Fr. 23.90

Koba the Dread - Laughter and the Twenty Million

English · Paperback / Softback

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Zusatztext “ Koba the Dread is filled with passion and intelligence! and with prose that gleams and startles. . . .This fierce little book. . . [has the] power to surprise! and ultimately to provoke! enrage and illuminate.” – San Jose Mercury News “ Koba the Dread is heartfelt. . . . Amis does not shrink from difficult questions about possible moral distinctions between Lenin and Stalin! Stalin and Hitler.” – San Francisco Chronicle “Riveting. . . .Martin Amis has a noble purpose in writing Koba the Dread . He wants to call attention to just what an insanely cruel monster Josef Stalin was.” – Seattle Times “Martin Amis is our inimitable prose master! a constructor of towering English sentences! and his life…is genuinely worth writing about.” – Esquire Informationen zum Autor Martin Amis Klappentext A brilliant weave of personal involvement, vivid biography and political insight, Koba the Dread is the successor to Martin Amis's award-winning memoir, Experience. Koba the Dread captures the appeal of one of the most powerful belief systems of the 20th century — one that spread through the world, both captivating it and staining it red. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of 20th-century thought: the indulgence of Communism by the intellectuals of the West. In between the personal beginnings and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best one-hundred pages ever written about Stalin: Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible. The author's father, Kingsley Amis, though later reactionary in tendency, was a "Comintern dogsbody” (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and then his closest friend (after the death of the poet Philip Larkin), was Robert Conquest, our leading Sovietologist whose book of 1968, The Great Terror, was second only to Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago in undermining the USSR. The present memoir explores these connections. Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere "statistic.” Koba the Dread, during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin's aphorism. PART I THE COLLAPSE OF THE VALUE OF HUMAN LIFE Preparatory Here is the second sentence of Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine: We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book. That sentence represents 3,040 lives. The book is 4411 pages long. 'Horse manure was eaten, partly because it often contained whole grains of wheat' (1,340 lives). 'Oleska Voytrykhovsky saved his and his family's ...lives by consuming the meat of horses which had died in the collective of glanders and other diseases' (2,480 lives). Conquest quotes Vasily Grossman's essayistic-documentary novel Forever Flowing: 'And the children's faces were aged, tormented, just as if they were seventy years old. And by spring they no longer had faces. Instead, they had birdlike heads with beaks, or frog heads - thin, wide lips - and some of them resembled fish, mouths open' (3,880 lives). Grossman goes on: In one hut there would be something like a war. Everyone would keep close watch over everyone else ...The wife turned against her husband and the husband against his wife. The mother hated the children. And in some other hut love would be inviolable to the very last. I knew one woman with four children. She would tell them fairy stories and legends so that they would forget their hunger. Her own tongue could hardly move, but she would take them into her arms even though she had hardly the strength to lift her arms when they were empty. Love lived on within her. And people noticed that where there was hate people...

Product details

Authors Martin Amis
Publisher Vintage USA
 
Languages English
Product format Paperback / Softback
Released 09.09.2003
 
EAN 9781400032204
ISBN 978-1-4000-3220-4
No. of pages 336
Dimensions 131 mm x 202 mm x 21 mm
Series Vintage International
Vintage International
Subjects Humanities, art, music > History
Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > General, dictionaries

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