In 2012, a fire broke out in the northeast of Moscow. An old building with wooden ceilings caught fire, the fire quickly spread to neighboring houses. Fire brigades could not get close to the place - all the parking lots around were full of cars. The fire covered one and a half thousand square meters. It was also impossible to get close to the hydrant, so the rescuers used a fire train and even two helicopters. One employee of the Ministry of Emergency Situations died in the fire.
As it turned out later, the fire started in the house of the Mir publishing house.
It is unlikely that this name says something to most people. Publishing house and publishing house, another ghost from Soviet times, which has not released anything for thirty years, but for some reason continued to exist. At the end of the XNUMXs, it was on the verge of bankruptcy, but somehow returned its debts, to whom and whatever it owed. Its entire modern history is a couple of lines on Wikipedia about leapfrog between all sorts of state MGUP SHMUP FMUP, which gather dust in Rostec's folders (according to Wikipedia, again).
But behind the bureaucratic lines there is not a word about what a huge legacy Mir left in India and how it influenced the lives of several generations.
A few days ago posted a link to , where digitized Soviet scientific books are posted. I thought someone was turning their nostalgia into a good cause. It turned out to be true, but a couple of details made the blog unusual - the books were in English, and Indians discussed them in the comments. Everyone wrote about how important these books were to them in childhood, shared stories and memories, said how great it would be to get them in paper now.
I googled, and each new link surprised me more and more - columns, posts, even documentaries about the importance of Russian literature for the people of India. For me, this was a discovery, which is now embarrassing to talk about - I can’t believe that such a large layer passed by.
It turns out that Soviet scientific literature has become a kind of cult in India. The books of the publishing house that ingloriously disappeared from us are still worth their weight in gold on the other side of the world.
“They were very popular because of their quality and price. These books were available and in demand even in small settlements - not only in large cities. Many have been translated into various Indian languages - Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, Gujarati and others. This greatly expanded the audience. Although I am not an expert, I think one of the reasons for lowering the price was an attempt to replace Western books, which were very expensive then (and still too),” Damitr, the author of the blog, told me. [Damitr is an acronym for the author's real name, which he asked not to be made public.]
He is a physicist by training and considers himself a bibliophile. Now he is a researcher and teacher of mathematics. Damitra began collecting books in the late 90s. Then they were no longer printed in India. Now he has about 600 Soviet books - some he bought from his hands or from second-hand booksellers, some were given to him. “These books made it much easier for me to learn, and I want as many people as possible to read them too. That's why I started my blog."
How Soviet books got to India
Two years after the Second World War, India ceased to be a British colony. Periods of great change are always the most difficult and hottest. Independent India turned out to be full of people of different views, who now have the opportunity to move the foundations where they see fit themselves. The world around was also ambiguous. The Soviet Union and America tried to reach, it seems, to every corner in order to lure them into their camp.
The Muslim population seceded and founded Pakistan. The border territories, as always, became disputed, and the war broke out there. America supported Pakistan, the Soviet Union - India. In 1955, the Prime Minister of India visited Moscow, Khrushchev paid a return visit the same year. Thus began a long and very close relationship between the countries. Even when India was in conflict with China in the 60s, the USSR officially maintained neutrality, but financial assistance for India was higher, which somewhat spoiled relations with China.
Because of the friendship with the Union, there was a strong communist movement in India. And then ships with tons of books went to India, and kilometers of film reels with Indian cinema came to us.
“All the books came to us through the Communist Party of India, and the money from the sales added to their funds. Of course, among other books, there was a sea and a sea of volumes of Lenin, Marx and Engels, and many books on philosophy, sociology and history were quite biased. But in mathematics, in the sciences, there is much less bias. Although, in one of the books on physics, the author explained dialectical materialism in the context of physical variables. I won’t say if people were skeptical about Soviet books at that time, but now most collectors of Soviet literature are centrists with a leftist bias or openly left.”
Damitra showed me some texts from The Frontline, an Indian "left-leaning publication" dedicated to the centenary of the October Revolution. In one of them, journalist Vijay Prashad that interest in Russia appeared even earlier, in the 20s, when the Indians were inspired by the overthrow of the tsarist regime in our country. Then communist manifestos and other political texts were clandestinely translated into Indian. In the late 20s, the books “Soviet Russia” by Jawaharal Nehru and “Letters from Russia” by Rabindranath Tagore were popular among Indian nationalists.
No wonder they liked the idea of revolution so much. In the position of the British colony, the words "capitalism" and "imperialism" by default had the same negative context that the Soviet government placed in them. But thirty years later, not only political literature became popular in India.
Why was Soviet books so loved in India?
For India, they translated everything that they read in our country. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Chekhov, Gorky. A sea of children's books, for example, "Deniska's stories" or "Chuk and Gek". From the outside it seems to us that India, with its ancient rich history, gravitates toward mysterious myths and magical stories, but it was the realism, routine and simplicity of Soviet books that bribed Indian children.
Last year, a documentary film "Red Stars Lost in the Fog" about Soviet literature was filmed in India. The directors paid the most attention to children's books, on which the characters of the film grew up. For example, Rugvedita Parah, an onco-pathologist from India, spoke about her attitude as follows: “Russian books are my favorite because they do not try to teach. They do not indicate the moral of the fable, as in Aesop or the Panchatantra. I don’t understand why even such good books as our textbook “Mother Shyama” should be full of clichés.”
