| Abstrakt: |
This article presents the story of Leonid Ivanovich Rylov, an unhappy staff member at the Library for Foreign Literature in Moscow who, in 1953, took his complaints to the very summit--he wrote an extremely long letter (some 8,400 words) to Mikhail Suslov, secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In the fall of 1997 Ekaterina Genieva, director-general of the Library for Foreign Literature in Moscow, brought Rylov's complaint to the author's attention. Rylov's letter, too long to reproduce here, can be found in its entirety at www.libfl.ru/win/rylovl .html. Ekaterina Genieva offered to ask I.A. Bordachenkov, an archivist at the Library, to prepare for this issue of Solanus some material about Rylov and his letter, and about the Library and its staff at the time. He did so, and has also provided some wonderful photographs. The author asked Genieva to write a general introduction, placing Rylov's letter in its historical context. The readers who are too young should remember that this was the way in 1953. |
