Reviews for The Stalin Epigram

The average rating for The Stalin Epigram based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-07-23 00:00:00 Rhoderick Patricio "turning over the words as if they were stones, looking for worms of calamity beneath them" - Robert Littell, The Stalin Epigram I'm in the middle of reading Vollmann's masterpiece Europe Central, and it got me thinking of Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, which seems to always bring me back from son (Jonathan Littell) to father (Robert Littell). This is unlike any Littell novel I've read. It is sad, beautiful, complex. It is a writer not playing with words to earn a living, or to impress, or to get laid, or to sell one stupid book. It is a lonely poet casting a stone into a cave, writing a love note to a dead lover, or telling Stalin to take a flying leap. It is art and art is always a little mad. It is Mandelstam flinging words at a wall, into a void, at history. It is a failure certainly, but a beautiful failure for sure. The Stalin Epigram Our lives no longer feel ground under them. At ten paces you can't hear our words. But whenever there's a snatch of talk it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer, the ten thick worms his fingers, his words like measures of weight, the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip, the glitter of his boot-rims. Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses he toys with the tributes of half-men. One whistles, another meows, a third snivels. He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom. He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes, One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye. He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries. He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home. -- Osip Mandelstam, 1891 - 1938

Review # 2 was written on 2010-08-23 00:00:00 Darrel J. Antonelli Based upon the life of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, this historic novel traces the events leading up to Mandelstam's arrests and ultimate tragic fate. The author tells his story through a series of letters, memos or remembrances narrated by those closest to the poet or from the viewpoint of characters (some invented) whose lives interface with his. By following the lives of Mandelstam, his wife and friends as they attempt to cope with the terrorist tactics of the Soviet state, we get a grim picture of pre-WWII Russia. Stalin insisted that all art, including what he regarded as the highest form of literature,(poetry), must celebrate the communist philosophy; otherwise such art is seditious and must be expunged. When Mandelstam, once recognized as one of Russia's greatest poets, is overwhelmed by his frustration at becoming persona non-grata, he decides to write an epigram personally attacking Stalin, and pays the price by being exiled. Littel deftly recreates the stifling atmosphere produced by Stalin's paranoia. This novel allows us to appreciate how much the people and its artists suffered. Under such circumstances it is a wonder how any non propagandistic poetry was ever created during this period of Russia's history. And yet, the admiration Russians have for their poets shines through this sad tale.