ISBN: 0140028455
Godina izdanja: 1968
Jezik: Engleski
Autor: Strani

Svetlana Alliluyeva - Twenty Letters to a Friend
Penguin, 1968
214 str.
meki povez
stanje: vrlo dobro

Everyone will be curious"--and Europeans currently viewing with satisfied amusement the snapshots which complement this "family chronicle" are the gainers from the furor surrounding its publication. The Kremlin`s concern was unnecessary: there is nothing to ruffle the forthcoming anniversary of the Revolution, nothing incendiary or especially provocative (in either sense). Mrs. Alliluyeva`s political philosophy as expressed here (there are no afterthoughts except for a footnote) is a benevolent one-worldliness; she is as faithful to the Old Bolsheviks as she is to the God she committed herself to in her mid-thirties. Being neither chronological nor comprehensive, this is not, despite her designation, precisely a chronicle; rather it is a confession, a purgative, in the form of testimony--to her father as a fond parent; to the natural, wholesome family life of the Party leadership before 1932; to the sensibility and wisdom of her mother; to the nobility of her grandparents, various relatives and friends. But each of them, beginning with her mother, came to a tragic end, victims of Stalin--the adult Svetlana acknowledges what the child Svetlana still cannot reconcile. The disclosures are few: the details of her father`s "difficult and terrible" death; the depredations of her alcoholic brother Vasilly; the loathing of her family for Beria from the first. Svetlana herself has a certain interest. She describes the constrictions imposed by her position, mentions briefly a thwarted romance and her first two marriages, reports an increasing alienation from her father. And she regrets the losses justified by elevating ends over means. When this was set down--loosely, redundantly, sometimes contradictorily--the author had not come to terms with herself, with her father`s role, with the system. Everyone will be curious--for a while.


Cultural, Russia, History, Non Fiction, Autobiography, Memoir, Biography