“They were distinguished by the fact that they never tried to take lightly or condescendingly to the personality of the child. They do not offend their intellect,” said psychologist Sulbha Subramaniam.
Since the beginning of the 60s, the Publishing House of Foreign Literature has been engaged in the release of books. Later it was divided into several separate ones. "Progress" and "Rainbow" published children's and fiction, political non-fiction (as it would be called now). The Leningrad "Aurora" published books about art. The Pravda publishing house printed the children's magazine Misha, which contained, for example, fairy tales, crossword puzzles for learning the Russian language, and even addresses for correspondence with children from the Soviet Union.
Finally, the Mir publishing house produced scientific and technical literature.
“Scientific books, of course, were popular, but mostly among people who were specifically interested in science, and such people are always a minority. Perhaps the popularity of Russian classics in the Indian language (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky) also helped them. Books were so cheap and common that they were almost disposable. For example, at school lessons, pictures were cut out of these books,” Damitr says.
Deepa Bhashti writes in his for The Calvert Journal that by reading scientific books, people knew nothing and could not find out about their authors. Unlike the classics, they were often ordinary employees of research institutes:
“Now the Internet has told me [where these books came from], without a single hint of the authors, their personal stories. The Internet still hasn't told me the names of Babkov, Smirnov, Glushkov, Maron, and other scientists and engineers from state institutions who wrote textbooks about things like airport design, heat transfer and mass transfer, radio measurements, and much more.
My desire to be an astrophysicist (until physics got kicked out in high school) came from a little blue book called Space Adventures at Home by F. Rabitza. I tried to find out who Rabitsa is, but there is nothing about him on any fansite of Soviet literature. Apparently, the initials after the surname should be enough for me. The biographies of the authors may not have been of interest to the homeland they served.”
“My favorites were Lev Tarasov's books,” says Damitr, “His level of immersion in the topic, his understanding, was incredible. The first book I read, he wrote with his wife Albina Tarasova. It was called "Questions and Answers in school physics." There, in the form of a dialogue, many misconceptions from the school curriculum are explained. This book cleared up a lot for me. The second book I read from him is Fundamentals of Quantum Mechanics. In it, quantum mechanics is considered with all mathematical rigor. There, too, there is a dialogue between the classical physicist, the author and the reader. I also read his "This amazing symmetrical world", "Discussions on the refraction of light", "A world built on probability." Each book is a gem and I am fortunate to be able to pass them on to others."
How books were preserved after the collapse of the USSR
By the 80s, there were an incredible number of Soviet books in India. Since they were translated into many local languages, Indian children literally learned to read native words from Russian books. But with the collapse of the Union, everything abruptly stopped. By that time, India was already in a deep economic crisis, and the Russian Foreign Ministry said it was not interested in special relations with New Delhi. From that moment on, subsidizing the translation and publication of books in India ceased. By the 2000s, Soviet books had completely disappeared from the shelves.
Only a few years were enough for Soviet literature to be almost forgotten, but with the massive spread of the Internet, its new popularity began. Enthusiasts gathered in communities on Facebook, corresponded in separate blogs, searched for all the books they could find, and began to digitize them.
In the film "Red Stars Lost in the Fog", among other things, they told how modern publishers took up the idea of not just collecting and digitizing, but officially republishing old books. At first they tried to find the copyright holders, but they could not, so they simply began to collect the surviving copies, re-translate what was lost, and put it into print.
A shot from the film Red Stars Lost in the Mist.
But if fiction could be forgotten without support, scientific literature remained in demand as before. According to Damitra, it is still current in academic circles:
“Many professors and teachers at universities, recognized physicists, recommended Soviet books to me. Most of the engineers still working today learned from them.
Today's popularity is due to the very difficult IIT-JEE exam for engineering majors. Many students and tutors simply pray to the books of Irodov, Zubov, Shalnov and Volkenstein. I'm not sure if Soviet fiction and children's books are popular with the modern generation, but Irodov's Solving the Basic Problems of Physics is still recognized as the gold standard.
Damitra's workplace where he digitizes books.
Nevertheless, the preservation and popularization - even scientific books - is still the occupation of a few enthusiasts: “As far as I know, only a couple of people besides me collect Soviet books, this is not a very common activity. Every year there are fewer and fewer hardcover books, yet the last of them were printed more than thirty years ago. There are fewer and fewer places where Soviet books can be found. Many times it seemed to me that the book I found was the last copy in existence.
Besides, book collecting itself is a dying hobby. I know very few people (despite the fact that I live in academia) who have more than a dozen books at home.
Books by Lev Tarasov are still reprinted by various Russian publishing houses. He continued to write after the collapse of the Union, when they were no longer taken to India. But I do not remember that his name was widely popular with us. Even the search engines on the first pages give out completely different Lviv Tarasovs. I wonder what Damitra would think of this?
Or what would publishers think if they knew that Mir, Progress and Raduga, whose books they want to publish, still exist, but it seems only in the registers of legal entities. And when the Mir publishing house was on fire, their book heritage was the last issue that was discussed later.
Now in every way they relate to the USSR. I myself have a lot of contradictions about him. But for some reason, writing and admitting to Damitra that I didn’t know anything about this was somehow ashamed and sad.
Source: habr.com