Julia Dobrovolskaya: biography, activities and interesting facts

Dobrovolskaya Julia Abramovna is widely known in pedagogical and scientific circles. Her credit was the creation of the world's best textbook of the Italian language, the most complete dictionaries: Russian-Italian and Italian-Russian.

She for her life translated many films, books, articles, taught innumerable number of students. The professor of Milan, Trieste, Trent University, Dobrovolskaya has done more than anyone else to popularize the Russian language in Italy. More than once the Italian government awarded it with prizes in the field of culture.

Childhood, youth

25.08.1917 in Nizhny Novgorod in the family of a silviculturist, the future scholar-philologist Julia Dobrovolskaya was born. Her biography during her adolescence was marked by the family's move to the northern capital. Her father went to work as a planner for the Leningrad production, and my mother - as an English teacher.

After graduating from school, the girl chose the profession in the footsteps of her mother, enrolling at the Faculty of Philology LIFLI. With teachers Julia immensely lucky: the world-famous scientist Propp V.Ya. fundamentally taught students not just German, but explained how to feel this language.

Until the end of her life Julia Abramovna was grateful to Vladimir Yakovlevich for teaching her the basics of art - to be a polyglot. Later, using the received knowledge, Julia Dobrovolskaya managed to master practically all the basic European languages practically independently.

A brilliant education engendered euphoria: the future seemed to the enthusiastic Komsomol member "air locks".

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 lying ...".

She saw such snow in the camp outside Moscow. And before that, she was indicted for treason (Article 58-1 "a"), for which relied on the shooting or 15 years in prison. Julia Dobrovolskaya, in spite of pressure, stood and did not recognize the imposed guilt.

This woman did not talk about what measures of influence were applied to her by shoulder-strapping masters in thick-wall casemates. Only one phrase broke from her lips: "You can only imagine: Lubyanka, Lefortovo, Butyrka ..."

After the failed attempts to break, she was sent to the Khovrin camp. "Memory" of those times for her for life remained the inability to have children due to hard labor.

At liberty, a 28-year-old woman was released under an amnesty in 1945.

Dobrovolskaya about Stalin's missionaries in Spain

She became displeased after the "business trip" to Spain.

Komsomolskaya Yulia Dobrovolskaya responded to the call of a "man in civilian clothes" who recruited translators to participate in helping the Republicans. But for three years of work the girl understood why Stalin sent 30 thousand military and Enkavadeshny specialists.

"Internationalists" with military bearing 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 birthplace of Cervantes was preparing to become a country of partocracy. From the local communists of the "Popular Front", the visitors made the likeness of the Bolshevik commissars.

Those expropriated private property, cracked down with their fellow countrymen. The Catholic Spaniards were forcibly tried to turn into atheists, blew up churches, killed priests. Events developed according to the Stalinist canons of the "class struggle".

Awareness of guilt before the Spaniards

The population who accepted the "comrades" who came to them as anti-fascists, seeing their deeds, rose and supported their military, who raised the insurgency. In particular, the "Spanish Chapaev" (formerly trained at the Frunze Academy, Yulia Abramovna's friend Valentin Gonzalez) came to the conclusion that the Communists were similar to the fascists.

The Republicans were defeated at the cost of one million Spanish lives, and the "internationalists" were expelled. Julia Dobrovolskaya, returning home, kept quiet about what she had seen and experienced.

She had acquaintances among passionaries, subsequently disillusioned in 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, they repressed the young woman who returned to the USSR "in advance and just in case": for fear that she could write about the Spanish war in the Western media or do something like that.

After 40 years, the interpreter will be in Barcelona, and she will descend from the plane's ramp with a heavy heart, feeling ashamed of the mission of her youth.

Helping to survive

As Julia Abramovna recalls, it was the most important thing for her, who was under oppression, not to be embittered, not to stop seeing good in people. She followed this rule, noticing, remembering and thanks to people who, by the call of the soul, do good deeds. However, among them she is especially grateful:

• Her decent first husband, Dobrovolsky Evgeny Aleksandrovich, a nomenklatura worker who married a "zechka" and sacrificed his career;
• Engineer Mikhail Khovrinsky camp-camp Mikhailova, who arranged her interpreter;
• A gray-haired, inferior police chief who, at his own risk and risk, gave her a passport in return for a certificate of release.

