Customer Reviews

The Stalin Epigram: A Novel

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In the Stalin Epigram, Littell departs from Cold war spies and turns to Stalinist era poets. The book is based on historical people and events. Littell explores Stalinist repression in the 1930's. His primary focus follows Osip Mandelstam, a formerly renowned poet whose work by 1934 has been suppressed by Stalin's government. He also tells the story of circus strongman and former Soviet champion weightlifter Fikrit Shotman. For a brief time, the two men are unlikely cell mates in Lubyanka.

Mandelstam is an ardent communist and idealist. In his despair at both his personal situation, the general state of the Revolution, and particularly the famines caused by Stalin's forced collectivization, Mandelstam produces a sixteen line ode to Stalin - rather not the kind that Stalin was accustomed to, however, as it included a description of Stalin as "the murderer and peasant slayer". His jailing at least seems to have some rational end.

Shotman's fate, on the other hand, demonstrates the capriciousness of a system that encouraged people to accuse others of anti-Soviet activities. His initial crime was having a sticker of the Eiffel Tower on his suit case.

Littell employs an interesting tool by using numerous narrative voices to weave his tales - Mandelstam, his wife Nadezhda, their bisexual lover Zinaida Zaitseva-Antonova, their poet friends Boris Pasternak and Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova, and Stalin's personal bodyguard, Nikolai Vlasik. Stalin himself also plays a prominent role.

Littell's descriptions of interrogation, psychological manipulation, and torture inside Lubyanka rivals Darkness at Noon: A Novel, but constitute only a portion of the book's focus. Littell also follows the victims of repression after their trials and sentences. With his strongman's body, simple mind, and unquestioning faith in Stalin, Shotman is far better equipped to resist the impact of his ordeal than Mandelstam. Littell details Mandelstam's downward slide with insight and empathy. Highly recommended.

What fascinates me about Robert Littell is how different his books are from one another. "The Company" was a spy saga, the best spy novel ever written. "Walking Back the Cat" was completely different, shorter and lighter. "The Once and Future Spy" had an entire story-within-a-story about Nathan Hale.

With "The Stalin Epigram", Littell leaves the espionage genre. This might be a historical novel, but I really think it's just a novel - one above genre, one that survives on the strength of its writing rather than by following any formula.

The novel is based on a true incident. Leading Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, already out of favor with Stalin's Communist regime and scraping to survive, wrote a 16-line poem, or epigram, directly attacking Stalin in 1933, after having seen, from a train passing through the countryside, the effects of the collectivization famine-genocide the Bolsheviks had visited upon the Ukraine.

The poem was essentially his death sentence. He escaped initially with four years internal exile which, along with his interrogation, broke his health and sanity, but was rearrested shortly thereafter and sentenced to a Siberian labor camp which proved to be the death sentence intended. He died in 1939.

I was initially wary of a book about poets, but Littell keeps it moving and I flew through the pages. Littell uses an unusual structure to bring to life this episode, which deserves to be better known in the West than it is. Each chapter is seen through the eyes of a different character close to it - Mandelstam himself; his wife Nadezhda; his friend and fellow poet Anna Akhmatova; an actress and mistress who turns Mandelstam in out of fear; Stalin's bodyguard; a weightlifter imprisoned at the same time who becomes Mandelstam's cellmate; and the like. Littell does well with the different voices - the peasant simplicity of the weightlifter, the poetic sensibility of Akhmatova and Mandelstam, the warmth and trepidation of friend and writer Boris Pasternak; their Slavic romanticism; and the political fear that pervades them all as the Communist terror grows. A mordant humor present in many of them keeps the book from being too overwhelmingly depressing, although the subject matter otherwise would and should be.

And Stalin himself: we see him justifying the terror as an advance purge of potential Fifth Columnists who might aid the Germans in the event Hitler invades, and holding in contempt what he sees as the weakness of the intellectual faction dominating the Old Bolsheviks - people too weak, in his mind, to do the dirty work a thorough social revolution entails. (Unlike someone of peasant roots like himself.)

The bones of the story are factual, mostly. Littell does a grand job imagining the conversations and providing the mood and detail - how people go into exile, how interrogations worked, and what life was like in the labor camps of Siberia.

Stalin's terror ought to be revisited by fiction writers again and again, particularly now, as so many records and memoirs have been released granting foreigners and latter-day observers far better factual information. Littell has done a grand and principled job in writing this book.

After reading a glowing review of Littells latest novel I purchased this book and am about 20 pages shy of finishing it. The facts of the book are above.Littell gives the reader a taste of what it must have been like to live in Soviet Russia under Stalin in the thirties. The book has a frightening effect on the reader. Ive read several biographies of stalin and Littell paints his brutal picture true. I would have wanted to read this book straght through but became tired. It is that gripping. I recommend it to anyone interested in the period in russia and mavelous literature. James e. Vigiletti J.D.

The Stalin Epigram is set in the mid-1930s Soviet Union, as Josef Stalin embarks upon the Great Terror. The great Russian countryside is being collectivized, with peasants being herded into hellish Government-controlled collective farms, which leads to starvation, rebellion by the peasants, and bloody terror against them by the Soviet Government. Against this backdrop, a Russian-Jewish poet composes a poem condemning Stalin. Of course, the inevitable occurs, and much of the novel deals with the process of arrest, interrogation, and the gulag.

One of the strengths of this novel is that it attempts to characterize Josef Stalin as a man. Most novels dealing with Stalin tend to deal with him as a malevolent force of nature. Here, Littell treats him as a heartless and deranged human being, with human traits and weaknesses.

