A grim reminder that tyrants have myriad ways to strangle dissent. (8 pp. b&w photos)
A gripping account of the final months of the Russian poet, who took her own life in 1941, at age 49, following the arrest and imprisonment by the Soviet secret police of her daughter, husband, and friends.
“Where is the truth?” asks Kudrova. And: “How true is it?” Newly translated from the Russian, this 1995 work (her third about Tsvetaeva, none reviewed) endeavors to answer these disturbing questions about the famous poet’s decision to hang herself in a small, somber house near Moscow. The author carefully reconstructs Tsvetaeva’s movements and imagines what she might have been feeling as her personal world imploded, the Russia she knew exploded (Nazi bombs were raining on Moscow), and the NKVD rounded up, interrogated, broke, and executed anyone who’d ever breathed, or even considered, an anti-Soviet sentiment. (Readers concerned about our own Patriot Act will recognize some ominous shadows flickering on the wall.) Kudrova begins in mid-June 1939 as the poet and her 14-year-old son were leaving France to return to the Soviet Union. Her husband, who had been working for Soviet intelligence in France, was already home. Husband and wife had not seen each other for 18 months; the NKVD would shoot him in 1941. Using their son’s diary, the KGB archives, letters (including three suicide notes) and other personal documents, interviews, and visits to key locations, Kudrova imagines the forces at work on Tsvetaeva. The author examines and modifies three published motives for the poet’s suicide: protecting her son, who by her death would perhaps be freed from subsequent government suspicion; yielding to mental illness (her mood had grown ever more fearful and saturnine); avoiding arrest herself by the NKVD and being forced to traduce her friends, even as they had falsely betrayed her family. Kudrova concludes by calling Tsvetaeva “another victim of the Great October Socialist Revolution.”
A grim reminder that tyrants have myriad ways to strangle dissent. (8 pp. b&w photos)Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2004
ISBN: 1-58567-522-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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