The Incredible Story of the Book “The Country of White Lilies” of Grigoriy Petrov

Many works about Russian exile literature written abroad were unpublished for years during the Soviet Union period. Some of these works, which lost their originals in Russian language, met with the Russian readers in the 1990s after being translated from the Western languages in Russian. The Russian writer Grigory Spriridovich Petrov’s book The Country of White Lilies due to the intense interest of the Turkish readers was preserved in the approximately 60 years period of prohibition. The book and his author, whose name was forgotten in the Soviet Union, continued to be published in the Balkans and Asia and only 81 years later was published in Russian language. The original was first translated in Turkish and from the Turkish translation the book was translated in Arabic and Finnish. The Country of White Lilies has more than eighty publications and up to ten different translations from Bulgarian and Russian editions in Turkey.