Word: stalins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Socialist Labor, his country's equivalent of both the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Brezhnev's colleagues in the Politburo had even been known to refer to him as vozhd (roughly, great leader), a title previously given only to Lenin and Stalin. Privately, Soviets joked about the cult of personality that gradually surrounded their President as he fought against the inexorable frailties of old age. It was said, for example, that he had even outdone Stalin in the matter of mustaches by cultivating two of them, a reference to the bushy eyebrows that...
...first printing of 100,000 copies would vanish from the stores within 48 hours, and any magazine containing an Aksyonov short story, like his celebrated Halfway to the Moon, could count on the immediate sellout of a 2 million-copy press run. No other prose writer of the post-Stalin generation commanded such an impassioned following; no other offered a more radical departure from the standard Socialist Realist fare. His nonconformity came naturally. Aksyonov had been born an alien in the Soviet world. He was the child of Stalin's victims: his father Pavel, the former Communist mayor...
...pink ramparts and red star floating on a sea like the isle of Cythera itself, framed by a "classical" Poussinesque clutter of arching trees, fallen columns and pediments and other bric-a-brac. It has the deeply sincere vulgarity of a holy card: an alliance between Alexander Gerasimov, Stalin's favorite artist, and Walt Disney...
Sometimes a weird sort of yearning intrudes. As a child, Melamid lived on the Moscow street that Stalin's staff car reputedly took on its way from the Kremlin to his country dacha: If you look carefully, his elders told him, you might see him in the back of the car. Melamid never did, but a yearning for the ogre is commemorated in I Saw Stalin Once When I Was a Child: the red curtain in the rear window slides back, revealing the fleshy nose, the twinkling eye of the Dreadful Father. "To us," Melamid points out, "Stalin...
Well, up to a point. To suppose the work is only a satire on an obsolete propagandist style is to miss its deadlier thrust. What K & M are getting at is not just totalitarian art, but official art as such. Stalin and the Muses-showing Clio, muse of history, presenting a volume for revision to the mustachioed god in his transcendent white military greatcoat-is "objectively" a hilarious spoof, done in clumsily tight parody of the 17th century grand manner. But then, if these sleek pictorial tropes are I so absurd when lavished on Stalin, why should they...