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Cargando... The memory artistpor Katherine Brabon
   Ninguno Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro.  anzlitlovers | Jul 16, 2016 |  sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
How can hope exist when the past is so easily forgotten? Pasha Ivanov is a child of the Freeze, born in Moscow during Brezhnev's repressive rule over the Soviet Union. As a small child, Pasha sat at the kitchen table night after night as his parents and their friends gathered to preserve the memory of terrifying Stalinist violence, and to expose the continued harassment of dissidents. When Gorbachev promises glasnost, openness, Pasha, an eager twenty-four year old, longs to create art and to carry on the work of those who came before him. He writes; falls in love. Yet that hope, too, fragments and by 1999 Pasha lives a solitary life in St Petersburg. Until a phone call in the middle of the night acts as a summons both to Moscow and to memory. Through recollections and observation, Pasha walks through the landscapes of history, from concrete tower suburbs, to a summerhouse during Russia's white night summers, to haunting former prison camps in the Arctic north. Pasha's search to find meaning leads him to assemble a fractured story of Russia's traumatic past. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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 Google Books — Cargando...GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)823.4Literature English English fiction Post-Elizabethan 1625-1702Clasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio: (3.83)
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Repression. I have used this entirely inadequate word to summarise decades of Stalin’s violence against his own citizens. Unknown millions died in the wake of collectivisation and the Great Purge which took place in the 1930s. As Stalin consolidated his power, not to be relinquished until his death in 1953, a climate of terror descended. Rivals, dissidents and intellectuals fell to an ever-expanding network of informers, and they disappeared without trace, either to the gulags or to ‘psychiatric’ institutions, or else were shot and buried in mass graves. After Stalin’s death there was a brief period of liberalisation known as The Thaw under Kruschev, but it didn’t last long and in 1964 Brezhnev took power and a repressive cultural policy was restored.
Brabon’s novel begins with the birth of its narrator Pasha in 1964, covers his childhood during the Brezhnev Freeze, and explores the flowering of hope and optimism as Gorbachev introduced economic reforms (perestroika) and new freedoms under ‘openness’ (glasnost). When it’s 1986, Pasha is twenty-four. He thrives in the new atmosphere in Moscow. He goes to street protests on the Arbat (a pedestrianised street in central Moscow); he listens to music that used to be forbidden; he gets to wear jeans; and with his girlfriend Anya he plans to research and write the history of repression. Both he and she have parents who were victims of the Freeze, and Pasha has childhood memories of covert dissident meetings in his mother’s apartment. Now he can tell the story, he thinks.
TO read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/06/05/the-memory-artist-by-katherine-brabon-vogel-... (