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 Lev Razgon;
• Poet, translator, publicist Korney Chukovsky;
• Publicist, translator, poet, journalist Ilya Ehrenburg;
• Campessino (Valentin Gonzalez), Republican commander, subsequently repressed;
• The Italian children's writer-storyteller Gianni Rodari;
• The painter Renato Guttuso;
• Professor of the Moscow State University Merab Mamardashvili;
• Writer Nina Berberova, wife of Vladislav Khodasevich.

Personal life

Julia Dobrovolskaya after liberation taught at the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages from 1946 to 1950. She was engaged in teaching and translation activities.

Competent and principled, it was inconvenient for party manipulators. The reason to blame her soon found. Once Julia Abramovna translated an article of Catholic content. The teacher and interpreter fully experienced "freedom of conscience in the Soviet format".

She was fired from her job. Pressing was so strong that her first husband Evgeny Dobrovolsky left her.

However, Julia Dobrovolskaya succeeded in an afterthought to prove her case and get a job in MGIMO. There she was taken care of by the Head of the Department of Romance Languages Gonionsky SA, they were married. His wife Semyon Alexandrovich became a real support and support. Because of her husband's illness, Dobrovolskaya, after nineteen years, was widowed.

Professional activity

The reason for leaving the USSR professor was an official ban on her receiving an international award.

In 1964, Julia Dobrovolskaya "Practical Course of the Italian Language" finished her work on her legendary textbook. By the way, so far (for half a century) this manual is the base for students of philology. For this work, recognized as classical, in 1970 the Italian government awarded the teacher of Moscow State Institute of International Relations Julia Abramovna with a national award for achievements in the field of culture.

However, the Soviet authorities did not allow her to go abroad for rewarding. Julia Dobrovolskaya, a world-renowned interpreter, felt herself, as in her youth, locked in the walls of casemates. She, sincerely expecting that with the fall of the bloody regime of the leader and with the advent of thaw of the 60's can finally work freely, bitterly disappointed. The professor realized that it was not the institution bureaucracy at all that poisoned her - she was not fit for the system.

Julia Abramovna could not take any more experiments on herself. In 1982, she enters into a fictitious marriage with an Italian citizen and leaves the country. In this she was helped by a Milanese friend Emmy Moresco, who asked for a favor from her acquaintance Hugo Giussani.

"A life teacher"

Having left for Italy from the USSR, Dobrovolskaya Julia remained the same "teacher": she was always surrounded by a sea of students with questions. She prompted, taught, recommended. I worked furiously, despite my 65-year-old age.

It so happened that the title of Soviet professor here meant little, although local linguists were amazed at the vast knowledge of the Russian teacher. Julia Abramovna liked to say that no one gave her anything. After seven years 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 of Russian classics. The Italians admired the "Russian teacher": the writer Marcello Venturi told about it in his novel: "Gorky Street, 8, flat 106". (Once it was her home address).

Often, in front of her Italian students, there were tears when, at their request, Julia Dobrovolskaya told about her life. The biography of the translator and the teacher reminded them of an adventure novel: "How did you really go through this?" After her death in 2016, university colleagues respectfully recognized that her works are adequate to the scientific merits of the whole team.

It so happened that two countries, two cultures, two civilizations were reflected in the difficult fate of this woman.

Conclusion

After the collapse of the USSR, she repeatedly visited her homeland, willingly giving interviews.

At the end of her uneasy life Julia Dobrovolskaya left the epistolary memory of her compatriots. The educational books Italo-Russian, which came out from under her pen, were supplemented with a biographical collection "Post Scriptum. Instead of memoirs. "

The teacher, the world-renowned translator, truthfully and in a manner of confidential conversation told readers about the world in which she lived, her thoughts and feelings, her friends.
After her death, those who knew her agreed that after her departure there was no impression of emptiness, lack of clarity. She managed to do everything, she said everything and wrote everything.