LEV KOPELEV: INTELLETTUALE SOVIETICO E UOMO DEL DIALOGO

The aim of the present work is to provide an intellectual biography of the Soviet writer Lev Zinov’evič Kopelev (1912-1997). He grew up and studied during the period of the Stalinism and until the Sixties he can be considered as an “homo sovieticus”, who devoted himself to the Communism and his leading figure, Stalin. Victim of the regime he believed into, Kopelev spent nine years in a šaraška, and, after events such as the Prague Spring, he permanently left his believes and his idol Stalin. As a child Kopelev learned German, since he lived in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Kiev of the beginning of the century, and the contact with the German world can be considered as a constant in his life: during the Second World War he worked as an interpreter with German prisoners and in the Sixties he became a germanist by profession. Thanks to different inputs he received as a young man and thanks to the continuous contact with the German world, he underwent a path of personal growth, enriched by the friendship with Heinrich Böll, whose ethical ideals influenced him and led him to develop a project of dialogue and openness towards the “other”.  This personal evolution converted him from being a convinced communist to becoming a dissident.  Deprived of Soviet citizenship in the Eighties, he spent the rest of his life in the West Germany and he devoted his life to examine in depth the links between Russians and Germans towards the centuries. This research led to a great project: the “Wuppertaler Projekt zur Erforschung der Geschichte Deutsch-Russischer Fremdenbilder”. In this work Kopelev firstly analysed the evolution of the relationship between the two nations from a literary, political, social and cultural point of view; secondly, he examined the genesis and the development of the prejudices of the ones towards the others and vice versa.  This work can be considered as the final point of Kopelev’s intellectual development: first of all as a scientist, since he condensed his knowledge in German and Russian literature, history and culture, but also as a man, because it was the result of the moral teaching he had learned from his own experience.