For the first time Trotsky’s diary in Siberia is translated into Spanish

Siglo XXI Publishers publishes The escape from Siberia in a reindeer sleightravel diary Leon Trotskywhich is translated for the first time into Spanish.

The edition of the book was prepared by Horace Tarcus, director of the Center for Documentation and Research of the Culture of the Left. With the translation, directly from Russian, it is the work of Irina Cheronovathe volume has a presentation of Leonardo Padura titled “Trotskyup close and inside, to the way there and back”, in which he defines this work as “a booklet that, due to the closeness between the narrated events and its writing –due to the historical situation in which these events occur, the age and the degree of political commitment of its author at the moment of living what he narrates and, immediately, deciding to capture it–, gives us a young Trotsky almost pure. And this in all his facets: that of a politician, that of a writer, that of a man of culture and, above all, that of a human being”.

The strenuous days, in which Lev Davidovich Bronstein crossed the Siberian steppe, they happened in the winter of 1907, the same year in which he published the book under the pseudonym N. Trotskyunder the seal of Shipovnik, although the author narrated his second exile in frigid Siberia (the first was between 1900 and 1902).

In addition to Padura’s introduction, a note from Tarcus and a “Coda. The reunion with Natalia Sedova as narrated Trotsky in his autobiography My life”, the text consists of two parts: “The going. Fragment of letters” and “The return”. The first, indicates Horacio Tarcus, is made up of “a series of letters that Trotsky he sends a correspondent – ​​who keeps anonymous – at each stopover on his way to Beryozov”; in the second part “it takes the form of a chronicle, in which the narrator takes up details about Siberia from his notebook”.

The writer Leonardo Padura points out that “The escape from Siberia appears as an unexpected crack that allows us to peek into the intimate personality of the full-time political and revolutionary man and his relations with the human condition. It also constitutes a sample of his literary abilities (not in vain for a time he was nicknamed ‘La Pluma’) and, as a climax, its publication, for the first time in Spanish, may be a tribute to the memory of a thinker, writer and fighter murdered more than eighty years ago who, in today’s world of so many faithless, still makes some think that utopia is possible. Or, at least, necessary.