Kerala’s Love Affair with Soviet Literature

By Maya Palit

There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved her Children Until They Moved Back In.

There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby.

There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories.

When an uncle gifted me these books by the Russian author Lyudmila Stefanovna Petrushevskaya and said he thought that I would really get them, I took one look at the titles and assumed that he was commenting on my odd taste in fiction. Once I had dipped into them though, I think I understood his point. There was something so relatable about the way the author fused vulnerability and toughness: her grim-as-they-come narratives about alcoholism, mad parents, abuse, prostitution and poverty in the post-Soviet era are unembellished and written with such caustic humour that at the end of each story, you’d catch yourself smiling at the unbelievable darkness of her portraits.

There are several 20th-century Russian writers, like Vera Panova and Mikhail Bulgakov, who grabbed life by the scruff of its neck in their writing. Then there are the Russian folktales for children, which a friend described as “picking up on a side of family life you wouldn’t find in Enid Blyton,” and the classic Russian writers — the 19th-century guys — of whom the older generation can’t seem to get enough.

A case in point is the mania over Oru Sangeerthanam Pole — a Malayalam novel about Fyodor Dostoevsky’s affair with his stenographer Anna Snitkina, which sold over a whopping 2.5 lakh copies in the 1990s. Perumbadavam Sreedharan, the author, and the president of Kerala Sahitya Akademi released the 66th edition of the book at Dostoevsky’s home in St Petersburg last year. It was Sreedharan’s first trip to Russia.

The 77-year-old author apparently kissed the floor of Dostoyevsky’s museum in St Petersburg upon entering. He was reported to have remarked, “I had grown up reading the books of Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Alexander Pushkin etc. So when I finally landed in Russia, it was a ‘sacred’ moment for me.”

Bizarrely, it was an acting role that took Sreedharan to Russia: he stars as himself in the new docu-fiction film, In Return — Just a Book, based on his novel and his creative engagement with Dostoevsky. Directed by Shiny Jacob Benjamin and scripted by another literary giant,Paul Zacharia, the film’s release is highly anticipated. It addresses how Sreedharan managed to capture miniscule details about Dostoevsky’s epileptic seizures, gambling, alcoholism and his tumultuous romance, and how his depiction of the Russian novelist seized the public imagination. (Reviews on Goodreads still gush about how his Dostoevsky tales were far juicier than any of the novelist’s own writing; not least because of grandiose one-liners like his characterisation of the Russian novelist as “the man with god’s signature on his heart”.) But while we wait for the film, it’s worth remembering that Sreedharan was hardly the only Dostoevsky-obsessed person in Kerala. The state’s association with Russian literature goes way back, and last November, the fifth Russian Language and Literature festival was held in Thiruvananthapuram.

Communist thought entered Kerala and began taking root in the 1930s and ’40s, but it was only in the ’50s that Russian literature was introduced to the public. Initially, it came through Kesari Balakrishna Pillai’s translations. He ran a periodical called Kesari and his translations — which started with Chekhov’s works — were part of active literary discussions in Kerala. In 1952, the publishing house Prabhath Book House, registered under the ownership of the Communist Party of India, secured the rights to import Russian books. According to Kottayam-based author and journalist KR Meera, the publications were beautiful and glossy, with shiny pages that cost only Rs 2 or 3 because they were heavily subsidised by the Soviet Union. To emphasise their legacy, she describes how PK Rajasekharan, a journalist and well-known critic told her that on the day of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he went to the Prabhath Book House and bought all the books possible just to preserve the memory of the Soviet Union. 

Although the author NK Damodaran’s first translations of Dostoevsky’s works from English to Malayalam were regarded very highly, the real harbinger of Russian literature in a massive way was a man named K ‘Moscow’ Gopalakrishnan. The joint editor of the Soviet Review in Delhi, he was recruited into the Malayalam section of Progress Publishers and left for Moscow in 1966. Over their 25-year stay, he and his wife Omana Gopalakrishnan translated close to 200 Russian books into Malayalam, including Party literature, folk tales, the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin etc. A few years ago, Gopalakrishnan told the crazy story of how Omana’s translation of Anna Karenina was burnt after their publishing house shut down, once the USSR had fallen.

“The children of the ’70s were shaped more by the Soviet Union than India. Maybe that explains the predominant left leaning among the readers who belong to that generation,” Meera said. . Or was it the other way around? Was there an ideological common ground that was the basis for so much Russian literature permeating the Malayali literary scene?

NS Madhavan, journalist and author of the modern classic Litanies of Dutch Battery, said, “It was an indirect way for the Communist Party to make money in India. The socialist realist novels had a huge readership… and there wasn’t a single barbershop in Kerala that didn’t have a Soviet Land magazine. After ’65, once the ideological game had stopped, there was less availability.”

A friend’s mother’s anecdote, however, disproves the idea that you had to have communist values to be into Russian literature. Reading Dostoevsky led to a hilarious misunderstanding when she moved to Mumbai: “Whenever I got free time I would go back to The Idiot. It was a hard read, and a colleague who observed me for a while suddenly asked, ‘Why are you reading commie books?’ And I thought he meant comic, I wasn’t familiar with the short term. That’s when I realised there was that instant connection people made, even though you wouldn’t call Dostoevsky Communist by any stretch of the imagination!”

You could get a hard-bound Dostoevsky for Rs 15, say friends’ parents who were brought up in Kerala. They remember their introduction to Dostoevsky, Gorky and Tolstoy through Malayalam publications, which by all accounts, were very colourful, printed on great quality paper, beautifully-produced and really cheap. The journalist Sunny Sebastian recalls devouring comic books with fascinating illustrations, science periodicals, and a regular children’s magazine called Sputnik. Even after leaving Kerala for Rajasthan, he kept up to speed with the literature by visiting the Russian books’ outlet in Chameliwala market in Jaipur.

When Meera says Russian literature was everywhere, she means it — before brown paper came along, they used to cover notebooks for school with the glossy paper from Soviet Land magazines. All the literature came to her through Malayalam renditions. The book that got Meera to start reading was Stories and Pictures by Vladimir Sutev. Amma, a translation of Maxim Gorky’s Mother, was a present for winning an elocution competition in Class V, and she remembers reading the fairy tale The White Deer as Velutha Kalaman. She read War and Peace as a child, but only really “got it” later when she re-read it as a student. The books gave her an exposure to another world, but also hit her with the realisation that people are the same everywhere.

Kerala’s tender lyublyu for Russian literature appears to have tempered down a bit over the generations. What can I say except that they missed out on the Lyudmila years.