Vladimir Zelinsky. A talk with my father

Abstract

This book can be classified as a memoir with one reservation made by its author: ‘These meditations go alongside the recollections…’ The son, writing his recollections in the memoir form, is Vladimir Zelinsky, a Russian Orthodox Church priest serving in Italy. His father Kornely Zelinsky (1896–1970) is a Soviet literary critic whose reputation has been stained by a number of gestures in his literary career. Most known as the theoretician in the Constructivists poetic group in the 1920s, he abandoned it and his former views in 1930 under the ideological pressure. In 1940, he wrote an internal review that practically barred the publication of Marina Tsvetaeva’s verse collection and made her life situation unbearable. In 1958, he was among the most bitter critics of Boris Pasternak after the latter was awarded the Nobel Prize. What position can his son, a priest, take in his memoirs? This position is not one of all-forgiveness but of understanding arrived at in the filial dialogue with his father’s life spent in the time affected by the ideological virus.