Ksenia Zorina. Called Anna

Called Anna
Ksenia Zorina

Publication date: February 22, 2000

Anne Frank. Refuge: Diary in letters: Trans. from the Netherlands S. Belokrinitskaya and M. Novikova. Preface George Soros. Afterword Ekaterina Genieva. - M.: Text, 1999.

Alexey Kapler has a story “Two out of Twenty Millions”. The partisans, surrounded by the Germans, are dying of thirst in the Odessa catacombs. The nurse takes a bucket and crawls to the only well for water. The German soldier looks at her, takes aim - and does not shoot. She returns, gives water to the wounded, then the Red Army comes, the war ends, they get married, give birth to a child, look for work, stand in line for an apartment, quarrel, make up... And suddenly again - she crawls for water, the soldier looks at her, takes aim, shoots. There was nothing.

Anne Frank's diary is, in fact, also something that did not happen. The Frank family was supposed to go to a concentration camp and die in 1942 - but they ended up in 1944. Between these figures fit two absurd years, an existence that by many standards could not be called life at all if Anne Frank had not left behind a text proving that they existed - both life and Anne herself. Only the rigor of this proof by contradiction (in every sense of the word) can explain the special place that the Diary occupies among other books, and the impression that it still makes.

The impression, however, is ambivalent. So ambivalent that when you are about to say what you really think, you experience a painful feeling of shame.

The book - at least the book that was published in Russian by the Text publishing house - leaves a feeling of grandiose speculation. It seems that the true Anne was ground by the millstones of history twice: when the Germans occupied Holland and when, after the war, Anne Frank's father, the Anne Frank Foundation in Basel, and so on and so forth took her diary and began to distribute it throughout the world.

Everything here is true - and at the same time, if not a lie, then still a half-truth. Starting with photographs. The canonical ones, those placed on the covers of both the old and new editions, are photographs of a ten to twelve year old girl. Child. When Anne Frank began writing a diary, she was thirteen years old; when she stopped, she was fifteen. She was completely different, she was an adult. To be honest, there shouldn't be any photo on the cover. She just can't be there.

On the title page is the word “Refuge” - but Anne Frank never called her diary that, she wanted to write a novel about Refuge after the war, and this is not the same thing at all. The name given to the old Soviet publication for whatever political reasons, “The Diary of Anne Frank,” is much more honest.

Finally, the text itself. What we are reading also cannot quite be called Anne Frank's diary. Yes, all the words were written by her - but there are at least four versions of this text. The version, called version A, is the diary that Anna kept from June 1942. Version B is a text rewritten by herself in 1944, with cuts, corrections and additions. (A radio broadcast from the Dutch government in exile said that after the war it would be necessary to collect all evidence about it, including diaries, and Anne herself began to prepare her diary for publication.) Version C is a text compiled from two manuscripts of Anne Frank, a shortened version, from which fragments have been removed that are more or less related to sex or contain unflattering characteristics of the people with whom Anna hid for two years in the back of the house at Prinstengracht 263, in the office of the joint-stock company for the production of jam "Opecta", once led by by her father, in a hiding place behind a bookcase. This version was published for more than forty years - until the last one was finally released, created by the writer and translator Miriam Pressler based on version C with additions from the first two.

Whose text is this? What is here from thirteen-year-old Anne Frank, who was given a notebook in a beautiful checkered cover for her birthday? What about fifteen-year-old Anna, who passionately wanted to become a writer and rushed along an unknown, painful literary path: to edit her own manuscript? What - from each and every editor? Who is the real author? Miriam Pressler? Why should we believe the editor's chosen combination of real names, pseudonyms, and initials? Why were the Germanisms that Anna naturally inserted into her native Dutch language removed? Why aren't there any - none! - textual comments? Why are there no comments at all? There is a two-page "history of this book", but there is not a word about how it really happened.

The point is not that untruth has crept in somewhere, but that the truth seems to be of no particular interest to anyone. The principle of “all information in the text” is good in its own way, but don’t those people who, risking their lives, hide eight “illegal immigrants” deserve at least a few words? Two years of Anne Frank's life and her diary are, after all, their feat. At least this is required simply as a human being, in any publication. Some information from the history of the Netherlands would also be useful, because for the average reader everything connected with real life, from the exchange rate to the attitude towards the royal family, is a dark forest. And the actual history of the occupation: this is not the Eastern, but the Western Front... Anna’s former classmates organize receptions and sign up for the kayaking club... To understand, you need to know at least something.

All of the above one way or another comes down to one thing - lack of reflection. The text looks blatantly implausible (however, the implausibility is partly explainable: the original literary quality, novelism, if you like, artificiality are caused by the fact that the text was written by a writer, albeit fifteen years old), but none of those who prepared the book for publication tried to comprehend either the text itself or the fate facing behind him.

In Russian, “Refuge” appears as a purely sacred text, which means it neither requires nor tolerates comment. The fact that there is a scientific publication in Holland does not change anything - the editorial office that is before us is intended for the general reader, that is, it is designed to educate. And education is a dangerous thing, it gravitates towards pathos and abstract noble examples. The essence of education is speculation. The very fact of the existence of this book, its title, its form, the demagogic preface and afterword prove that for those who published it, it is, first of all, a Testimony. But this is cruel and unfair to Anne Frank. This document concerns her life - only her life and experiences, torment, relationships with parents, bad character, love, thoughts about the future. She split into simply Anna and Anna, the author of the text. After her death they made an icon out of her. But she is an author, not a witness.

The horror of what happened is realized precisely because this book exists. If Anne Frank had lived, she would not exist. She would burn her diary or hide it at the bottom of the closet, write a novel, ten novels... If she were alive, she would have a choice. But she was left with no choice - neither those who killed her, nor those who published it.

The book is wonderful. Those who read it at the age of eleven, thirteen, fifteen (in the old, abridged version, translated by Rita Wright-Kovaleva) and used its language to express their own feelings remember it all their lives. But they remember it as a text, as a novel in letters. And not as a Testimony.