A valuable addition to the growing list of Soviet memoirs, countering sanitized depictions of martyrs and monsters with...
Searing, unsentimental portrait of Soviet intellectuals’ sufferings under Stalin.
Emma Gerstein (1903–2002) created a furor in post-Soviet Russia when she published her blunt accounts of her friendships with poets Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova. Contradicting the well-known, highly selective memoirs of Mandelstam’s wife Nadezhda (Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned), Gerstein depicts the poet as high-spirited and brilliant, but difficult, and terrifyingly reckless; he recited his infamous “Stalin Epigram” (which referred to the dictator’s “fat fingers oily as maggots”) to many more people than was safe, and when arrested promptly gave his listeners’ names to the police. Gerstein also states that Mandelstam, who died en route to a labor camp in 1938 after a series of arrests and internal exiles, tried to lure her into a ménage à trois with himself and the bisexual Nadezhda. In the case of Akhmatova, Gerstein contradicts the bitter reproaches of the poet’s son Lev Gumilyov, who claimed his mother abandoned him during his lengthy incarcerations. Close to both of them (she had a stormy affair with Gumilyov and corresponded with him in the camps), the author shows Akhmatova doing everything she dared to help her son, crippled by the knowledge that the actions of a banned poet could easily do more harm than good. Herself a distinguished Lermontov scholar whose career was severely damaged by her relations with these and other dissidents, Gerstein freely acknowledges the compromises and betrayals forced on even the best-intentioned people by a brutally repressive state; she judges them gently, perhaps because her own father, a Jewish doctor, remained loyal to the Revolution even after it consumed some of his closest friends. Yet no one will come away from her detailed, pitiless record of the horrors inflicted on its citizens without concluding that the Soviet system was politically, economically, and morally indefensible.
A valuable addition to the growing list of Soviet memoirs, countering sanitized depictions of martyrs and monsters with plain truth-telling about human beings trapped in a murderous society.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2004
ISBN: 1-58567-595-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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