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Zusatztext “For this man of many identities! each past episode consists of multiple versions…As an expert in the art of narrative! Christian Salmon understands what is most fascinating about this period of history: that the contemporaries of the revolution were! as the poet Mandelstam wrote! ‘cast out of their own biographies.’” — Le Monde des livres “An investigation that reads like a spy novel! but a true novel in which we encounter Mandelstam! Mayakovsky! and Victor Serge.” — Livres Hebdo “A genuine swashbuckling adventure story! Salmon’s book builds on episodes of spectacular! even extraordinary battles…Remarkable.” — Libération Informationen zum Autor Christian Salmon is a writer and researcher at France's National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). He founded and was a member of the International Writers' Parliament from 1993 to 2003. He is the author of several books, including Verbicide, Devenir minoritaire: Pour une nouvelle politique de la littérature (coauthored with Joseph Hanimann), and Tombeau de la fiction. William Rodarmor is a former journalist who has translated some forty-five books and screenplays in genres ranging from literary fiction to espionage and fantasy. In 2017 he won the Northern California Book Award for fiction translation for The Slow Waltz of Turtles by Katherine Pancol. He lives in Berkeley, California. Klappentext This page-turning biography follows in the footsteps of a forgotten legend of the Russian Revolution. Yakov Blumkin claimed to have had nine lives. He was a terrorist, the assassin of the German ambassador Wilhelm von Mirbach, a poet close to the avant-garde, a member of Cheka, a military strategist, a secret agent, and Leon Trotsky's secretary. Executed in 1929 on the orders of Stalin at only twenty-nine years old, he has continued to inspire a powerful curiosity: Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian Internet users have been adopting "Blumkin" as a pseudonym, and wild rumors and falsehoods about his extraordinary life abound today. With a trove of manuscripts, documents, rare photographs, and personal souvenirs, writer and researcher Christian Salmon sets out to reconstruct the shadowy past of this multi-faceted figure. Leseprobe CHAPTER 1 Once upon a time, I was a Bolshevik. A fictional Bolshevik, but a flesh-and-blood Bolshevik just the same, with a leather jacket, a red bandanna around my neck, and a glint in my eye. In those days, the walls of my apartment were covered with posters from the October Revolution. You could see entwined rifles and hammers, circles pen- etrated by triangles, raised fists, and slogans shaped like allegories: “Beat the Whites with a Red Wedge!” Locomotives roared skyward, and workers in red tunics pointed at the class enemy or the deserter. Astride a globe with a broom in hand, Lenin swept the last exploiters from the surface of the Earth. My dreams echoed with onomatopoeia written in gigantic repeated letters, as in Eisenstein’s films: HO, HO, HO. Streaming in from everywhere, the masses became a physical force on encountering the Marxist theory of surplus value. From the moment I awoke, the picture on the wall of a man with a bloody bandage around his forehead charged me with his implacable energy. The genie of electricity lit up the world. The Soviets did the rest. The masses rushed into the great theater of history. In the wings, the actors waited for the curtain to go up to run onstage and deliver the words that the crowd had been anticipating for so long. Slogans burst from fiery mouths. It was no longer the orators speaking to the people, but History itself dictating their words, as if the aim of those Bolsheviks with nerves of steel was to melt and merge with it. During revolutions, women’s charms fade in the eyes of men, they say. History takes their place. It haunts ...
