The Kremlin Ball (New York Review Books Classics)

Stories from the Author's visit to Moscow in 1929 which are a mix of reality and fiction, but allow the reader to reflect upon the human nature. Interesting reading.

Curzio Malaparte is an author known for his fantastic stories from the Second World war (one of the most famous is the tableau of frozen horses in Lake Ladoga). He was a former fascist who stayed in the Soviet Union during the late twenties and early thirties and wrote a book about Lenin, becoming more and more leftist, but never a Bolshevik. The Kremlin Ball is an unfinished book with lots of repetition about the Soviet elite during the period when even Trotski was active, but with the hindsight of knowing what had happened (Malaparte started the book only in the forties). The main protagonists are famous communists and their wives, with a mixture of Western diplomats who entertained them. The main interest is in the wives and their luxurious lifestyles before the Terror changed the landscape. As always with Malaparte, the book is best in details, in describing extravagant behaviours and strange personalities, like the Foreign Ministry head of protocol who moved about in Moscow with a horse-drawn carriage, but was very sharp in politics, or the different valuable jewels and clothes that the Bolshevik ladies loved to wear. There is a fascinating atmosphere which feels true, but as with Malaparte always, we will never know which details are really true and which are just his imagination. In the end, it becomes clear that Malaparte takes the side of the new Stalinist Guard and doesn't regret the demise of the Old Bolsheviks, who for him were corrupt and actually much worse than Stalin and his henchmen. Something which we will never know for sure.

Malaparte is a unique writer...he combines his experience of events, his impressions on those he meets with a lyrical prose that verges on surrealism...this is an unfinished book, not perhaps as polished as one would expect as it was finished posthumously, but it is such a valuable glimpse into those years in Russia between the satisfaction of a revolution accomplished and the fear of what is coming next... the winners of yesterday are today's loosers! Read and enjoy the ride into the last days of Moscow's revolutionary intelligentsia.

Interesting. What life was like between the 1917 Revolution and World War II in Moscow.