Saved books

Episodes of the burning of books and libraries have remained recorded in the collective memory, but surely everyone is also familiar with the story of the saved works of Franz Kafka. His friend Max Brod did not throw away and destroy Kafka's manuscripts as the writer wanted, but preserved them. Today, the adjective is a Kafkaesque part of the general culture of every educated individual. Thanks to Max Brod, Kafka's stories with an atmosphere full of anxiety and discomfort are available to us, which depict a world that resembles a disturbing nightmare. The novel "The Trial", on the other hand, has become an image of a bureaucratized and alienated environment with distorted human relationships, in which the individual becomes entangled in the cobwebs of impenetrable reality with incomprehension.

Although history remembers many destructions of books, fortunately there were also situations when books were saved and preserved in various ways. During the deliberate destruction of libraries or their looting, or during accidents and catastrophes that destroyed them, many librarians and other people who appreciated the value of books knew how to risk their own lives to save them. One of the famous works that was saved from looting in our close region is the Sarajevo Haggadah, a Jewish illuminated codex from the 15th century. The Nazis intended to appropriate and take away the Haggadah from occupied Sarajevo as they also stole other cultural treasures, but the chief librarian Dervish Korkut managed to hide and preserve it.

The rescue of valuable Jewish heritage during the German occupation was organized despite the dangers in many cities. One of the famous examples is Vilnius (now Vilnius in Lithuania, then the USSR). Vilna was a large center of the Jewish community, so in 1925 the headquarters of the Jewish Scientific Institute (YIVO) was established there. The Nazis ordered the destruction of its documentation and the removal of valuable manuscripts, but the Jews organized the smuggling and hiding of material, for which they built a whole underground bunker in the ghetto. The last remains of buried publications were found only in the 1990s. The group that took out and hid the books was called the Paper Brigade, and was led by Abraham Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski. They managed to save 30-40% of the material, which today is one of the largest sources on the life of Jews in Eastern Europe.

We would not have known Anne Frank's diary if her papers and notebooks had not been picked up and stored by her friend Miep Gies after the internment of the Frank family. After the end of the war, she handed over the notes to Anne's father, the only survivor of the camp, who later published them.

More recently, the chief librarian of the library in Basra, Alia Muhammad Baker, has become a real heroine. During the fierce bombing of Basra in the Iraq war in 2003, she organized the local population to take the books out of the library, and then distributed them for safekeeping with many friends and acquaintances. Her endeavor has been widely written about, and she has become the main character of several children's picture books. Similar sacrifice was shown during the Islamist attack on Timbuktu, Mali in 2012. Dr. Abdel Kader Haidara managed to evacuate a collection of priceless old manuscripts, which was the subject of several films.

Even in conditions that were not dramatic, individual works or authors would have remained unknown or lost if some individual, and sometimes a lucky coincidence, had not saved them from oblivion.

A similar situation as with Kafka and Max Brod happened with one of the greatest American poets, Emily Dickinson. She obliged her sister Lavinia to burn all her writings upon her death, but her sister preserved about 1800 found poems, which were not fully disclosed until much later. Both Kafka and Emily Dickinson published a very small part of their manuscripts during their lifetime and would probably have been poorly known if it had not been for the saved posthumous legacy.

Sylvia Plath was a respected author before she killed herself at the age of 30, but she gained the prestigious Pulitzer Prize and almost mythical status posthumously, when the collection "Ariel" was published, with poems collected by her husband, the poet Ted Hughes. The relationship between Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath was complex, and at the time of her death they were living separately due to his affair with another woman. All this caused a rather hostile attitude of the public towards Hughes, especially among some feminist critics. Hughes also published Sylvia's diaries, but admitted that he destroyed the last notebook, which he resented greatly, because he did not want these parts to be read by their children one day. Although he undoubtedly contributed to the author's posthumous fame, audiences and critics have an ambivalent attitude towards him regarding the preservation of Sylvia's manuscripts.

A special case are writers from the former USSR who were not allowed to publish during their lifetime or whose work was drastically censored and banned, but whose work survived thanks to self-sacrificing family members or friends. Danil Harms was only allowed to publish children's books during his lifetime, but he was arrested on the basis of them because he allegedly spread ideas that were not in line with Soviet values. Harms' search for thoughtfulness, absurd humor, ironic and sarcastic view of reality, mixing fantastic, twisted and realistic scenes, and fragmented narration were not desirable in the society of the time. Nevertheless, he gained a reputation in literary circles through texts that were read in closed groups or circulated in hand-reproduced samizdats. Harms starved to death in Leningrad prison in 1942, and a suitcase full of his manuscripts was hidden by his friend Yakov Druskin during difficult times. Through the efforts of Harms' sister, the works were translated and published in other countries in the 1970s, and in Russia only in the late 80s.

