Somehow (and the link below nicely explains why) the quality of Rait-Kovaleva's translation surprisingly made the book to be appropriate both for USSR censors and for intellectual crowd:
First introduced to readers during Khrushchev’s thaw, Salinger’s novel became an instant sensation among Soviet readers in the nineteen-sixties, and it has remained a classic. The Party authorized the novel’s translation believing that it exposed the rotting core of American capitalism, but Soviet readers were more likely to see the novel in broader terms, as a psychologically nuanced and universally appealing portrait of a misfit who rebels against the pieties of a conformist society. For a postwar intelligentsia chafing under repressive Communist rule, Holden Caulfield’s voice was electrifying—who knew phony better than these daily consumers of official Soviet language? Teen-agers adopted their hero’s speech patterns—or their Russian equivalents—even though the world of “The Catcher in the Rye,” with its private schools, hotel trysts, and jazz clubs, existed across a great abyss.
The whole article starts with tender passage:
A few years later, while taking time off from college, I wound up teaching English in a provincial school in Russia. When Russian acquaintances asked me where I was from, I’d haul out my worn copy of “The Catcher in the Rye” and tell them that I grew up only a few miles from the author’s house. This had a magical effect: it turned out that Salinger was just as revered in Russia as in America—if not more so. “Over the Abyss in Rye,” as “Catcher” is called there, was particularly beloved.
