history of challenges to censorship.
With a foreword by Kevin Klose, former Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post, this is the first complete English translation of Metropol. Vissza