Arrested Voices: Resurrecting the Disappeared Writers of the Soviet Regime

In the late 1980s, as perestroika and glasnost bloomed in the Soviet Union, poet and essayist Shentalinsky, neither a dissident nor a state lackey, saw an opening: he organized fellow writers to appeal to the authorities to open files regarding state repression of writers during the Stalinist era. His lively, ironic book--an episodic, not a comprehensive, report--offers insight into the depredations and corruption of the Soviet regime. The files reveal the Orwellian interrogation of Isaac Babel and the satirist Mikhail Bulgakov's sardonically bold appeal to be allowed to leave the country. Shentalinsky's research uncovers the mysterious fates of writers like the multitalented Pavel Florensky, the ""Russian Leonardo da Vinci,"" whose grandson had been told a dozen versions of Florensky's death. The KGB files, the author reports, both contradict and concur with the published memoirs recalling the great poet Osip Mandelstam; similarly, the files on Maxim Gorky, not a victim but a regime favorite, suggest that, for example, the writer and Lenin were not the great friends claimed by official legend. (July)