A Ransomed Dissident

Igor Golomstock (1929-2017) was an art historian, translator, university lecturer, and radio broadcaster. He was born in Russia and emigrated to the UK.Sara Jolly is a freelance Russian-English translator and documentary filmmaker based in London.Boris Dralyuk is a literary translator, writer, and the Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.Robert Chandler is an award-winning poet and translator from Russian, French, and Greek. Among the writers he has translated from Russian are Alexander Pushkin, Nikolay Leskov, Vasily Grossman and Andrey Platonov. He is the co-editor of the Penguin Classics anthology Russian Poetry from Pushkin to Brodsky (2014). Penguin have also published his anthologies of Russian short stories and of Russian magic tales.

In 1939, a ten-year-old Igor Golomstock accompanied his mother, a medical doctor, to the vast network of labour camps in the Russian Far East. While she tended patients, he was minded by assorted 'trusty' prisoners - hardened criminals - and returned to Moscow an almost feral adolescent, fluent in obscene prison jargon but intellectually ignorant. Despite this dubious start he became a leading art historian and co-author (with his close friend Andrey Sinyavsky) of the first, deeply controversial, monograph on Picasso published in the Soviet Union. His writings on his 43 years in the Soviet Union offer a rare insight into life as a quietly subversive art historian and the post-Stalin dissident community. In vivid prose Golomstock shows the difficulties of publishing, curating and talking about Western art in Soviet Russia and, with self-deprecating humour, the absurd tragicomedy of life for the Moscow intelligentsia during Khruschev's thaw and Brezhnev's stagnation. He also offers a unique personal perspective on the 1966 trial of Sinyavsky and Yuri Daniel, widely considered the end of Khruschev's liberalism and the spark that ignited the Soviet dissident movement. In 1972 he was given 'permission' to leave the Soviet Union, but only after paying a 'ransom' of more than 25 years' salary, nominally intended to reimburse the state for his education. A remarkable collection of artists, scholars and intellectuals in Russia and the West, including Roland Penrose, came together to help him pay this astronomical sum. His memoirs of life once in the UK offer an insider's view of the BBC Russian Service and a penetrating analysis of the notorious feud between Sinyavsky and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Nominated for the Russian Booker Prize on its publication in Russian in 2014, The Ransomed Dissident opens a window onto the life of a remarkable man: a dissident of uncompromising moral integrity and with an outstanding gift for friendship.

The extraordinary story of the man who introduced Western art into Soviet Russia.

From a renowned translator, with strong potential publicity

List of IllustrationsTranslator's NoteAcknowledgementsTurning PointPart I. Russia1. My Father's Arrest2. Kolyma3. Moscow4. Finances and Romances5. The Pushkin Museum of Fine ArtsComrade NovikovAbram Efros and Andre´ GideThe Museum of New Western Art6. The International Festival and Artists7. The Sinyavskys, Khlebny Lane, the Far North8. Dancing Around Picasso9. The Museum Again10. VNIITE11. Great Expectations12. The Sinyavsky-Daniel Trial13. Dissidents14. Pen Portraits of My Friends 15. Questions of Faith16. A Waiting Game17. Departure: An Obstacle RacePart II. EmigrationTranslator's Note to Part II18. The Journal Kontinent19. The Anthony Blunt Affair20. Radio Liberty, Galich21. At the BBC22. The Second Trial of Andrey Sinyavsky23. Politics versus Aesthetics24. Sinyavsky's Last Years25. Perestroika26. Family MattersInstead of a Conclusion The Benefits of PessimismAfterwordNotesDramatis PersonaeAppendix IAppendix IISelect BibliographyIndex