The Green Lantern: A Romance of Stalinist Russia (Hardcover)

by Jerome Charyn (Author) "THEY WERE GIVEN A MOUSETRAP ON STRANGLERS' LANE, the former Paradiz, where Chaliapin sang before he went into exile..." (more)
Key Phrases: seventh department, mountain queen, traveling players, King Lear, Boris Nikolaievitch, Pavel Khlebnikov (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Political intrigue and personal jealousy thrive under Stalin's dread stare in this lively new novel by veteran author Charyn (The Isaac Quartet; Death of a Tango King; etc.). Ivan Azerbaijan is a poor boy from the mountains who comes to Moscow with a traveling theater troupe to build sets for a new production of King Lear. When the theater troupe's leader is incapacitated, the six-foot-six Ivanushka, or "Little Ivan," is thrust into the role of Lear and discovers a talent for acting that makes the humble production the toast of Moscow's elite. Ivanushka attracts so much attention that Joseph Stalin himself descends to the tiny theater. Impressed, Stalin releases the sultry starlet Valentina Michaelson from house arrest to play Cordelia to Ivanushka's Lear. Soon Ivanushka, in love with Michaelson, finds himself surrounded by spies, apparatchiks and power brokers who negotiate to stay in Stalin's favor—a dangerous game, for inevitably Stalin "falls upon whatever person he admires." Charyn's Moscow is full of personalities, from the elusive Michaelson and the manipulative Vladimir Rustaveli, who takes Ivanushka under his wing, to the steely and erratic Stalin. Throughout, Charyn keeps the intrigue front and center—who will be arrested next, who will sleep with whom—but the unconsummated, wordy love affair between Michaelson and Ivanushka eventually stalls some of the book's momentum.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
"He had yellowish eyes, like a wolf. But they crinkled with a warmth and a merriment that a wolf could never hope to have." Guess who? Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili, a k a Stalin, is a despot with a heart and a twinkle in his eye in Jerome Charyn's new novel, The Green Lantern, which unfolds amid the political and romantic intrigues of 1930s Moscow. Stalin's murderous apparatchiks are all here -- the poisoner Yagoda, Yezhov "the Dwarf," and the bespectacled Beria -- as well as some of the artists and writers whom Stalin liked to toy with: Maxim Gorky, Sergei Eisenstein, Osip Mandelstam, Isaac Babel.

One notable absence (apart from a passing reference), however, is Mikhail Bulgakov, whose Russian Civil War play, "Days of the Turbins," is said to have been seen by Stalin 15 times. In 1928 Bulgakov started writing The Master and Margarita, his brilliantly inventive novel about devilish doings in Moscow. That book, published posthumously in 1967, set the bar very high for fictional renderings of the Great Terror. So high that perhaps it is unfair to draw comparisons, but anyone who has read Bulgakov's masterpiece will find The Green Lantern a disappointment.

Charyn's novel opens in 1933, after the suicide of Stalin's second wife, Nadya Alliluyeva. Newly arrived in town for a six-week run of "King Lear" is a makeshift acting troupe from Tiflis, Georgia. Unforeseen circumstances thrust an unschooled stagehand, Ivan Azerbaijan, into the lead as Lear, and his performance is an instant sensation. Stalin himself -- a doting father to his daughter Svetlana, and a terrible sentimentalist -- weeps when he sees Ivanushka's portrayal of the tormented king. Invested with the charms of his holy-fool namesake from Russian folklore, Ivanushka disarms the schemers and murderers swirling around Stalin and manages to navigate the serpent's lair unmolested -- though Stalin's signature fake-out ("He gives you the Order of Lenin, and lops off your head that very night") is the other shoe waiting to drop.

Ivanushka's romantic fortunes are in the hands of a fading starlet named Valentina Mikhailovna "Michaelson," who has been under house arrest as punishment for a traitorous flirtation with the American movie studio MGM. Her current lover is the dashing Volodya Rustaveli, a reformed Georgian bandit turned popular writer, protégé of Gorky, favorite of Stalin, and a spy for the NKVD (the precursor to the KGB). Rustaveli has a bad case of writer's block thanks to the demands of his secret-police gig, which include poisoning his mentor. But Rustaveli is not simply an opportunistic knave. He intervenes to help both a socialist-realist hack and the literary giant Mandelstam, whose fate was sealed by his 16-line "Epigram" on Stalin: "His cockroach whiskers leer/ And his boot tops gleam./ Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders/ . . . " Stalin, no illiterate country bumpkin, appreciated Mandelstam's genius, and his instructions were to "isolate but preserve."

The plot twists and turns, characters fall out of favor and allegiances shift, and Ivanushka, under Rustaveli's tutelage, learns how to play the game. Yet The Green Lantern never quite rises to its subject matter. Charyn's style is clipped and choppy; the writing, especially the dialogue, sounds at times like a clunky translation -- and other times like a bad romance novel:

"He'll send us both to a labor camp."

"Good. I'll swim in the White Sea with the winter bears."

"You'll freeze your ass off."

"But at least we'll have each other."

The book is packed with historical odds and ends -- Yagoda is smitten with Timosha, Gorky's fetching daughter-in-law; the title of Valentina's fictional film, "The Girl in the Green Hat," echoes the popular novel that Nadya was reportedly reading at the time of her suicide, Michael Arlen's The Green Hat -- but it's hard to shake the feeling that Charyn is just going through the motions, ticking off items on his list. A reader may nod in recognition or simply glide over the historical allusions, but in either case they add little true texture or depth.

Nor do they help to propel an often listless narrative. The Green Lantern should be a page-turner, but it suffers from a blurry focus and sketchily drawn characters. The story does pick up unexpectedly around page 300, when it breaks free of the repetitive machinations in Moscow and follows Ivanushka to a Siberian labor camp. Finally, Ivanushka is doing something about his long-simmering passion for Valentina -- though somehow there's not much in the way of sexual tension between these two. The reunion is complete with the appearance of a broken-down Rustaveli, who has been made to suffer for a seditious work called "The Green Lantern." This is Charyn's 38th book, and there is much to admire in his eclectic oeuvre, such as his rollicking autobiographical trilogy about growing up in the Bronx circa the 1940s. For a bewitching, unforgettable spin through the Stalin era, however, spring for a copy of The Master and Margarita.

Reviewed by Julia Livshin
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press (September 7, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568583125
• ISBN-13: 978-1568583129
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #901,007 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best historical novels I've read, May 7, 2005

By	F. Isikdag (New Hampshire) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I can't disagree more with the Washington Post review. I started reading it because I had nothing else better to do and then suddenly I was transported into Stalinist era of the 1930s. I feel I need to find out what I can about this author who has achieved something close to witchcraft by re-creating the psychological (un)reality of that era. I almost laughed when I read the reviewer's complaints about how the details don't add to the intrigue/suspense. There is NO suspense; only the utter illogic of possible imminent violent end to one's life for no reason which IS the definition of the Stalinist era. How this guy called Jerome Charyn about whom I know nothing accomplish this in a rather slim book much better than all the volumes of Solzhenitsyn who was actually there, I have no idea.
Fatma Isikdag