THE RUSSIAN ATTITUDE
SIR,—The following story is instructive and illuminat- ing in the context of the Pasternak tragedy as showing a permanent Russian attitude in such matters.
Mr. Ilya Ehrenburg wrote a delightful book in the 1920s which never saw the daylight in an English version. The novel, entitled The Adventures of Lasik Roitschvantz, is the life story of a little Jewish tailor from Galicia. It is the story of the conflict of this elusive, ethereal creature first with the new and, to him, utterly incomprehensible Soviet power, and then with Polish, German, French and finally Palestinian brutality, wordliness and hard-headedness. The con- flict which was so imaginatively stated by Mr. Arthur Koestler as being between the Yoga and the Com- missar.
As there is no copyright between Russia and this country we proceeded with a translation of the book in the full expectation of payment to be made to the author—a gesture rarely reciprocated by the Russians. It was like a bombshell when we were notified that legal action would be taken against us if we persisted in our plan to publish the book, as copyright was acquired for it by first publications in Russian in France.
This happened about four years ago and no plead- ing on our part, no assurances that we intend to publish the book not because of its satirical content (which is in any case neatly divided between East and West), but because of its intrinsic worth as literature, and, last but not least, no THAW made any change in the rigid Russian attitude of veto.
Here is a case, then, where the English-reading public is deprived of the enjoyment of a minor master- piece by the invoking of a law which the Russians themselves entirely reject, where the law is used for a
purpose for which it was never intended: namely, the suppression of literature.
The tragedy of the matter is that Ehrenburg's repu- tation would be tremendously enhanced by the appearance of the book here, and surely it could hardly damage Soviet reputation with imaginary events of thirty-five years ago.—Yours faithfully,
PAUL
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