Word: nikitin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Fedya Nikitin personifies this new twentieth-century faith that is encroaching upon the bankrupt culture of the West. As cultural attache of the Paris office of the "Free Commonwealth" (a new name given the U.S.S.R. in the 1950's), Fedya has unquestioning faith in the ideals of the Party. Koestler maims the impact that such a character might have, however, for Fedya appears as more of an anthropomorphized concept than a real man with a fixed idea...
...that time, war has become an almost immediate certainty. Pocket Geiger-counters and protective radiation umbrellas are in all the shops. France and the rest of the West are more confused and divided than ever, helpless before the poised divisions of the "Commonwealth of Freedomloving People" (Russia). For Fyodor Nikitin, however, cultural attache at the Free Commonwealth embassy, life holds neither personal nor political problems. Communism is his crutch and his faith. When Paris nightclubs, dressing gowns and mistresses begin to turn him a little soft, he has only to read a page or two of Marx and Engels...