“Every scarecrow secretly desires to terrorize.” —Stanislaw Lee When, from time to time, a responsible official in the United States suggests we employ our abundance of food as a “weapon” in our struggle with Communist totalitarianism, a clamor of protest arises from one end of the country to the other. But when the Communists wield...
Post
Bulgarian Death Squad
Georgi Markov: The Truth That Killed; Ticknor & Fields; New York. Claire Sterling: The Time of the Assassins: Anatomy of an Investigation; Holt, Reinhart & Winston; New York. In 1962 a one-time engineer, Georgi Markov, rose meteroically to the upper reaches of the Bulgarian literary elite upon the publication of a novel entitled Men, which...
Post
De-Filed
Penn Kimball: The File; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. On the surface, Penn Kimball at 68 might seem to have enjoyed a successful, satisfying life. Born to well-to-do parents of liberal Republican persuasion, he grew up happily in New Britain, Connecticut. After graduating from Lawrenceville, he matriculated at Princeton, where he was editor of...
Post
Tending the Abused Garden
Max Hayward: Writers in Russia: 1917-1978; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego, CA. by Charles A. Moser At the time of his premature death in 1979, Max Hayward was among the finest Western interpreters of contemporary Russian literature in the Soviet Union. As one of Britain’s most accomplished Slavists, he had obtained a research position at...
Post
Knuckling Under & Soaring Free
Border Crossing: The West and Russian Identity in Soviet Literature 1917-1934 by Carol Avlns; University of California Press; Berkeley. Poems by Anna Akhmatova, Selected and translated by Lyn Coffin; W. W. Norton; New York. In Border Crossings Carol Avins, associate professor of Slavic language at Northwestern University, grapples with a question that has long aggravated...