Word: stalinize
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DARK STAR by Alan Furst (Houghton Mifflin; $22.95). Plot is less important in this impressive spy novel than description, the re-creation of the nightmarish tensions that erupted during the 1930s between Soviet NKVD agents and Stalin's Georgian thugs...
...Poetry: Wallace Stevens for his strange visual clarities, Robert Frost for his sly moral clarities, Walt Whitman for his spaciousness and energy. Some early Hemingway. I read the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam (Hope Against Hope; Hope Abandoned), the widow of Osip Mandelstam, a Soviet poet destroyed by Stalin. I look at The Wind in the Willows out of admiration for Mr. Toad and for what he has to teach about folly and resilience...
Furst's perfect-pitch re-creation begins with a fatally flawed protagonist: Andre Szara, 40, Pravda reporter in Europe and occasional Soviet spy, whose life goals have been reduced to a desire to outlast Stalin's purges. As the novel opens in 1937, Szara, a Russified Polish Jew, is caught in the midst of a blood feud in the Soviet secret services between his NKVD friends, mostly Jewish intellectuals, and Stalin's Georgian thugs. The fear that dominates Szara's nomadic life is palpable: a typically chilling passage is about his return to Russia aboard a Soviet freighter with...
Unlike Malevich, Liubov Popova died young -- scarlet fever got her in 1924, before Stalin's purges could. She was only 35. At least she was spared the miseries of censorship and persecution visited on other Russian avant-gardists by Stalin. Moreover, she died at a time when it was still possible for an idealistic, exuberantly gifted young artist like herself to believe in the promise of Leninism. Her last works, such as the 1923 collage stage design for a play about the revolution called Earth in Turmoil -- showing a helmeted aviator, prototype of the new Soviet Man, gazing...
...There may be some similarity with the emergence of the U.S. at the end of World War II," suggests foreign affairs scholar Kenneth Thompson. But again there were other major figures shaping events: the Kremlin's Joseph Stalin, a menacing but victorious war leader; and Britain's Winston Churchill, the man of the half-century...