Reviews for The University of Mississippi: A Pictorial History

The average rating for The University of Mississippi: A Pictorial History based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-11-16 00:00:00 Gilda Alarcon Lekmanov has given us a splendidly illuminating biography - very brief, but I can't think of an introductory biography of any writer that rises to the level of this volume. I chose the word illuminating deliberately. I've read both volumes of Nadezhda M.'s memoirs. Even though I liked them both, I couldn't suspend disbelief - because her writing was so palpably a work of hagiography, and it was abundantly clear from the second or third chapter of volume one that I could choose to allow myself to be manipulated - or not. I never made up my mind. So what I find in Lekmanov is a biographer, who has spent much of his career studying the life and work of OM, who collated biographical evidence from as many memoirs, journals and letters of persons who knew OM as he could assemble, in many instances, evidence concerning the very same events that show OM and his wife together and in the company of others. Here's a most telling excerpt from one journal (pp. 156-7): "I became upset and angry after two, even three, phone calls from M. It's this ceaseless, capricious egoism. Demanding from everyone, literally, unlimited attention to himself, his own troubles and pains. In their atmosphere there is always 'world history' happening, nothing less, and this 'world history' is their personal fate, their biography. In general, it is the disreputable, cheerless, eventless, closed fate of two people, one of whom has taken upon himself the role of a premier, the other - the everlasting classical mourner over him. His defender from the external world, and externally it is something that is deserving of bared teeth. And thus, in everlasting conflict ..." I'm not the least surprised to read a response to OM of this tone and type. I felt much the same - vaguely - when I read NM's memoirs - too encapsulated, self satisfied, bordering on the delusional, perhaps. Lekmanov clarifies nicely how exactly it was that OM came to the particular attention of Soviet authority, with that quite flippant and rather boring little poem of his "We live not feeling the country beneath us." His thumbing of the nose at Stalin. Pasternak's response (p. 137): "What you have read to me has no connection to literature or poetry. It is not a literary fact, but a suicidal act that I do not approve of and in which I do not wish to participate." I was unsure what to think when I read NM on this topic. Now I'm more inclined to think that OM wrote this poem while in the acute phase of an episode of narcissistic inflation (one of many) - quite as if he were altogether untouchable. But then again, perhaps BP was right - perhaps OM was suicidal. In any case, all this is to say that Lekmanov documents what he has found among the memoirs, journals and letters of OM's contemporaries. And my view of OM has become much more complex after reading Lekmanov's pages. I only wish he had written five hundred more - at least.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-09-05 00:00:00 Roy Marinaro It seems this book doesn't know what it wants to be. Light-hearted satire? Radical, subversive, serious info? It goes back and forth between being a little silly and pretty darn preachy. And then out of nowhere it talks about recording artists doing "backmasking" and I can't tell if the author really thinks The Beatles put hidden backwards messages in their music or if this is meant as humorous satire. A frustrating read, to say the least.