A-Infos (en) France, Monde Libertaire - History Pages No. 105 (André Kozovoi) (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

André Kozovoi offers a moving account. He recounts a family history 
interwoven with archives and personal memories. The author, the child of 
dissidents who became a specialist in Soviet history, both presents a 
family context and, in the background, offers a nuanced analysis of the 
reality of the USSR and the nature of dissidence. His father, Vadim 
Kozovoi, was born in 1937 in Kharkiv, in the former USSR (present-day 
Ukraine). He belonged to the Jewish communist intelligentsia, whose 
social advancement was partly due to their loyalty to the regime. The 
author perfectly describes the ideological and social process that 
allowed the family to climb the ranks of the Soviet party apparatus. At 
17, the young man went to Moscow to study at the University. There he 
frequented circles of student dissidents seeking to make sense of 
de-Stalinization, initiated by Nikita Khrushchev. Criticism of the 
regime had its limits. Arrested the following year, he was interned for 
eight years in a penal colony in Mordovia, southeast of Moscow. It was 
there that he met Andrei's mother, Irina Emeliova, the daughter of Olga 
Ivinskaya, the daughter of Pasternak's mistress. The two women were 
incorporated into Doctor Zhivago in a barely disguised form; Lara 
represented the hero's lover. Olga Ivinskaya and her daughter were sent 
to the camps twice. Irina met Vadim there in 1961.

Two years later, Vadim was released. He was able to return to the world 
of Russian literature and began translating from French into Russian. 
His success and recognition were international; the era was one of thaw, 
and international exchanges allowed him to connect with poets like René 
Char and Henri Michaux. Granted permission to travel to France, he chose 
to stay. His partner and Andrei were not immediately granted permission 
to leave the Soviet Union. For four years, the family lived apart. 
Andrei recounts the image of an adored France in stark contrast to the 
dreary Soviet years of scarcity. This continued until François 
Mitterrand secured the family's reunification in Paris. The couple then 
resumed the fullness of their intellectual pursuits. The narrative also 
analyzes his mother's efforts during Perestroika to recover the stories 
Pasternak had entrusted to her, which had been confiscated by the 
political police. Meanwhile, Andrei grew up, shaped by this world, and 
became a historian of the USSR... to understand, and perhaps above all, 
to explain the Soviet tragedy...

* Andrei Kozovoi
The Exiles. Pasternak and My Family
Grasset 2025 346 p. EUR24

https://monde-libertaire.net/?articlen=8733
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