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Kolkata keeps its love for Soviet-era lit alive
Russia might have become increasingly isolated on the global stage but you wouldn’t have guessed that from the high turnout at the Russia Pavilion of the 45th Kolkata International Book Fair held earlier this month. Kolkata’s reading community still has a deep-rooted affection for Russian literature and many of them turned up in search of Soviet-era translations and reprints.
This love affair travelled beyond the Marxist strongholds of West Bengal and Kerala to other parts of the country through mobile bookshops and translations into Indian languages. In an essay for The Guardian, author Pankaj Mishra wrote about his own diet of Soviet Life magazine and Russian fairy tales while growing up. “For boys like me, in north Indian railway towns in the 70s and 80s, where nothing much happened apart from the arrival and departure of trains from big cities, the Soviet Union alone appeared to promise an escape from our limited, dusty world.”
It wasn’t just the classics of Dostoevsky and Pushkin that attracted people. If ‘Soviet Nari’ was liked by women for its knitting designs, folk tales of Baba Yaga, the wild witch, and Ivan, the handsome prince, ignited the imagination of children. Of course, those tales also came loaded with dollops of Soviet propaganda. Debasmita Moulick, curator at the Russia Pavilion, says scarcity and nostalgia have turned these books into collector’s items. “Some of the children’s stories have been passed down over generations,” says Moulick, adding that about 200 to 500 people turned up every day at the fair asking for specific editions or translations.