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A Ransomed Dissident - A Life in Art Under the Soviets (Paperback)
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A Ransomed Dissident - A Life in Art Under the Soviets (Paperback)
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In 1939, a ten-year-old Igor Golomstock accompanied his mother, a
medical doctor, to the vast network of labour camps in the Russian
Far East. While she tended patients, he was minded by assorted
'trusty' prisoners - hardened criminals - and returned to Moscow an
almost feral adolescent, fluent in obscene prison jargon but
intellectually ignorant. Despite this dubious start he became a
leading art historian and co-author (with his close friend Andrey
Sinyavsky) of the first, deeply controversial, monograph on Picasso
published in the Soviet Union. His writings on his 43 years in the
Soviet Union offer a rare insight into life as a quietly subversive
art historian and the post-Stalin dissident community. In vivid
prose Golomstock shows the difficulties of publishing, curating and
talking about Western art in Soviet Russia and, with
self-deprecating humour, the absurd tragicomedy of life for the
Moscow intelligentsia during Khruschev's thaw and Brezhnev's
stagnation. He also offers a unique personal perspective on the
1966 trial of Sinyavsky and Yuri Daniel, widely considered the end
of Khruschev's liberalism and the spark that ignited the Soviet
dissident movement. In 1972 he was given 'permission' to leave the
Soviet Union, but only after paying a 'ransom' of more than 25
years' salary, nominally intended to reimburse the state for his
education. A remarkable collection of artists, scholars and
intellectuals in Russia and the West, including Roland Penrose,
came together to help him pay this astronomical sum. His memoirs of
life once in the UK offer an insider's view of the BBC Russian
Service and a penetrating analysis of the notorious feud between
Sinyavsky and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Nominated for the Russian
Booker Prize on its publication in Russian in 2014, The Ransomed
Dissident opens a window onto the life of a remarkable man: a
dissident of uncompromising moral integrity and with an outstanding
gift for friendship.
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