Whispering Campaign of Orlando Figes

"The Whisperers" by Orlando Figes is a fine work of scholarship and a deeply moving account of private life in Stalin's Russia.

It is curious, therefore, that Figes or his wife and fellow academic - for the authorship is not quite clear - should choose to rubbish the work of other historians of Russia and the former Soviet Union through anonymous reviews.

However, academia has always been something of a cloak and dagger profession, as reflected in the murder mystery campus novel genre.

Incidentally, I'm sure that Stalin would have enjoyed the furore unleashed by the unmasking of Figes; and the episode reminds us that the darker side of the human psyche, with its rivalries and resentments, is never too far away.

To the Castle and Back

I've recently started reading Vaclav Harvel's memoir "To the Castle and Back", whose title naturally reminds me of fellow Czech writer Franz Kafka's book "The Castle". It is a testimony to the difference between the first part of the last century and its final decade that Havel secures a relatively long tenure at "the Castle", whilst the hero of Kafka's novel struggles to gain entry to a rather more surreal fortification. Nevertheless, Havel's own memoir finds him battling with external forces, as well as those internalised within himself, and its wryly ironic structure, or apparent lack of one, reflects this process.

I look forward to properly reviewing "To the Castle and Back" at a later date. In the meantime, readers may observe that the images have mysteriously disappeared from my previous post, and indeed from my other blogs too. Was some censor at work I wondered, given the political content of these blogs ? It seems, however, that this disappearance of photographs and other images is a technical problem of Blogger.com, and that the pictures can reappear, coming back, as it were, from some virtual castle themselves.