Word: stalins
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...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...
...your review "Blood Relatives" [Aug. 9] you say that our brother Alexander Pasternak was a member of Stalin's secret police, the Cheka. As an architect who designed one lock of the Moscow-Volga Canal. Alexander was employed by the Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) in 1936. The NKVD not only controlled all construction projects, like the canal and the metro, but had also taken over the functions of the Cheka. Accordingly, the NKVD uniform that Alexander was obliged to wear carried unpleasant associations, associations he detested because he was afraid of one department being confused with another, more...
...20th century with ingenuous vigor. Feasting on suckling pig in Madrid's toniest restaurant or visiting the Valley of the Fallen, Spain's grandiose monument to its Civil War dead, the compañeros loudly dispute the merits of their beliefs: the Gulag vs. the Inquisition; Stalin vs. Judas; Brezhnev vs. Franco. The priest veers toward an ecumenical humanism; the Marxist sighs for a materialistic Utopia. They agree only about the culture that confronts them. Says Quixote: "It's an absurd world or we wouldn't be here together...