Compassion edition by Patricia le Roy Literature Fiction eBooks
Download As PDF : Compassion edition by Patricia le Roy Literature Fiction eBooks 
"Poetry is more respected in Russia than anywhere else. People are killed for it."
In 1938, during the Stalin Terror, Nina writes "Witness," a poem about the purges. Working secretly at night, alone in her room, she learns each line of the poem by heart, and then puts a match to the pages. Paper is dangerous, and Nina is a marked woman. If the NKVD find "Witness," they will send her to the camps.
In London, Andrei, who left Nina behind when he was forced to flee Russia, despairs at the thought that she might already be dead. Has she survived? Have the purges swallowed her up?
"Witness" is finally published in Russia fifty years later. Andrei's granddaughter Charlotte buys him a copy in Moscow and takes it back to London. Andrei is now over ninety, and a world-famous sculptor. After refusing for years to talk about the past, he consents to tell Charlotte about his love affair with Nina.
Compassion edition by Patricia le Roy Literature Fiction eBooks
An excellent work. Those who have been following Mme. Le Roy’s novels set in a historical context will appreciate the careful research that has gone into this opus that skillfully weaves an unconventional romance into the backdrop of the Soviet literary intelligentsia’s struggle for survival from the time of the Bolshevik revolution to Perestroika. The cognoscenti will recognize facets of known Soviet literary figures but they are never reduced to stock caricatures in Mme. Le Roy’s sensitive rendition. The intermittent switch in narrators is deftly handled and keeps the reader engaged. It’s a sad historical comment that the story couldn’t have had a happier ending but that would have been inconsistent with reality for the Soviet literary intelligentsia.Product details
|
Tags : Compassion - Kindle edition by Patricia le Roy. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Compassion.,ebook,Patricia le Roy,Compassion,FICTION Historical,FICTION Literary
People also read other books :
- Crazy Quilts A Beginner's Guide Betty Fikes Pillsbury 9780821422144 Books
- Positively Caroline How I beat bulimia for good... and found real happiness Caroline Adams Miller MAPP 9780925776228 Books
- World Development Report 2015 Mind, Society, and Behavior World Bank 9781464803420 Books
- Mindfulness Meditation A History of Meditation - edition by Dr. AJ Redding. Religion & Spirituality eBooks @ .
- A Home for Her Heart (Boardinghouse Betrothals) Janet Lee Barton 9780373282814 Books
Compassion edition by Patricia le Roy Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews
Patricia Le Roy is a master storyteller. Compassion is a seminal book that like her previous novel Judas Tree vividly describes what life under communism—the most advanced stage of socialism—was like. Both books hold lessons for our times. The novel is also a cliffhanger to the very end.
Compassion vividly reconstructs the environment in which writers and artists in the USSR lived and created during the Stalinist period. Le Roy tells the reader how after the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks systematically suppressed free speech, creativity, and original thinking by silencing or eliminating intellectuals who did not support the Socialist Revolution.
The story begins in the early 1920s with restrictions on free expression, censorship, and persecution of writers. Being labeled a bourgeois poet meant you would not be published or worse. Such conditions paved the way for a tyrant like Stalin to emerge and, as we know today, eventually led to crimes against humanity such as the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine-genocide, culminating in the purges of 1937/38 when fear of arrest and deportation was ubiquitous.
The book also conveys a message relevant to today’s world. Current attempts to regulate free speech through the dogma of political correctness and hate speech laws represent the slippery slope to authoritarianism and totalitarianism. The story unfolds around the Russian poetess Nina Anishkova (Anna Akhmatova in real life) and her writer friends such as Ilya, and other protagonists. Feld, Nina’s first husband, proclaims “I cannot breathe. I cannot breathe anymore,” reacting to dogma proclaimed by Lunachovsky, the Commissar of Cultural Enlightenment — “literature and the arts would from now on be used as tools to propagate communist thought.” Nina’s second husband Gregory Afanasyev, the inquisitor and mouthpiece of revolutionary art agrees — “Art for Art’s sake is inadmissible and self-expression in art is no longer acceptable. . . . Art must be subservient to our social needs and used as tools to propagate communist thought.” Later he too is arrested and sentenced to Kolyma.
The poet and writer Ilya disagrees. He believes that his best work comes from an extreme form of individualism called inspiration, echoing the Libertarian philosophy of Ayn Rand in two of her most popular books “Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” where the individual and collective are inherently in conflict. Ilya who lives in constant fear because he doesn’t know when and how the Bolsheviks will strike, says “they aren’t interested in the truth.” We all believed in the Revolution that promised “Equality, Justice, and Peace.” But then we realized that we exchanged one form of oppression for an even worse one that aimed to control all forms of human activity. Ilya finally confesses I am guilty of the crime of thought. Another poet, Kastalnik, says “we must all walk, talk and think the same way.”
Attempts to discredit Nina bring to mind today’s speech codes at American universities or hate speech laws in Europe, which, by the way, in countries like Germany are enforced the same way they were enforced in the Soviet Union. If you dared to resist and spoke up you risked losing your position, reputation and imprisonment, not unlike tenured professors in the US who speak out for free speech.
Le Roy’s book is sprinkled with dozens of phrases verging on poetry. For example, describing spring as “a swirling mist of greens and colored buds,” or winter “it was snowing again, and the branches of the trees outside the window were white against the vaster whiteness of the garden.” At the end of the book when Nina encounters Andrei, her old lover, she describes the meeting in the superbly concise phrase — “Twenty years of staring, in twenty seconds.”
