Mario Vargas Llosa in Soviet Union. Dedicated to Llosa’s 85th anniversary

Abstract

The present article is a publication of a report by Tamara Zlochevskaya, a translator of the Foreign Commission of the Union of Soviet Writers, on the stay of the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa in the USSR in 1968, provided with a introduction by the researcher and explanations to the text. This is the first publication of a document preserved in the Russian State Archives of Literature and Art (RGALI). It’s known that at the end of the 60s the writer found himself disappointed in socialism, although the reasons for this disenchantment could be various factors from visits to socialist countries to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the reaction of the Cuban leadership to those events. The accompanying translator's report is a rare source about Llosa's visit to Moscow, which we hardly know about. The testimony of T.Zlochevskaya, as well as the analysis of the correspondence between M. Vargas Llosa and the Foreign Commission, shed light on the misunderstandings between the writer and Soviet institutions related with the censorship and author’s emolument for the novel "The Time of the Hero".