by Robert Littell. Littell's forte has been novels portraying the ambiguous and treacherous world of espionage (e.g., The Company). In a genre-busting switch, he slips into the skin of Osip Mandelstam, Russia's premier poet of the early 20th century. Mandelstam's verses first supported the Bolshevik Revolution but then turned in disgust from its bloodthirstiness. Mandelstam paid a high price for his poem of conscience, "The Stalin Epigram," which eviscerated Stalin with lines like "His cockroach whiskers leer." Using Mandelstam's widow, Nadezhda, herself a famous chronicler of the Soviet era, as a narrator, along with the voices of fellow writers Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, Littell re-creates the five crucial months that saw Mandelstam's creation emerge only to condemn its maker to a wretched death en route to the Gulag in 1938. (Check Catalog)
Friday, May 8, 2009
The Stalin epigram
by Robert Littell. Littell's forte has been novels portraying the ambiguous and treacherous world of espionage (e.g., The Company). In a genre-busting switch, he slips into the skin of Osip Mandelstam, Russia's premier poet of the early 20th century. Mandelstam's verses first supported the Bolshevik Revolution but then turned in disgust from its bloodthirstiness. Mandelstam paid a high price for his poem of conscience, "The Stalin Epigram," which eviscerated Stalin with lines like "His cockroach whiskers leer." Using Mandelstam's widow, Nadezhda, herself a famous chronicler of the Soviet era, as a narrator, along with the voices of fellow writers Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, Littell re-creates the five crucial months that saw Mandelstam's creation emerge only to condemn its maker to a wretched death en route to the Gulag in 1938. (Check Catalog)
