The Stalin Epigram by Robert Littell

ALAN CHEUSE OFFTH BOOK REVIEWS FROM NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO 3 The Stalin Epigram byRobert Littell (Simon& Schuster,2009) First aired on NPRMay 29, 2009 It happens to the best of them: seasoned thrillerwriters taking it upon themselves to write a novel that extends the boundaries of the genre?or leaps them altogether? as a way of making a bolder, larger statement about life in thewriter's time. Robert Littell's new novel about the life (and death) and times of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam happens to be one of those books. To tell the story of Mandelstam's blind courage in the creation of a poem critical of Stalin and the sub sequent fury that descended upon him, Littellmakes a bold technical decision: he employs a number of narrators besides the great forty three-year-old poet himself. There is Mandelstam/s devoted wife, Nade zhda, and sympathetic fellow poets Anna Akhmatova and Boris Paster nak, a betrayer of a mistress, a literal strongman (a weight lifterpicked up during one of Stalin's roundups of innocents), and the actual Russian strongman's bodyguard (a tough guy named Nikolai Vlasik). Littell's brilliant and convincing presenta tionof thiskaleidoscopic view of the Mandelstam story makes fora lotof color and heat?the life and times of theStalinist era,with all its fears and bravery, its show trials and executions, with Stalin himself as a character in the center of things. But even with all the colorful characters, the story drives along toward the persecuted poet's best and worst days, and those powerful moments when a number of the principal narrators gather for the best and worst reasons. Stendhal once wrote thatpolitics in a novel was like a pistol shot in an opera house. Here the explosiveness and excitement come from the opposite?poetry thatchanges lives, ifnot history, in a novel that stands head and shoul ders above most others of itskind, a novel thatbegins as a thrillerand ends as a testimony to the courage and naked vision of an odd and eccentric hero. 12 i World Literature Today

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