Un indispensabile atto d’amore. Le lettere dal gulag (1948-1954) di Aleksandr Klibanov a sua moglie Natal’ja El’cina

Aleksandr Ilich Klibanov (1910-1994), a well-known scholar of the history of Russian sectarianism and heresies, spent about 12 years in a forced labour camp, having been charged twice (in 1936 and then in 1948) of taking part in a Trotskyist, counter-revolutionary organization. Like many survivors of deportation to Soviet camps, Aleksandr Klibanov also felt the need to give his testimony and chose to do so in the manner most congenial to him, preparing – with the historian’s acumen, inherited in large part from Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich (1873-1955) – a kind of critical edition of his correspondence (from 1932 to 1955) with his wife (Natal’ja El’tsina), accompanying it with a long and complex critical commentary. Forgotten for decades and only recently published, Klibanov’s book of remembrance, due to the intensity of the love sentiment and the role of consolation assigned to literature, provides us with an unpublished and extremely moving portrait of the great scholar.