Interesting article on Russian reactions to Martin Amis’ Koba the Dread (if you don’t know what that is, just read a few posts down): | ‘Haughty’ Amis faces the wrath of Russia.
Sample:
In Koba the Dread, Amis asks why history is not as – if not more – sombre about Stalin’s Terror, which claimed many more lives than the Holocaust. He concludes: ‘There’s something in Bolshevism that is painfully, unshirkably comic.’ Russians have reacted hostilely because of Amis’s detached style, in which he searches for the right ‘literary genre’ for the genocidal regime – a black farce. Petrov said: ‘Soviet history can be represented as a funny anecdote, but I don’t think that it is productive because there were serious things in Soviet history.’
