“THE CONDUIT AND THE SHVAMBRANIA” BY LEV KASSIL: A HISTORY OF THE TEXT

Abstract

The article analyzes the structural and textual changes made by Lev Kassil in the reprinting of the story “Conduit and Shvambraniya”. The material for this study is the 1935 and 1937 editions of the story, two editions in 1957, and the last lifetime edition in 1965. An analysis of the published editions shows the formation of the story “The Conduit and Shvambrania” as a single novel, a single narrative and structural whole, which was not yet the case in the 1935 edition. The author reveals the changes made by Lev Kassil in later versions of the story and offers a classification of authorial corrections: 1) deletions of ideological and political nature; 2) deletions and changes caused by attacks of pedagogical critics; 3) corrections and changes of artistic nature. Lev Kassil was forced to respond to the ideological campaigns that were unfolding both on the national scale and in the professional literary environment (the anti-Semitic campaigns of the 1930s and 1940s, the deportation of the Volga Germans in the 1940s, discussions of “pseudo-romanticism and formalism” in criticism, etc.). Another reason for changing the text of the story was the circumstances of the writer’s family biography: the repression of his brother Iosif Kassil, who was the prototype of one of the main characters in the story — Os’ka. Nevertheless, The Conduit and Shvambrania was the only book in Kassil’s work in which a Jewish theme was expressed.

Keywords: Soviet children’s literature, publishing history, textology, editorial, author’s corrections, self-censorship, Lev Kassil, “Konduit i Shvambrania”