Raisa Orlova

Raisa Orlova Davydovna - Kopelewa (Russian Раиса Давыдовна Орлова - Копелева, scientific transliteration Raisa Orlova Davydovna - Kopeleva; born July 23, 1918 in Moscow, † May 31 1989 in Cologne) was a Russian writer and American Studies. She was from 1956 the second wife of Lew Kopelev.

Raisa Orlova studied 1935-1940 in the USSR English and American Studies and in 1950 began working as a lecturer in literature in Tallinn and Moscow. In the Russian monthly magazine Foreign Literature ( иностранная литература ) she was Head of Department from 1955 to 1961. Since then she has worked as a freelance writer and literary critic of the American literature of the 19th and 20th centuries (Mark Twain, Jack London, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ernest Hemingway ). After the invasion of the Warsaw Pact countries in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in 1968, she was active in the Soviet civil rights movement. The apartment of the couple Kopelew Orlova in Moscow quickly became a starting point of dissidents and foreign correspondents, among them Fritz Pleitgen and Klaus Bednarz. In 1980 she was expelled from the Writers' Union of the USSR and 1981 after their trip to the West expatriated along with her husband, the writer and civil rights activist Lev Zinovievich Kopelew from the Soviet Union. From then on, they lived mostly in Cologne, where her longtime friend, Heinrich Böll and Annemarie Böll the pair were on hand.

On 31 May 1989 Raisa Orlova died in Cologne, after she had previously been visited their relatives and friends in Moscow. She was buried at the Donskoy Cemetery in Moscow.

Her first book describes very clearly how she slowly finds his way in Germany and how she learned to deal with the peculiarities of the Germans.

Works

  • The doors open slowly (1984 ), Двери открываются медленно (1994 )
  • A past that does not pass. Looking back over five decades (1985 ), Воспоминания о непрошедшем времени ( USA 1983, Moscow 1993)
  • Letters from Cologne Books from Moscow (1987 )
  • When the bell fell silent; Alexander Herzen's last year of life (1988 )
  • Why do I live (1990 posthumous )

Together with her husband she wrote:

  • Boris Pasternak. " Image of the world in the Word " (1986)
  • We lived in Moscow ( 1987), Мы жили в Москве (1 ) ( USA 1988, Moscow 1990)
  • Contemporaries, master, Friends ( 1989), Мы жили в Москве ( 2)
  • We lived in Cologne. Notes and recollections (1996 ), Мы жили в Кёльне (2003)
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