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Simon & Schuster
May 2009
On Sale: May 12, 2009
384 pages
ISBN: 1416598642
EAN: 9781416598640
Hardcover
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Fiction
Based on a riveting historical episode, The Stalin Epigram
is a fictional rendering of the life of Osip Mandelstam,
perhaps the greatest Russian poet of the twentieth century -
- and one of the few artists in Soviet Russia who daringly
refused to pay creative homage to Joseph Stalin. The poet's
defiance of the Kremlin dictator and the Bolshevik regime --
particularly his outspoken criticism of Stalin's
collectivization rampage that drove millions of Russian
peasants to starvation -- reached its climax in 1934 when
Mandelstam, putting his life on the line, composed a
searing indictment of Stalin in a sixteen-line epigram and
secretly recited it to a handful of friends and fellow
artists.
Would Stalin and his merciless state security apparatus get
wind of this brazenly insulting poem? Would the poet's body
and spirit be crushed under the weight of the state if they
did? Narrated in turn by Mandelstam himself, his devoted wife,
his great friends the poets Boris Pasternak and Anna
Akhmatova, along with vivid fictional characters, The
Stalin Epigram is the page-turning tale of courage and the
human spirit told in deftly poetic prose by a perceptive,
talented writer. With the benefit of extraordinary research
and an almost mystical empathy, bestselling author Robert
Littell has drawn a fictional portrait of the beleaguered
poet struggling to survive the running riot of Stalinist
Russia in the 1930s. This memorable novel culminates in a
wholly unexpected encounter that illuminates the agonizing
choices Russian intellectuals faced during the Stalinist
terror and explains what drew Robert Littell to the
poignant subject in the first place.
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