Angels on the Head of a Pin
A Novel
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In this contemporary Russian classic, a samizdat document arrives at a Soviet newspaper headquarters with unimaginable consequences.
Angels on the Head of a Pin is set in Moscow in the late 1960s, at a time when Khrushchev-era liberalization is being threatened by the return to personality cult and repression following the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia. The editor-in-chief of the organ of the Communist Party collapses with a heart attack outside the Central Committee building. This is partly brought on by the appearance of a samizdat manuscript on his desk that leads to his anguishing over who left it there and what to do with it to avoid falling victim to the malevolence its content is likely to unleash. The solution lies with Yakov Rappoport, an ageing and cynical Jewish veteran of the war and two spells in the Gulag, the author of not only the obnoxious popular campaigns sponsored by the newspaper (and all its letters to the editor) but of every speech that gets made in public by the principals of the regime as well. His efforts to help his stricken editor, as well as the novel's star-crossed lovers, lead to a hallucinatory climax.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A Soviet national newspaper is the mirror for Communist hypocrisy in the 1960s and '70s in this ambitious epic satire. When the executive editor of Trudovaya Pravda, Makartsev, is stricken with a heart attack and hospitalized, Makartsev's deputy, Stephan Yagubov, takes the helm at the paper, throwing the employees into a state of anxious uncertainty. The subsequent political intrigue centers on an obscure, whimsical 19th-century passage about Russian freedom by French author de Custine, who mystically appears to Makartsev just before the translation draws interest from the KGB. A correspondent named Ivlev is eventually arrested and fired when the secret police link him to the document after his affair with a na ve young reporter. Other memorable characters include the devious Yagubov, a cynical Jewish speechwriter and propagandist named Rappoport and the hapless Makartsev, whose son is arrested for a drunk-driving incident in which he kills two pedestrians. On the grand stage of Soviet Russia, Druzhnikov captures the ebb and flow of life at the paper; his portrayal of political machinations as the omniscient Party looks over the shoulders of the employees is piercing and revealing. The sheer number of characters in the novel is daunting, but Druzhnikov preserves the clarity of the story line throughout, and the climax features a compelling showdown between Makartsev and Yagubov. Employing the newspaper in much the same way that Solzhenitsyn used a hospital as a metaphor in Cancer Ward, Druzhnikov captures the essence of Russian life before the collapse of Communism.
