Elizabeth Markstein

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Elisabeth Markstein Collection Collection Identifier: MSE/REE 0017

Abstract: Elisabeth Markstein (1929-2013) was highly regarded for her translations from Russian to German, including Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago (under the pen name Anna Peturnig). She was also a teacher and literary scholar as well as a staunch supporter of the dissident writers in the Soviet Union. This collection consists of personal documents, correspondence (family, personal, and professional), papers dealing with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, scholarly research materials, photographs, and finally,... Dates: 1890s-2013; Majority of material found in ( 1930s-1990s)

Found in: University of Notre Dame Rare Books & Special Collections / Elisabeth Markstein Collection

Source Elisabeth Markstein Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Hesburgh Libraries of Notre Dame. https://archivesspace.library.nd.edu/repositories/3/resources/1599 

Biographical / Historical

Elisabeth Markstein (1929-2013) was a prominent Austrian translator and literary scholar and a courageous and dedicated human rights activist. She was a close friend of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Lev Kopelev, and Efim Etkind, and she was instrumental in bringing to the West and, thus preserving, works that had only been available in samizdat. Besides Dostoevskii's novel The Gambler, Marsktein translated works of Viktor Nekrasov, Vasilii Grossman, Friedrich Gorenstein, Vasilii Aksenov, and Vasilii Shalamov. Under the name Anna Peturnig she translated Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.

She was born Elisabeth Koplenig in 1929. Her parents Johann (1891-1968) and Hilde (1904-2002) were important Austrian intellectuals and activists in the international communist and workers' movement. Johann Koplenig served as chairman of the Austrian Communist Party from 1945 to 1965, playing a key role in the party's activities before and after World War II. Hilde Koplenig worked as an activist and writer for the international labor and communist movements. Because of these political affiliations and because Hilde was Jewish, the family was forced to leave Austria after 1933. During the ensuing years they lived in various locations throughout Europe. Elisabeth attended school in Zürich and Paris, but she spent most of her formative years in the Soviet Union, where she lived with her parents during the 1930s and then during the Second World War. She graduated high school in Moscow and returned to Vienna in 1945.

After returning to Austria, from 1946 to 1952, she pursued Slavic studies at the U. of Vienna, spending a year at Moscow State U. In 1952 she completed her doctorate in Russian literature. The subject of her dissertation was Maxim Gorky and socialistic realism. That same year she married the journalist and writer, Heinz Markstein (1924-2008), with whom she eventually had three daughters. From 1956 to 1958 she studied at the Translation Institute in Vienna and became a certified Russian translator, and in 1966 she began her teaching career, first in Vienna, then Innsbruck, Graz, and Vienna again. From 1975 to 1976 she was a guest lecturer at the U. of Texas at Austin. She continued to teach at the Translation Institute in Vienna until her retirement in 2003. Throughout her lifetime Markstein maintained close ties with the international communist and workers' movement; however, during the 1960s such events as the suppression of the "Prague Spring" contributed to changing her views on Soviet-style socialism and the communist movement more broadly. In March of 1971 she was expelled from the party for activities damaging to the communist cause. In 2010 she published her memoirs entitled Moskau ist viel schöner als Paris.

Elisabeth Markstein achieved prominence as a translator and literary scholar. In 1989 she won the Austrian State Prize for Literary Translation (Österreichischen Staatspreis für literarische Übersetzung), and in 2014 the University of Austria posthumously established a special prize to commemorate her accomplishments in that same area. However, despite the importance of her translations, she will probably best be remembered for the key role she played in bringing the literary work of Solzhenitsyn to the West, acting as his personal liaison and connecting him with the attorney Fritz Heeb. Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel prize in 1970; from the late 1960s through 1974, the year of his exile from the Soviet Union, Elisabeth Markstein worked tirelessly, often at great personal risk, with a clandestine network of Solzhenitsyn's supporters inside the USSR as well as with Western literary agents and publishers outside the country. Using the code name of "Betta," she played a critical part in the triangle formed by herself, Fritz Heeb ("Iura"), Nikita Struve ("Kolya"), as well as Stepan Tatischeff ("Émile") to translate and publish Solzhenitsyn. She passed away in 2013 and is survived by her daughter Catherine as well as five grandchildren

Source Elisabeth Markstein Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Hesburgh Libraries of Notre Dame. https://archivesspace.library.nd.edu/repositories/3/resources/1599

Elizabeth Markstein recollection

Elisabeth Markstein now at the age of eighty, recalls her “life between two worlds” in loosely composed stories and portraits. She lived in hard times and has become more and more [indulgent]. She grew up in different countries and with different foster parents. His father, Johann Koplenig, a shoemaker from Carinthia, had formed the Communist Party of Austria out of hostile revolutionary sects in 1924, and his mother, who came from a middle-class Jewish family, went underground with him in 1933. They took their child with comrades in Zurich, then in the Sudetenland and only later brought them to Moscow, to the legendary "Hotel Lux". Although neighbors, teachers and classmates kept disappearing from the "Lux", the girl was convinced until 1945 that she "lived in a paradisiacal land". After returning to Austria, the young woman gradually evaded the dogmatic guidelines of the party, of which her father remained chairman until his death in 1968. She loved him so much that she chose a pseudonym when she translated Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Archipelago Gulag into German. She was a helpful friend to many persecuted Russian authors who smuggled their manuscripts abroad or was ready when they were expatriated: Jossif Brodski, Solzhenitsyn, Vasily Axionov, Kopelev. Cautious but unmistakable is the sadness of her life story. Of the three daughters that she raised with her husband, the author Heinz Markstein, whose childhood was so unprotected, two died at a young age, as did her beloved brother Ernst, the talented poet who, at nineteen years old succumbed to cancer. "You will stay with me as long as I live," she says, the life-loving one, about all her dead. (English translation from German text using google translate and may not be an accurate translation of the original text).

Source https://www.nzz.ch/sich_behaupten_zwischen_den_welten-1.7747868?red...

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