IN MEMORY OF ANATOLY YAKOBSON

Compiled by Alexander Zaretsky and Yuli Kitaevich

In 1973 The Chekhov Publishing Corporation (New York) published, in Russian, "The End of Tragedy", which was named by the critics as one of the best books about the "fate of Russian intellectuals of the Silver age of Russian poetry, about the unseen tragedy that fell upon Russian culture". Soon after the 38-year old author Anatoly Yakobson was forced by the KGB to emigrate from Russia to Israel.

Before his emigration Anatoly worked as a history and literature teacher in a prestigious Moscow school, and was a translator of poetry into Russian. His confrontation with the Soviet government started with his protests against persecutions of the dissidents. Yakobson became the prime target of the KGB when he assumed responsibility as the Editor-in-Chief of the underground publication called "The Chronicle of Current Events", which was smuggled to the West and reprinted in English.

In 1978, Anatoly Yakobson took his own life. After his death many of his friends, relatives, colleagues and former students wrote memoirs devoted to Anatoly Yakobson. Most of those memoirs are now presented in this book, which is being published for the 75-th anniversary of his birth. Among nearly 80 contributors to the collection are well-known Russian human rights activists Sergei Kovalev, Pavel Litvinov, Ludmilla Alexeyeva, Elena Bonner, Vladimir Gershovich; the president of Chekhov Publishing Corporation Edward Kline; university professors, poets, theorists of literature – Peter Viereck, Linda Gerstein, Lydia Chukovskaya, David Samoylov, Yevgeny Pasternak, Anatoly Geleskul, Igor Guberman; relatives and friends of A. Yakobson - Maya Ulanovskaya, Alexandr Yakobson, Yuna Vertman, Vera Prokhorova and many others.

This book is meant for Slavic scholars, historians of Russian literature, bibliographers, and all those who are interested in the history of Russian culture and the human rights movement of the 20th century.

Published by M-Graphics Publishing

Boston 2010


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