The novel "Doctor Zhivago", which won Boris Pasternak the Nobel Prize in 1958, could not be published in Russia. The manuscript was smuggled abroad and published in Italian translation by the Feltrinelli publishing house, and then translated from Italian into other languages. The CIA, in turn, financed a Russian edition translated from Italian that was published in The Hague. The Soviet authorities tried in every way to prevent the publication of the novel, and threatened the author himself, so that in the end he had to refuse to receive the Nobel Prize. The original Russian text was not printed until 1988, but the novel is now part of school reading in Russia.

Mikhail Bulgakov wrote several versions of "The Master and Margarita" between 1928 and 1940, when he died. He read the manuscript to his friends during his lifetime, but did not find a publisher. His already published works were increasingly rejected, banned and criticized, and the writer lived in constant uncertainty. The novel was published in a literary magazine only in 1961 thanks to some literary theorists and Bulgakov's widow, but in an abridged and censored version. The manuscript was secretly taken from Russia and a more complete edition was printed in Paris in 1967. The book appeared in Russia in 1973, but since there are many versions, it is difficult to say what the canonical text is. However, the novel with its mixture of fantasy, realism and satire; With humor and grotesque that mix with tragic and romantic parts and metatextual elements, it offers a lot of material and possibilities of interpretation and is certainly one of the most important works of the 20th century.

Unfortunately, there were plenty of stories like this from that time, but the rejection of works that became groundbreaking in the history of literature did not happen only in Russia. The trust and encouragement of a family member or a friendly publisher was often crucial so that individual authors did not give up on their own work.

It is known that Marcel Proust's "The Road to Swan" was rejected several times, which was also contributed by the original opinion of Andre Gide. After the initial review, Gide believed that the work was not worth printing, which he later, after reading, considered one of his biggest mistakes, and sent Proust a letter of apology and admiration. Orwell's "Animal Farm" waited several years for printing because it was rejected (mostly due to the political circumstances of the time) by several publishers, including T. S. Elliot.

Sometimes the authors themselves doubted their work or considered it too controversial to be published.

Vladimir Nabokov almost threw the manuscript of "Lolita" into the fire. At the last minute, his wife saved him and encouraged the writer to finish it. The book was first published in Paris, by a publisher who mainly published pornography, because no one could be found in the United States and Britain to print it. The novel still causes controversy today for its depiction of the relationship of a middle-aged man to a twelve-year-old girl.

There is an interesting story about Harper Lee's book "Go Set a Watch". It was published as a sequel to the book "To Kill a Mockingbird" and shows a completely different character of the main characters, with stronger racial prejudices. After publication, it turned out that this was actually the first version of the book, which was later significantly changed. The author thought that this version was lost, but it was found towards the end of her life and made public. In the meantime, doubts arose as to whether Harper Lee was manipulated about how the book would be presented and whether it should be published.

The books of Nabokova and Harper Lee open up new questions that have been particularly topical in recent years: how to talk about difficult and traumatic topics; whether books should be corrected or censored in later times if their language no longer corresponds to what is considered correct; whether individual authors can be canceled because of their views and the like. But the case of Harper Lee also introduces us to a nicer topic about books whose originals or drafts were considered lost, but were happily found after a long time.

"The Tale of Genji", a novel by Murasaki Shikibu, was written in the 11th century, and through the experiences of Prince Genji, it describes court life in the Heian period, during the reign of the Fujiwara clan. The novel has exceptional literary value and is one of the classics of Japanese and world literature, but it is also historically important because it provides an excellent insight into Japanese culture and the life of court women of the time. The original record has not been preserved, and the text has been rewritten several times over the centuries, with Murasaki herself editing the early versions. Throughout history, several official transcripts have been established that are considered authentic, and which have come to this day only in parts. In this century, thanks to the efforts of scholars, several valid transcriptions have been found that have established a more complete picture of the novel, with chapters that have been unknown for centuries.

Another example of a forgotten and discovered manuscript refers to Hemingway. It is known that Hemingway spent the 1920s in Paris, visiting the salon of Gertrude Stein, along with many other actors of the art and literary life of the time. This group of literary authors became known as the lost generation, a term coined by Gertrude Stein, but mostly promoted by Hemingway himself. In 1956. Hemingway visited the Ritz Hotel after a long time, and the staff reminded him that at the end of the 20s he had left crates full of various things there, which were preserved in the storage room. Hemingway was overjoyed to find his diaries in the crates, from which later published memoirs were born. "A Moveable Feast" depicts the vibrant period of the 1920s in Paris and describes many of the participants and events of that time.

Every bibliophile and librarian knows the excitement of finding a rare or long-sought book. So even if it doesn't turn out to be Shakespeare's folio edition (every collector's dream), let's hope that some more beautiful, hitherto hidden things will appear and that some publisher will give a chance to some ingenious unknown author. Because people can save books, but books can also save people in various ways.