Requests from readers for books to purchase are always interesting to deal with, and a particularly fascinating example appeared this year in the form of a request for a Russian translation of Roberto Carnero’s book about Pier Paolo Pasolini.  Why would a reader want us to buy this?  The book is extraordinary not so much in what you can read, but in what you can’t:

This is therefore a title we have acquired for interest less in Pasolini than in modern Russian censorship.  Many pages are untouched but a good number have sections missing, albeit few on such a grand scale as the photo above shows.  What I found striking in the sample above was not just the scale of the censorship but the inclusion of a footnote on the left-hand page when even the asterisk pointing to it from the main body of text has been blocked out.  It is also interesting that the publisher has reproduced these censored sections in, it would seem, their physical entirety and even their typesetting.  The only acknowledgement of the censorship comes on the book’s back cover: “Attention, part of the text is [         ]”.

The UL has both the first Italian edition of Roberto Carnero’s Morire per le idee (2010) and the 2022 revised edition, which means that readers can easily compare the Russian translation with the Italian original (the 2022 edition).  In the following pages, only one small section is blacked out.

The original Italian sentence reads “Così mi trovo con delle bozze mezze morte tra le mani, da correggere e da castrare.”  It is the end of the sentence that has caused the censor to pounce, the Russian translation itself suffering the act of “castrare” as a result.

Censorship in Russia grows and grows, officially and unofficially.  The front cover of the Carnero translation already bears an “18+” stamp (age warnings, often to do with swear words, have been common for some years now) but presumably much of the additional censorship relates to the anti-LGBT censorship that passed into law in 2013 and then was widened in 2022 in part to extend it to materials for adults and not just for children.

Earlier this year, employees of the major ĖKSMO publishing house were arrested under this law.  Ten specific titles were included in the case raised against them.  We haven’t bought the six that were translations into Russian, and we already had two of the four Russian originals (the first two listed below, requested already by the same academic who had requested the Pasolini book) but we have managed to acquire the remaining two now as well.

• Leto v pionerskom galstuke / Katerina Silʹvanova, Elena Malisova.
• O chëm molchit Lastochka / Katerina Silʹvanova, Elena Malisova.
• Okna vo dvor / Mikita Franko.
• Tetradʹ v kletochku / Mikita Franko.

Requests for Slavonic-language material are always welcome at slavonic@lib.cam.ac.uk

Mel Bach