Natalya Yevgenevna Semper

Natalya Yevgenevna Semper (Russian: Натáлья Евгéньевна Сéмпер; 23 August 1911 – 29 October 1995) was a translator, Egyptologist, artist and memoirist.

Biography and works

Descendant of an old Moscow family (related through her father to the brothers Polyakov, Promyshlenniki fur traders and patrons), she was the daughter of Yevgeny Sokolov, a Moscow artist and Tatyana Evert, a ballerina at the Bolshoi Theater. She was a precociously gifted child, mastering several European and Oriental languages, studied philosophy and Eastern cultures, wrote poetry and drew. Considering her name too ordinary, she invented the pseudonym Nelly Semper for herself at 15, which she later used as a professional pseudonym and which was also used by some works of a distinct English traveller. The pseudonym was an important part of her development and accompanied her for the rest of her life.

She wrote memoirs about her academic and dramatic life of Moscow in the 1920s and 30s. She studied for the Higher Degree in Modern Languages at the second Moscow State University (ВКНЯ; 1928–1930) and the Moscow State Linguistic University (МИНЯ) and was employed as a translator and reviewer for the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS; 1935–1938), as well as for the author Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. She also wrote about her imprisonment in a single cell in the Lubyanka during the Great Patriotic War, forced labour on the construction of the Moscow Canal in the gulag. Written shortly before her death, these memoirs are unfinished (the narrative cuts off before 1959).

''Natalya Semper''

She was arrested in July 1949, detained at Lubyanka and then at Butyrka prison. She took this event as a necessary break in a period of mental crisis ("I suppose the possibility of the existence of a rational, cosmic force, which determines the rhythm of life" ... "I was in need of fundamental change and it appeared in the form of the arrest").). She was convicted under article 58 for 10 years and was sent to Vyatlag (1950–1955).

Prison and the gulag not only did not break her, it made her more indomitable ("An entirely interesting life" ... "I love work, and the natural life in the camp was remarkable. And what a variety of people!"), as she became experienced in finding joy and unity with the world: "That shoot of wheat from the dead body of Osiris, suddenly germinated in me the will to live... I began to bring orger to internal chaos, to remove piles of collapsed debris and to clear a space for construction" ; "One can infuse compassion in every step, share sympathetic joy with no one, but it is hardly ever done. Most people associate optimism with egoism, enjoying life with a healthy body, and reject this gift".

She was released in April 1955. For people, accustomed "to fight for survival in the wild and to their own company, reduced to nothing" ... "the transition to normal life was sometimes more difficult than staying in the Archipelago." Acquaintances expected to see an "emaciated 'goner' with a bruised soul, but a returned to their life like wine fermented, astoundingly joyful and happy.".

After she returned from the camp, she earned a living teaching English, German and French, producing summaries for the Institute of Academic Information on Oriental Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences, doing writing work, etc. She wrote regular Egyptological literature reviews in the ''Journal of Ancient History''. She "always preferred physical difficulties – the 'yoke' – and for that reason never served," and thought that she "lived the life of a happy person, full of youth's interesting events, catastrophes, gains, losses... lived just as she wished, despite material and day-to-day difficulties.".

The memoirs of Semper circulated in the samizdat; the autograph is stored in the Manuscripts department of the State Literature Museum.

Critical response

The original publishers of the text believed the very highest talent of the author "was the talent of loving to live – to journey, new friends, bright colours and the covert, innermost things, which invisibly directs people's fates."

Noting the tendency in the twentieth century for the traditionally marginal genre of non-fiction to take the foremost place, the scholar N.P. Krochina notes that N.E. Semper-Sokolova's book "a representative example of the genre of memoirs in the twentieth century," considering her in the context of other examples of the genre, like the diaries of Mikhail Prishvin, ''The Gulag Archipelago'' of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Ilya Ehrenburg's memoirs ''People, Years, Life'', Sergei Durylin's notes ''In His Own Corner'', Andrei Tarkovsky's ''Captured Time'', etc.

In spite of the "rich factographic" autobiographical narrative, Krochina sees "a dominating thread of memory" in the "establishment of an independent personality, radiating joy and will to live," who managed to absorb and within herself the present and historical world views of east and west.

References

Memoirs

* – Beginning
* – Conclusion
*

Academic surveys

*
* — 1960. – No. 1.
*
* – 1975. – No. 3. – 1976. – No. 3. – 1977. – No. 3. – 1978. – No. 3. – 1979. – No. 4. – 1981. – No. 1. – 1983. – No. 1. – 1985. – No. 1.
* – 1962. – No. 1. – 1963. – No. 1. – 1969. – No. 1. – 1970. – No. 1. – 1973. – No. 1.
*
*

Other

* (Offering for Instruction of 5–6 Classes, by leaders in historical circles with a thoroughly developed program of four performances: Ancient Egypt, Babylon, Ancient Greece and the Middle Ages)

Bibliography

*

External links

Memorial
On the website "Мемориала"

Из воспоминаний жителей Вятлага
– Extracts from Accounts of Life at Vyatlag (On the website "Вятлаг" – Vyatlag)

{{DEFAULTSORT:Semper, Natalya Yevgenevna
1911 births
1995 deaths
Russian Egyptologists
Russian memoirists
Soviet dissidents
Soviet painters
Gulag detainees
20th-century Russian translators
20th-century Russian painters
Russian women historians
Russian women painters
20th-century memoirists
20th-century pseudonymous writers