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The Stalin Epigram: A Novel, by Robert Littell
PDF Ebook The Stalin Epigram: A Novel, by Robert Littell
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Based on a true historical episode, The Stalin Epigram is a fictional account of the life of Osip Mandelstam, perhaps the greatest Russian poet of the twentieth century—and one of the few artists in Soviet Russia who daringly refused to pay creative homage to Joseph Stalin. The poet’s defiance of the Kremlin dictator and the Bolshevik regime— particularly his outspoken criticism of Stalin’s collectivization rampage that drove millions of Russian peasants to starvation—reached its climax in 1934 when Mandelstam, putting his life on the line, composed a searing indictment of Stalin in a sixteen-line epigram and secretly recited it to a handful of friends and fellow artists.
Would Stalin and his merciless state security apparatus get wind of this brazenly insulting poem? Would the poet’s body and spirit be crushed under the weight of the state if they did?
Narrated in turn by Mandelstam himself, his devoted wife, his great friends Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, and vivid fictional characters, The Stalin Epigram is a page-turning tale of courage and the human spirit and illuminates the agonizing choices Russian intellectuals faced during the Stalinist terror. In it, legendary author Robert Littell delivers his most riveting suspense story and masterfully written novel to date.
- Sales Rank: #1565247 in Books
- Published on: 2010-06-01
- Released on: 2010-06-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.44" h x 1.00" w x 5.50" l, .72 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 384 pages
Most helpful customer reviews
31 of 32 people found the following review helpful.
Littell Turns from the Cold War to Stalinist Repression
By Douglas S. Wood
In the Stalin Epigram, Littell departs from Cold war spies and turns to Stalinist era poets. The book is based on historical people and events. Littell explores Stalinist repression in the 1930's. His primary focus follows Osip Mandelstam, a formerly renowned poet whose work by 1934 has been suppressed by Stalin's government. He also tells the story of circus strongman and former Soviet champion weightlifter Fikrit Shotman. For a brief time, the two men are unlikely cell mates in Lubyanka.
Mandelstam is an ardent communist and idealist. In his despair at both his personal situation, the general state of the Revolution, and particularly the famines caused by Stalin's forced collectivization, Mandelstam produces a sixteen line ode to Stalin - rather not the kind that Stalin was accustomed to, however, as it included a description of Stalin as "the murderer and peasant slayer". His jailing at least seems to have some rational end.
Shotman's fate, on the other hand, demonstrates the capriciousness of a system that encouraged people to accuse others of anti-Soviet activities. His initial crime was having a sticker of the Eiffel Tower on his suit case.
Littell employs an interesting tool by using numerous narrative voices to weave his tales - Mandelstam, his wife Nadezhda, their bisexual lover Zinaida Zaitseva-Antonova, their poet friends Boris Pasternak and Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova, and Stalin's personal bodyguard, Nikolai Vlasik. Stalin himself also plays a prominent role.
Littell's descriptions of interrogation, psychological manipulation, and torture inside Lubyanka rivals Darkness at Noon: A Novel, but constitute only a portion of the book's focus. Littell also follows the victims of repression after their trials and sentences. With his strongman's body, simple mind, and unquestioning faith in Stalin, Shotman is far better equipped to resist the impact of his ordeal than Mandelstam. Littell details Mandelstam's downward slide with insight and empathy. Highly recommended.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Survives on the strength of its writing
By Dan Berger
What fascinates me about Robert Littell is how different his books are from one another. "The Company" was a spy saga, the best spy novel ever written. "Walking Back the Cat" was completely different, shorter and lighter. "The Once and Future Spy" had an entire story-within-a-story about Nathan Hale.
With "The Stalin Epigram", Littell leaves the espionage genre. This might be a historical novel, but I really think it's just a novel - one above genre, one that survives on the strength of its writing rather than by following any formula.
The novel is based on a true incident. Leading Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, already out of favor with Stalin's Communist regime and scraping to survive, wrote a 16-line poem, or epigram, directly attacking Stalin in 1933, after having seen, from a train passing through the countryside, the effects of the collectivization famine-genocide the Bolsheviks had visited upon the Ukraine.
The poem was essentially his death sentence. He escaped initially with four years internal exile which, along with his interrogation, broke his health and sanity, but was rearrested shortly thereafter and sentenced to a Siberian labor camp which proved to be the death sentence intended. He died in 1939.
I was initially wary of a book about poets, but Littell keeps it moving and I flew through the pages. Littell uses an unusual structure to bring to life this episode, which deserves to be better known in the West than it is. Each chapter is seen through the eyes of a different character close to it - Mandelstam himself; his wife Nadezhda; his friend and fellow poet Anna Akhmatova; an actress and mistress who turns Mandelstam in out of fear; Stalin's bodyguard; a weightlifter imprisoned at the same time who becomes Mandelstam's cellmate; and the like. Littell does well with the different voices - the peasant simplicity of the weightlifter, the poetic sensibility of Akhmatova and Mandelstam, the warmth and trepidation of friend and writer Boris Pasternak; their Slavic romanticism; and the political fear that pervades them all as the Communist terror grows. A mordant humor present in many of them keeps the book from being too overwhelmingly depressing, although the subject matter otherwise would and should be.
And Stalin himself: we see him justifying the terror as an advance purge of potential Fifth Columnists who might aid the Germans in the event Hitler invades, and holding in contempt what he sees as the weakness of the intellectual faction dominating the Old Bolsheviks - people too weak, in his mind, to do the dirty work a thorough social revolution entails. (Unlike someone of peasant roots like himself.)
The bones of the story are factual, mostly. Littell does a grand job imagining the conversations and providing the mood and detail - how people go into exile, how interrogations worked, and what life was like in the labor camps of Siberia.
Stalin's terror ought to be revisited by fiction writers again and again, particularly now, as so many records and memoirs have been released granting foreigners and latter-day observers far better factual information. Littell has done a grand and principled job in writing this book.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Brilliant book
By vespasian
After reading a glowing review of Littells latest novel I purchased this book and am about 20 pages shy of finishing it. The facts of the book are above.Littell gives the reader a taste of what it must have been like to live in Soviet Russia under Stalin in the thirties. The book has a frightening effect on the reader. Ive read several biographies of stalin and Littell paints his brutal picture true. I would have wanted to read this book straght through but became tired. It is that gripping. I recommend it to anyone interested in the period in russia and mavelous literature. James e. Vigiletti J.D.
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