Dobrovolskaya Julia Abramovna is widely known in pedagogical and scientific circles. Her merit was the creation of the best Italian language textbook in the world, the most complete dictionaries: Russian-Italian and Italian-Russian.
She has translated many films, books, articles in her life, trained countless students. Professor of Milan, Trieste, Trent University Dobrovolskaya did more than anyone else to popularize the Russian language in Italy. More than once, the Italian government awarded her prizes in the field of culture.
Childhood, youth
08/25/1917 in Nizhny Novgorod in the family of the arborist was born the future scholar-philologist Julia Dobrovolskaya. Her biography in the years of adolescence was noted by the family moving to the Northern capital. Her father went to work as a planner at Leningrad production, and her mother - a teacher of English.
After graduating from school, the girl in the choice of profession followed in the footsteps of her mother, enrolling in the philological faculty of LIFLI. Julia's teachers were immensely lucky: the world-famous scientist Propp V. Ya. Fundamentally taught students not just the German language, but explained how to feel this language.
Until the end of her life, Julia Abramovna was grateful to Vladimir Yakovlevich for being taught her the basics of art - to be a polyglot. In the future, using the knowledge gained, Yulia Dobrovolskaya was able to learn almost all the basic European languages on her own.
A brilliant education gave rise to euphoria: the future seemed an enthusiastic Komsomol member with “castles in the air”.
She was forced to sign
Those who read her biography may have an association with the lines of Vladimir Vysotsky: “Snow without dirt, like a long life without lies …”.
She saw such snow in a camp near Moscow. And before that, she was indicted on a sweeping charge of treason (Article 58-1 “a”), for which she was supposed to be shot or 15 years in prison. Yulia Dobrovolskaya, despite the pressure, withstood and did not admit the imposed guilt.
This woman did not talk about what measures of influence were applied to her by the shoulder cases by masters in thick-walled casemates. Only one phrase came off her mouth: “You can only imagine: Lubyanka, Lefortovo, Butyrka …”
After failed attempts to break, she was sent to the Khovrinsky camp. The "memory" of those times for her life remained the inability to have children due to hard labor.
The 28-year-old woman was released under the amnesty of 1945.
Dobrovolskaya about Stalin's missionaries in Spain
She became objectionable after the "business trip" to Spain.
Komsomol member Yulia Dobrovolskaya responded to the call of a “man in civilian clothes” who recruited translators to participate in helping Republicans. But for three years of work, the girl understood why Stalin sent 30 thousand military and enkavedesh specialists.
The “internationalists” with military dressings served as advisers not only in the armed formations of the Republicans, but also as consultants in the hastily created analogue of the NKVD. The homeland of Cervantes was prepared to become a country of partocracy. From the local communists of the Popular Front, the visitors made a semblance of Bolshevik commissars.
Those expropriated private property, dealt with their own countrymen. The Spanish Catholics were forcibly tried to turn into atheists, blew up churches, killed priests. Events developed according to the Stalinist canons of the "class struggle".
Spaniards Guilty
The population, who received the "comrades" who came to them as anti-fascists, saw their deeds, rebelled and supported their military, who raised a rebellion. In particular, the “Spanish Chapaev” (previously trained at the Frunze Academy, a friend of Julia Abramovna Valentin Gonzalez) came to the conclusion that the communists were similar to fascists.
At the cost of a million lives of the Spaniards, the Republicans were defeated, and the "internationalists" expelled. Julia Dobrovolskaya, returning to her homeland, kept quiet about what she saw and experienced.
She had friends among passionaries, who later became disillusioned with the USSR. The girl-translator was a notable person (this is evidenced by her image in the novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Ernest Hemingway).
Obviously, the young woman who returned to the USSR was repressed “in advance and just in case”: out of fear that she could write about the Spanish war in the Western media or do something like that.
After 40 years, the translator will be in Barcelona, and she will leave the plane with a heavy heart, feeling shame for the mission of youth.