This novel is not an easy read, and the transitions between characters can be confusing to the reader at times. But this piece does give insight into the nature of the Stalinist terror and perhaps even Stalin the man. Not Littell's best, but still worth the reader's attention. RJB.

This book was absolutely tremendous. I heard about in an NPR review and decided to give it a try.

Mr. Littell did a wonderful job creating the tragic, romantic, intense and frightening world these poets, some of the world's greatest, endured. He incorporated anecdotes that I remember from Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Against Hope, but made the material his own. He portrayed the poets as the artists they were and also as well-educated, sophisticated city dwellers almost completely at odds with their savage times. His use of frequent quotations from Mandelstam's, Akhmatova's and Pasternak's poetry serves as a aid to understanding the context of their work. one Mandelstam poem I remember begins "I returned to my city (Petersburg), well-acquainted with tears". After having read this novel, in which Mandelstam briefly returns to Petersburg after his years of internal exile, this poem has more resonance for me.

I also enjoyed the sweet, comic character of Shotman, who seems to have wandered in from an Ilf and Petrov novel to take up residence here. his ability to cope with the extremes of Soviet life was a relief from the sufferings of the other characters.

I recommend this book, and the poetry of the characters, most highly.

I have to admit I'm new to Robert Littell's works and the only reason I picked this up was because the title, "The Stalin Epigram" appealed to the wordsmith in me [and also because I loved Tom Robb Smith's amazing "Child 44" which was set in Stalin's Russia]. The story revolves around Osip Mandelstam, a great Russian poet whose poem titled "The Stalin Epigram" basically compares Stalin to a ruthless killer. Naturally, given the totalitarian and ruthless regime that was Stalin's, the poem is not well-received and Osip and his wife Nadezhda are packed off to a life of exile in Siberia. Freedom comes later, but even then the couple's trials are far from over.

Littell's work has great depth and provides a lot of insights into the brutality of Stalin's regime, and is even more compelling given that he actually interviewed Osip's wife Nadezhda in 1979, a year before she died. This enhances the credibility of the story,even though it is presented as a novel and narrated here through various viewpoints, i.e. Osip's wife, his lover, Stalin's bodyguard, another fellow prisoner, even writer Boris Pasternak ["Doctor Zhivago"] etc. It's heartrending and brutal, and packs one heck of a literary punch.

This is a work of historical fiction set in the political reality of Stalin's Russia. The novel is based on the life of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, and is based on stories Littell heard from Mandelstam's wife.

During the 1930s, Mandelstam wrote poems critical of Josef Stalin's forced collectivization of farms. Like others who questioned Stalin's policies, Mandelstam felt that he needed to express his objections and made the mistake of sharing a key, critical poem in writing with a young actress, Zinaida Zaitseva Antonova, with whom he and his wife, Nadezhda were intimate. The poem refers to Stalin as `the murderer and peasant slayer' and, understandably, is not well received by Stalin.

The nightmare begins. Mandelstam was imprisoned, interrogated and ultimately exiled to Siberia. Nadezhda accompanied him voluntarily. When they are freed, they return illegally to Moscow. Mandelstam writes another poem praising Stalin to try to regain favour, but this does not work.

Littell tells this story by the use of a number of different narrative voices. While Mandelstam's story is the primary focus, the introduction of others provides a more complete picture of the times. Some of the characters - Boris Pasternak and Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova, try to help the Mamdelstams. Others, such as Fikrit Shotman demonstrate the paranoia of a regime that would arrest a man for having a sticker of the Eiffel Tower on his steamer trunk. Stalin himself appears in these pages, as do others who were part of his inner political circle.

In many ways this is a bleak novel. The suspicion, the paranoia and the power of Stalin's regime is clearly demonstrated. And yet, the kindness of many individuals cannot be ignored.

The passage of time means than most of the people are dead. The epigram itself is still in existence.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

I live in the Czech Republic, former Czechoslovakia, and I am 42 now. I did not live through real communist dictatorship, only the latest phase of the regime, when it was very rigid and boring, but did not threaten your life unless you were a really active dissident, which I was not.
However, I can still appreciate how excellent the imagination of Littell is in depicting the cult of the personality, and the crazy effect the Orwellian system had on everybody. I have not yet read another author who was not form the Eastern bloc himself who would have such good understanding. Usually Westerners use crap cliches, confuse names of people, capitals... e.g. in the recent Bond movie, Prague is confused with some Yugoslav city...pictures from one city are mixed with store fronts from another.
Not Littell...you want to get a real feel for this awful era, read his books.

I started this book with some anticipation, as most of the reviews of it here are positive. However, I was dismayed at the bad dialogue, which is often used to move the plot forward in a contrived and unbelievable manner. Also, the speech of particular characters wasn't consistent. For example, a circus strongman at times speaks sort of like I could image a strongman speaking, and at other times speaks like the narrator.

I was also annoyed at errors like saying khoziain is a Georgian word when it is Russian. I don't understand why Littell changed the location of Akhmatova's being asked "Can you describe this?" from line of women waiting at a prison to a chaotic scene of prisoners departing on a train. I don't see how this strengthened the novel.

There are some goods lines of dialogue in the novel, but as it turns out that Littell interviewed Nadezhda Mandelstam, perhaps those are her own lines. I hope that Littell has preserved that interview and will donate it to an archive so that this will not be its only use.

I was hoping for some reflections, or some philosophical ruminations. A mere retelling of the story left me less than satisfied.