8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Decent writing, stellar ending, July 23, 1998
By A Customer
"The Revolutionist" is a captivating novel about a fictional man, Alexander Til, as he helps in the Russian Revolution but becomes disillusioned over the course of decades. Robert Littell presented the story well, although he could have expounded more on certain aspects of the plot. The ending, however, was incredible. Robert Littell's use of symbolism was better than any I've ever read. The book left me feeling quite satisfied. This book, while not Solzhenitsyn, gives a more personal touch to the hope presented by Communism and the horror of Stalinism. "The Revolutionist" is not complex, however; I'm only 16. Littell spent years researching the facts, yet some inaccuracies remain. Regardless, anyone interested in Soviet history should definitely read this novel.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A fine historical novel with epic sweep, showing where the Revolution went wrong, April 17, 2010
Robert Littell's fiction based on Russia, Communism and espionage is an impressive body of work. "The Revolutionist", an earlier effort now republished, shows features of some later books. It has "The Company's" epic sweep, and models two characters on the historical subjects of "The Stalin Epigram", the poet Osip Mandelstam and his wife Nadezhda.
Littell sometimes uses a dark comedic tone; it's present here, not so much that it might lessen the gravity of what he's writing about, but blending well with the mordant Russian and Jewish sensibility fitting for his characters.
The story follows characters from the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917 until Stalin's death in 1953. The main character, Alexander Til, a Jewish radical, returns from America to join the revolution, accompanied by fellow revolutionary Atticus Tuohy, who has a Russian parent. Referred by Trotsky, they find themselves near the revolution's center, trusted by Lenin and Stalin. They lodge in a big house belonging to a princess, Lili Yusupova, who has joined the Bolsheviks.
There's a big difference between the two. Til is an idealist, offended by even the slightest compromises away from the classless promise of the revolution, such as leaders getting extra food amidst revolutionary chaos and starvation. Tuohy, until now a happy-go-lucky skirt-chaser, discovers a taste and talent for revolutionary violence, and works his way up in the Bolshevik secret police.
The house lodges a motley crew, some revolutionaries, some not - the poetic couple, a dentist, a photographer, an aging revolutionary, and a few more. Littell follows them through the Civil War and purges as their paths diverge and cross again. Til falls in love with Lili. They're strange bedfellows, a Russian Jew and a a gorgeous princess whose brother was Rasputin's killer. But, hey, it's a revolution. You know it's going to end badly.
Sex is a major theme. Bolshevik women busily enact their own sexual liberation, regarding it as essential to personal liberation. Everyone's getting laid. No one's getting married. The only married couple are the poets, who oppose the Bolshevik takeover. But sex, revolution or no, remains a source of original sin. The nude photos the beautiful Lili once posed for come back to haunt her, as do previous lovers. The arty, heady atmosphere of the revolution itself slowly gives way first to the Civil War, then to the Bolshevik solidification of power and finally to Stalin's terrifying dictatorship. By 1934, not too many people are finding a revolution they can dance, or fornicate, to.
Characters find themselves at signature moments such as the seizure of the Winter Palace and the murder of the Romanovs. Littell touches on mysteries and legends surrounding the period, including whether Anastasia survived, whether Lenin was affected mentally by late-stage syphilis, and whether Stalin was murdered. Interestingly, the only one of those whose possible truth isn't downplayed in an afterword is the question of Anastasia's survival. (Littell originally published this in 1988; much new Communist history has been disgorged from KGB files since then.) And he deals with one dastardly deed that only Stalin's death prevented from happening - the forced deportation of all of the Soviet Union's Jews to Siberia, under the guise of forming the "Jewish homeland" of Birobidzhan there.
The Revolution and Civil War turn horrifyingly violent, including a particularly disturbing episode involving what can only be called feral children, abandoned and roaming the countryside. The purges wrap the country in terror as Stalin tightens his grip, eliminating opponents and loyalists alike. The wrong glance or word can bring about not only one's destruction but that of his entire family. Any sound in the night might very well mean the secret police coming. Prisoners undergo months of interrogation, ending usually in an execution they welcome as an end to their suffering, or occasionally in an unexplained release. Census takers are arrested and executed; their capital crime is reporting the Soviet Union to have 16 million fewer residents than a few years before. The census takers didn't fail to find anyone; this is how many had died in the Civil War and the Ukrainian peasant famine, and the census takers have failed to cover it up in the service of the revolution.
"My principal preoccupation in `The Revolutionist'," Littell says in an afterword, "has been to show how someone as decent as (Til) could have been attracted to the Bolsheviks at the start, and repelled by them in the end; to suggest, in other words, where the greatest political experiment of the twentieth century went very wrong."
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