Une personnalité très attachante que celle de ce grand germaniste russe avec un parcours commun à beaucoup d’intellectuels juifs soviétiques.Enthousiasme pour l’idéal communiste,purges staliniennes, camps, dissidence, exil, combat en faveur des droits de l’homme.
En 1980, alors qu’il effectue un voyage d’étude en Allemagne de l’Ouest, sa citoyenneté lui est retirée. Il reste alors en Allemagne où il est professeur à l’Université de Wuppertal. Il obtient le grade de docteur en philosophie à l’Université de Cologne et obtient de nombreuses récompenses internationales. En 1990, Gorbatchev lui restaure sa citoyenneté soviétique. Lev Kopelev décède en 1997 à Cologne.
Il jouit en Allemagne, d’une certaine notoriété , grâce à son travail infatigable en faveur de la réconciliation et de l’amitié germano-russe.
Un forum en langue allemande (entre autres) lui est d’ailleurs consacré.
Pour en savoir plus sur ce grand Monsieur……Les infos en français, sont hélas, assez rares.
Il parle ici, avec un délicieux accent russe, des relations entre les peuples. 
Merci de nous avoir présenté ce monsieur que je ne connaissais pas !
Merci également de nous l’avoir fait connaitre!
En 1962, Heinrich Böll se rend pour la première fois en Union soviètique où il fait la connaissance de son collègue Lev Kopelev. De cette rencontre naitra une amitié. Vingt années durant, les deux hommes correspondront, au nez et à la barbe de la censure, grâce à l’aide d’intermédiaires.Cette correspondance témoigne d’une époque pas si éloignée que cela et pourtant révolue.La république de Bonn, la dictature soviètique, la guerre froide, tout y est.Dans leurs échanges épistolaires est également abordé le traumatisme de la seconde guerre mondiale.
Le livre est paru en décembre 2011, (Böll-Stiftung.)
Kopelev was born in Kiev, Ukraine, to a middle-class Jewish family. In 1926, his family moved to Kharkov. While a student at Kharkov State University in the philosophy faculty, Kopelev began writing in the Russian and Ukrainian languages; some of his articles were published in the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.
An idealist Communist and active Bolshevik, he was first arrested in March 1929 for « consorting with the Bukharinist and Trotskyist opposition, » and spent ten days in prison.
Later, he worked as an editor of radio news broadcasts at a locomotive factory. In 1932, as a correspondent, Kopelev witnessed the NKVD’s forced grain requisitioning and the dekulakization. Later, he described the Holodomor in his memoirs The Education of a True Believer. Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow later quoted him directly. (see also Collectivisation in the USSR).
He graduated from the Moscow State Institute of Foreign Languages in 1935 in the German language faculty, and, after 1938, he taught at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History where he earned a PhD.
When the German-Soviet War broke out in June 1941, he volunteered for the Red Army and used his knowledge of German to serve as a propaganda officer and an interpreter. When he entered East Prussia with the Red Army throughout the East Prussian Offensive, he sharply criticized the atrocities against the German civilian population and was arrested in 1945 and sentenced to a ten-year term in the Gulag for fostering bourgeois humanism and for « compassion towards the enemy ». In the sharashka Marfino he met Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Kopelev became a prototype for Rubin from The First Circle.
Released in 1954, in 1956 he was rehabilitated. Still an optimist and believer in the ideals of Communism, during the Khrushchev Thaw he restored his Communist (CPSU) membership. In 1957–1969 he taught in the Moscow Institute of Polygraphy and the Institute of History of Arts. It was Kopelev who approached Aleksandr Tvardovsky, editor of the top Soviet literary journal, the Novy Mir (new world) to urge publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
From 1968 onward Kopelev actively participated in the human rights and dissident movement. In 1968 he was fired from his job and expelled from the CPSU and the Writers’ Union for signing protest letters against the persecution of dissidents, publicly supporting Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel and actively denouncing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He also protested Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion from the Writers’ Union and wrote in defense of dissenting General Pyotr Grigorenko, imprisoned at a psikhushka.
Kopelev’s books were distributed via samizdat and were published in the West.
For his political activism and contacts with the West, he was deprived of the right to teach or be published in 1977.
As a scientist, Kopelev led a research project on the history of Russian-German cultural links at the University of Wuppertal. In 1980, while he was on a study trip to West Germany, his Soviet citizenship was revoked. After 1981 Kopelev was a Professor at the University of Wuppertal.
Kopelev was an honorary Ph.D. at the University of Cologne and a winner of many international awards. In 1990 Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev restored his Soviet citizenship.
Kopelev was married for many years to Raisa Orlova, a Soviet specialist in American literature, who emigrated with him to Germany. Her memoirs were published in the United States in 1984.
Lev Kopelev died in 1997 in Cologne, Germany and was buried in the New Donskoy Cemetery in Moscow.
Quand on cite, merci de mentionner les sources, ici wikipédia anglais, et de ne pas se contenter de les copier-coller.
Wikipédia allemand eut été préférable, étant donné qu’on est un forum sur l’Allemagne.