Helped to survive
As Yulia Abramovna recalls, for her, under oppression, the most important thing was not to become embittered, not to stop seeing good things in people. She followed this rule, noting, remembering and thanks to people who, at the call of the soul, do good deeds. However, among them she is especially grateful:
- his decent first husband, Evgeny Aleksandrovich Dobrovolsky, a nomenclature worker who married a “zechka” and sacrificed his career;
- the engineer of the Khovrinsky factory camp Mikhailov, who arranged her as a translator;
- a gray-haired, thinner police chief who, at his own risk, issued her a passport in return for a release certificate.
Tell me who your friend is …
This ancient Roman proverb has stood the test of time. Many years of friendship connected Julia Dobrovolskaya with many worthy and wonderful people:
- prisoner of the Gulag, human rights activist, literary critic Leo Razgon;
- poet, translator, publicist Korney Chukovsky;
- publicist, translator, poet, journalist Ilya Erenburg;
- Campessino (Valentin Gonzalez), Republican commander, subsequently repressed;
- Italian children’s storyteller Gianni Rodari;
- painter Renato Guttuso;
- Professor of Moscow State University Merab Mamardashvili;
- writer Nina Berberova, wife of Vladislav Khodasevich.
Personal life
Yulia Dobrovolskaya, after her release, taught at the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages from 1946 to 1950. She was engaged in pedagogical and translation activities.
Competent and principled, it was inconvenient for partisan manipulators. An occasion to blame her was soon found. Once Yulia Abramovna translated an article of Catholic content. The teacher and translator fully experienced the "freedom of conscience in the Soviet format."
She was fired from her job. The pressure was so strong that her first husband, Evgeni Dobrovolsky, left her.
However, Yulia Dobrovolskaya managed to prove her case after the fact and get a job at MGIMO. There she began to look after the head of the department of Romance languages S. Gonionsky, they got married. Semyon Aleksandrovich became a real support and support to his wife. Due to her husband’s illness, Dobrovolskaya was widowed after nineteen years.
Professional activity
The reason for the professor to leave the USSR was an official ban on her receiving an international award.
In 1964, Yulia Dobrovolskaya, “Practical Course of the Italian Language”, finished work on her legendary textbook. By the way, so far (for half a century) this manual is basic for philological students. For this work, recognized as classic, in 1970 the Italian government awarded the professor of MGIMO Yulia Abramovna a national prize for achievements in the field of culture.
However, the Soviet government did not allow her to go abroad for awarding. Julia Dobrovolskaya, a world-famous translator, felt like in her youth, locked in the walls of the casemates. She, sincerely expecting that with the fall of the bloody regime of the leader and the advent of the thaw of the 60s, could finally work freely, was bitterly disappointed. The professor realized that it was not the institution bureaucracy that poisoned her - she was objectionable to the system.
Julia Abramovna could not make more experiments on herself. In 1982, she enters into a fictitious marriage with an Italian citizen and leaves the country. In this, the Milanese friend Emmy Moresco helped her, asking for a favor from her friend Hugo Giussani.
"Teacher for life"
Having left for Italy from the USSR, Julia Dobrovolskaya remained the same “teacher”: she was always surrounded by a sea of students with questions. She prompted, taught, recommended. She worked furiously, despite her 65 years of age.
It so happened that the title of Soviet professor did not mean much here, although local linguists were amazed at the vast knowledge of the Russian teacher. Julia Abramovna liked to say that nobody gave her anything. Seven years later, she became a professor in Italy. Her defense of her doctoral dissertation was an event for the scientific community of this country.
Dobrovolskaya always felt like a representative of a great culture - Russian. She participated in the publication of translated books by Russian classics. The Italians admired the “Russian teacher”: the writer Marcello Venturi talked about her in his novel: “Gorky Street, 8, apartment 106”. (Once it was her home address).
Often, tears appeared in front of her Italian students when, at their request, Julia Dobrovolskaya narrated her life. The biography of the translator and teacher reminded them of an adventure novel: “How? Did you really have to go through this ?! After her death in 2016, university colleagues respectfully acknowledged that her works are adequate to the scientific merits of the whole team.
It just so happened that two countries, two cultures, two civilizations were reflected in the difficult fate of this woman.
