Советская власть русской литературы: Взгляд из глухомани где-то в Южной Индии. Текст на английском. Кто может читать по английски, тот откроет для себя... а другим, что ж: "scientia potentia est is a Latin aphorism meaning "knowledge is power".
What continues to intrigue me is the reach of these distribution networks, down to the smallest of towns. I grew up in a village in the hills, a blip on the map of South India. To this day we do not have a bookstore in town, except for the newspaper vendor who stocks select pulp fiction titles alongside gossip tabloids and the day’s newspapers. And when I was growing up, there were no online marketplaces to log on to, of course. But there was Grandpa and his books from Russia.
There is nothing on the big wide internet about who the translators of these many books were. On an inside page, when they include a name at all, the books display only the second name of the translator—Babkov, Smirnov, Maron, etc.—preceded by an initial. I imagine translator bios were irrelevant in the greater service of the Motherland. Perhaps most well-known among the few who lent their full names to their works was Ivy Litvinova, the British wife of a Soviet diplomat working at the turn of the 20th century.
I managed to hear once about the son of one such translator, who went from Eastern India to Moscow and was employed to translate the books into Bangla, the language of his state. Translators from several Indian states were housed in apartment blocks with their families; children were born and raised there, and after the split of the USSR, some left, though many stayed back and continue to see out their lives there.