BOOKFORUM — DECEMBER/JANUARY 2008
The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia
By Orlando Figes
Metropolitan Books, 740 pages, $35
Early in Nadezhda Mandelstam’s astonishing memoir, Hope Against Hope, she remembers the moment when she registered, for the first time, the full horror of life under Stalin. It was not, as one might assume, when she learned that [...]
FORWARD — June 16, 2006
No one would say it’s an easy task to memorialize and document atrocity. Take the example of the Holocaust museum. The curator must find new ways of evoking the stench of death, the ruthless efficiency of the killing machine and the unfathomably high number of murdered families (at Auschwitz, those mountains [...]
FORWARD — May 12, 2006
There is a long-standing tradition among the Russian intelligentsia of honoring one’s intellectual heroes by prominently displaying their image for all to see. In a place where others might put family portraits, the Russian physicist has a photo of the professor who trained him; the poet stares up at Mandelstam or [...]
