Description
Book SynopsisA collection of letters by a most extraordinary member of East European intelligentsia, sent from Moscow, Mostar; lately Paris and Rome, where the author has lived since leaving war-torn Bosnia. Matvejević , vice president of the International PEN Club, was born in Yugoslavia, the son of a Russian emigre. His letters are about the past and the present of Russia, as welll as his hopes and fears for her future.
Trade Review"Matvejevic has written other important books (Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape; Yugoslavism Today; I Signori della guerra), but this is a special case. His personal stake is palpable from the first page, when he makes it clear that his ideal reader, at least in the opening, is his father who lies ill in a Zagreb hospital... There is a lot of interesting material here on Soviet and Yugoslav cultural politics, but also much that is personal and compelling in the author's own story and in the subtly insinuating manner he chose to convey it. Fascinating stuff." * Amazon (extract from a reader's online review) *
Table of ContentsBook One: Heroides To my forbears Seven thousand days in Siberia Sinyavsky-Daniel Brodsky Eurasian letters The Gulag Archipelago Book Two: Steles Soviet itineraries On letters, open and closed Kolyma To Varlam Shalamov Russian letters Hostage to the truth Cause for dismissal Yellow star, white star Confession Book Three: Epitaphs Rehabilitations Nikolai Bukharin Peter Kropotkin, the dark prince Maxim Gorky Lev Trotsky Goli Otok, a different gulag Book Four: Apologias Mikhail Bulgakov Nadezhda Mandelshtam Ariadna Efron Kruzhok Portraits of Stalin On writers' perestroika To Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev Archives and memory: to Boris Yeltsin An interrogation Our disappointments: to Brodsky Final letters Heirs without heritage Emigration and dissidence The collapse of the intelligentsia A perverted slavicism The gulag so long ago... Afterword: An open letter to the Reader
