To Be Preserved Forever

15 hrs. 19 min.

Language Russian

Author Lev Kopelev

Narrator Valery Stelmashchuk

Lev Kopelev’s book “And made a idol for himself…” was first published in the United States in 1978 and, since then, has not been reprinted. This is the first part of an autobiographical trilogy in which the author tells his childhood and youth in Ukraine, in Kyiv and Kharkiv, honestly and openly describing his Komsomol illusions and sins—among them his participation in grain procurement in early 1933; his first literary attempts; his work as a journalist on the radio and in the newspapers “Kharkov Steamroller” and “Udar.” After receiving the label of a “Trotskyist” in 1929, he miraculously avoided arrest during the purges after Kirov’s death. Incompatibility with the Soviet regime nevertheless brought him to a camp—one month before the victory over Nazism. In prison, Lev Kopelev understood: “…my fate, which I then considered absurdly unhappy and undeservedly harsh, was in fact both just and happy. Just, because I truly deserved punishment—after all, for many years I not only obeyed, but also zealously took part in crimes: I robbed peasants, fawned over Stalin, consciously lied and deceived for the sake of historical necessity, taught people to believe lies and to worship villains. And happiness was that the years of imprisonment spared me from the inevitable participation in new atrocities and deceptions.”

The novella “In the Sharp Turns of the Short Road” was first printed by Valery Chalidze in New York in 1982, and since then it has not been reissued.

1. To Be Preserved Forever 2. To Be Preserved Forever (narrated by Valery Stelmashchuk)