Near the end of the book Charlotte, the narrator, breaks down crying “so much waste, so much misery, so many broken lives . . .” all in the name of social justice, equality and peace, slogans, that resonated better with intellectuals in the West than in the Soviet Union, and by the way still do.
Several other leitmotifs run through the book immortality (Nina stayed in Russia because in her words “I have the power to grant immortality”), obliteration of historical memory and replacing it with a politically acceptable narrative (precisely what is happening at our universities today) and inability or unwillingness to resist tyranny (in Nina’s words “we did not resist, we did not protest. How could we?”)
I’m tempted to add, “we did not resist because we did not posses the means. The Bolsheviks took away all the guns.” Instead, Nina offers an inane “Each one of us was imprisoned in our own universe. The terror was like a sickness, like a plague. It struck at random out of a clear blue sky. No one was safe. The best thing is to lie low.” This fatalistic mindset, reflected in the saying Eto nasha sud’ba – it is our fate,” appears to be a peculiarly Russian trait common to people who have never experienced freedom. Le Roy illustrates this peculiarity as Nina patiently awaits for news of Grisha’s fate outside the Kresty prison. Yet, no one rebels; no one fights back, protests or screams. There is something defective with the psyche of such people. One is tempted to contrast this with thousands of armed rebellions in Ukraine during the period of collectivization and the Holodomor. They did not succeed because in the mid-twenties Stalin confiscated all weapons that inundated Ukraine after WWI and the Civil War, but they did not go down without a fight.
Another example comes to mind when Le Roy describes how its principal actors during the purge of 1937/38, Kirov, Zinoviev, Kamenev, all abased themselves confessing to crimes and sentenced to death for crimes they did not commit, reflecting a bizarre masochistic deformation. In contrast, Communist party leaders in Ukraine, such as Skrypnyk and Khvylovyj, at least had the strength of character to take their own lives rather than confess to fictitious crimes.
Deportation to Kolyma, the most dreadful of the Gulags, pops up again and again. Only a few of the readers if this novel will realize that Kolyma was a “work camp” consisting of hundreds of camps spread throughout northeastern Siberia. In magnitude, Nazi Germany’s concentration camps paled in numbers.
I noticed that Le Roy uses the Russian way of spelling Kiev and Kharkov rather than the Ukrainian Kyiv and Kharkiv, something that will grate many Ukrainians. She also refers to Ukraine as “the Ukraine,” as in the sentence “the golden air of the Ukraine and the grace of Georgia shiver away from his mind . . .” suggesting that Ukraine is a province of Russia while Georgia not.
Le Roy tells the story in more or less linear time by intertwining narratives of the main protagonists. At times the narratives of the protagonists are difficult to follow (Le Roy uses a variety of fonts to distinguish the main characters). It is, nevertheless, a stirring and compelling book that shows how any voices who did not support the communist revolution were first silenced and later eliminated—take your pick—through exiles, purges, gulags and outright murder. Overall it is an important novel that should be read not only by students of Russian history and the Cold War but all students, because like her previous novel Judas Tree it contains poignant lessons for today’s generation who know little or next to nothing about the evils and ravages of communism.
Russia at its worst – under Stalin. Russians at their best, as represented by their greatest female poet. Who lived through the worst to produce the best and was recognized internationally at the end for what she had done.
Just finished Compassion and loved it. Some super-lyrical passages about art and space and time. The image that stuck with me most was the "upside-down church." Especially interesting because of my personal experience with Soviet communism.
Many stories mix and mingle in Compassion, a novel rich in history with characters who suffer through real life events. Through a series of interviews, Charlotte unveils the ill-fated love story of her grandfather Andrei, a suspected British spy, and Nina, a controversial poet loved by the people yet on the radar of Stalin’s Bolsheviks. Flashing back to post-revolutionary Russia, who can you trust and what difficult choices must you make to survive during these tumultuous times? What happens to the lovers? What path do they ultimately take?
Le Roy has mastered the task of putting the reader in the shoes of multiple characters while the storyline floats between the past and the present. Gripping, emotional, philosophical and very approachable.
This rating is well deserved for ‘Compassion’ is another gripping tale set in two times and two worlds. Patricia LeRoy captures her readers’ interest from the very first page, and, using her impeccable research, builds a ‘can’t put it down‘ story that is to be enjoyed by both historians and fiction lovers.
This is a touching and wonderful book which I have enjoyed the best of those of hers I have read. I visited the USSR [as it still was] in the late 80's and found the ordinary people kind and helpful even with the language difficulty. I have been to many of the sites that are mentioned and so it's like I am revisiting my travels. Such courage and endurance during terrible times!
An excellent work. Those who have been following Mme. Le Roy’s novels set in a historical context will appreciate the careful research that has gone into this opus that skillfully weaves an unconventional romance into the backdrop of the Soviet literary intelligentsia’s struggle for survival from the time of the Bolshevik revolution to Perestroika. The cognoscenti will recognize facets of known Soviet literary figures but they are never reduced to stock caricatures in Mme. Le Roy’s sensitive rendition. The intermittent switch in narrators is deftly handled and keeps the reader engaged. It’s a sad historical comment that the story couldn’t have had a happier ending but that would have been inconsistent with reality for the Soviet literary intelligentsia.
0 Response to "[C6R]⋙ Libro Free Compassion edition by Patricia le Roy Literature Fiction eBooks"
Post a Comment