Word: titanic
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...Fall of a Titan, by Igor Gouzenko. The powerfully fictionalized decline and death of Maxim Gorki, with sidelights on Soviet man, by the famed ex-code clerk turned novelist (TIME, July...
Beagle for the NKVD. Feodor Novikov, protagonist of The Fall of a Titan, is only 16 when the revolution comes to Rostov in October 1917 and claims his parents among its first victims. Bent on survival, young Feodor informs on a starving army officer and learns that the way to get ahead in the new people's paradise is to curry favor with the Marxists. Soon he is an unofficial beagle for the NKVD, spying on his fellow students. Later, as a lecturer at the University of Rostov, he keeps tabs on his faculty colleagues. Chafing with ambition, Feodor...
Feodor's mission is psychological tug-of-warfare with Mikhail Gorin, an old and honored writer who godfathered the revolution back in Czarist days, but refuses to toady to Stalin. Gorin, the titan of the title, is intentionally modeled on Russia's late great writer, Maxim Gorky, and in chronicling his fall Author Gouzenko stages scenes with other Russian VIPs, e.g., Stalin, Malenkov, Beria (who wears the name Veria, plus the identifying pince...
...Russian Macbeth. In these and half a hundred other scenes, Author Gouzenko makes the point that modern Russia breeds only two kinds of men-the dead and the damned. The Fall of a Titan is doom-laden, a kind of Russian Macbeth with its pages drenched in suicides, rapes and murders. It is a book about the corruption of a nation's soul. Few scenes are memorable in themselves, but the cumulative effect is poignant and powerful. A wisp of a girl in a chemical plant manned by forced labor is raped by the foreman, goes mad, and hangs...
Tire Fall of a Titan has already transformed ex-Comrade Gouzenko into a capitalist: in addition to the juicy income assured by the Book-of-the-Month arrangement, Gouzenko a fortnight ago got the nice bourgeois sum of $100,000 for screen rights to the book...