'Boynya nomer pyat'

I found another one of those things in the attic at the dacha that complicates my understanding of the life of the mind in the Soviet Union. Like many summer cottages, ours also serves as an off-site storage place, with a ton of musty old books and journals lying about. There are tons of science journals (my father-in-law is a physicist), books about chess (my wife's grandfather was a fanatic), and a little used complete collected works of V.I. Lenin (pages of which are frequently used as kindling when the family makes shashlik).

They  also have a large number of crinkled copies of the literary journal Novy Mir, which had a fascinating run in the 1960s. Every time I look into a random one, I find something surprising.

This time, I opened the issue from March 1970, and discovered a lengthy excerpt from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, which had been published only the year before.

It is particularly poignant, because that book was one of the nine books banned by a New York school district and led to the landmark 1982 Supreme Court case Island Trees School District v. Pico, which found that the First Amendment applies to school libraries too.

And it is particularly ironic that the book remains to this day, in America, the source of controversy for being too dangerous for young minds. The school board in Republic, Missouri, just this summer decided to ban it.