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The Zhivago Affair

  The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book by Peter Finn & Petra Couvée - review by Donald Rayfield Donald Rayfield Pasternak Bound The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book By  Peter Finn & Petra Couvée Harvill Secker 350pp £20   In the 1970s and 1980s there was a ‘shop’ in Pimlico where visitors to – and from, if they were daring – the USSR could select free of charge any number of books, largely Russian poetry, fiction and history banned by the Soviets, as long as they promised to distribute them to Soviet citizens. The books were often intercepted by customs, but corruption was then no less widespread than today and confiscated books would soon be selling on the black markets of Leningrad and Moscow. Not just the distribution but the publication and, often, the editing of this material, which shaped the minds of Soviet dissidents (and diplomats), were down to the CIA. The Soviet authori...
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The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World

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  His Exile Was Intolerable Anka Muhlstein Why was Stefan Zweig unable to rebuild his life? May 8, 2014 issue Reviewed: The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World by George Prochnik Other Press, 390 pp., $27.95 The Grand Budapest Hotel a film directed by Wes Anderson On February 23, 1942, Stefan Zweig and his young wife committed suicide together in Petrópolis, Brazil. The following day, the Brazilian government held a state funeral, attended by President Getulio Vargas. The news spread rapidly around the world, and the couple’s deaths were reported on the front page of  The New York Times . Zweig had been one of the most renowned authors of his time, and his work had been translated into almost fifty languages. In the eyes of one of his friends, the novelist Irmgard Keun, “he belonged to those that suffered but who would not and could not hate. And he was one of those noble Jewish types who, thinskinned and open to harm, lives in an immaculate glass world of t...
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Emperor of Nostalgia

  Emperor of Nostalgia J.M. Coetzee February 28, 2002 issue Reviewed: The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth translated from the German and with an introduction by Michael Hofmann Norton, 281 pp., $27.95 1. At the apogee of a reign that commenced in 1848 and ran until 1916, Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, ruled over some fifty million subjects. Of these fewer than a quarter spoke German as a first language. Even within Austria itself every second person was a Slav of one kind or another—Czech, Slovak, Pole, Ukrainian, Serb, Croat, Slovene. Each of these ethnic groups had aspirations to become a nation in its own right, with all the appurtenances of nationhood, including a national language and a national literature. The mistake of the imperial government, we can see with hindsight, was to take these aspirations too lightly, to believe that the advantages of belonging to an enlightened, prosperous, peaceful, multiethnic state would always outweigh the pull of sep...
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