#reading my biography about Stalin

[i-am-still-bb]

I never would have thought

that I’d be putting this much though and effort into dying Easter eggs. 

I wasn’t planning on doing dying any this year because Æ is still so little. We’re not even doing a basket, because the stocking at Christmas didn’t mean much to him. He did hunt eggs last Saturday and he’ll hunt some more on actual Easter (some containing the little things that would have been in his basket if we had done that). But then I saw a video tutorial on Insta/Facebook/interwebs showing a way to safely dye Easter eggs with a toddler. And it seemed like fun for him that had a nice result. You put the dye in cool whip and roll the eggs around in it. Let them rest in the fidge for a few hours. Rinse the whipping cream off and voila you are left with beautiful eggs.

Not. 

This is the tutorial I used. (I could not find the video I originally saw, but as far as I can tell everything was the same.)

So the process was fine. One of the eggs cracked. No biggie.

I did the vinegar bath. It was diluted maybe half-and-half with water because that’s A LOT of vinegar. And I don’t think that they sat for quite 5 minutes. When drying the eggs a thin layer of shell came off leaving the eggs a slightly lighter color.

So after the eggs are safely in the fridge to set I decide to show Æ what is inside the things he was just playing with. I finish cracked the egg. It’s still 85% raw. I did do two batches in my pressure cooker. I have guesses as to what went wrong. But one batch was cooked and one was not cooked (positive, the batch that was cooked peeled beautifully.) But I don’t learn that until after the eggs have sat in their colored cool whip for a few hours in the fridge. 

I start rinsing the eggs. VERY little color is on the eggs. I did use brown eggs, and I know that that will make the colors more muted, but they should still be visible.

The color is actually stronger in the areas where that thin layer of shell did not come off following the vinegar bath.

I try and fail to figure out which ones need cooked more by spinning them. I resort to peeling them and having my husband buy more eggs so we can try again tomorowing instead of re-dying these eggs. 

In some places the dye seeped through the shell and onto the egg white itself (the reason behind using cool whip rather than shaving cream for this). In some of those spots there was a bit of color on the shell, but in others there was NOTHING on the shell.

Tutorial said gel dye (as did others), but the pictures had the liquid food dye. I used the liquid dye. Tried one eggs with gel dye and cool whip. It sat in the fridge covered in cool whip and dye for 20+ minutes (more than double the instructed amount of  time). Nothing. No color on the shell.

In interest of finding a toddler friendly way my mother suggested just gel dye in a ziplok bag and then squish the egg around. I am currently making a test egg to see if that even works. I’m testing it on one of the hardboiled eggs that had the vinegar bath and on a raw egg that has neither been hardboiled or bathed in vinegar to see if the vinegar stripping that layer from the egg actually decreased color adhesion rather than increasing it. 

will try to remember to update

[hungwy]

Been a real "history of the Soviet Union" year so far. Amur River by Colin Thubron, Sovietistan by Erika Fatland, Central Asia by Adeeb Khalid, about to start Ronald Grigor Suny's biography of Stalin, read a few pages into Collapse by Vladislav Zubok the other day, the whole Estonia thing I had a few weeks back, arguably my current Counter Strike thing,

[fruityyamenrunner]

the Goldwater Rule, where the professional boundary of American shrinks got limited, but what were they diagnosing Goldwater with?

Fact created a one-question survey and got hold of a mailing list. The single question was: “Do you think that Barry Goldwater is psychologically fit to serve as President of the United States?" Of the more than 12,000 psychiatrists who received the audacious survey, only 2,400 responded. 1,189 said Goldwater was unfit for office, a number that Ginzburg trumpeted in large type on the cover of Fact. Inside, lurid excerpts from the psychiatrists’ comments filled page after page. In light of the leading question and the low response rate, it was hard to argue that the survey was useful or even valid—except for political purposes. Ginzburg complicated matters by editing, heightening, and sometimes combining responses.

Fact also ran a vivid, oversimplified psychological portrait of Goldwater that had been assembled from magazine articles and other publicly available sources. Warren Boroson, who had read widely in psychoanalysis, admired both Theodor Adorno’s study, The Authoritarian Personality, and psychoanalyst Erik Erikson’s psychohistorical biography, Young Man Luther. Boroson thought he recognized something familiar in Goldwater.

Boroson’s draft profile charged that Goldwater exemplified what Adorno called the authoritarian personality: a personality developmentally stuck in the anal stage, unable to look up to his father, insecure about his masculinity, and susceptible to intolerance and to fascist political thinking.

As he worked, Boroson managed to get Erikson on the phone, obtaining his tentative blessing. The hypothesis sounded “reasonable,” Erikson told him. The author of Young Man Luther later called back with second thoughts and suggested that Boroson flesh out the idea with more historical and contextual information. This further step was never taken. Instead, Boroson’s draft was rewritten and sensationalized by Ginzburg.

They included such statements as “I believe Goldwater has the same pathological make-up as Hitler, Castro, Stalin and other known schizophrenic leaders,” and “It is my feeling that Senator Goldwater appeals to the unconscious sadism and hostility in the average human being.” Others said, “he is a mass murderer at heart,” and “it is apparent that Goldwater hates and fears his wife.”

it sounds so literary and trite now

[yaoist]

Book Roundup

Clientelism and Nationality in an Early Soviet Fiefdom: the Trials of Nestor Lakoba / Blauvelt

This one was my favorite of the three I read recently by a long way. It's short, sweet, and packed full of fascinating information on how the Soviet system of government functioned and why it worked the way it did. Nestor Lakoba is famous for being (allegedly, one must add) murdered by Beria and he doesn't get a lot of attention from historians outside of Abkazia, but the writer of this book examines a trove of fascinating documents. The intersection of ethnic tension, intense bureaucratic breakdown, vicious politicking, and mob-like social structures makes the entire thing a fascinating read. If you're interested in Soviet politics (and be warned it's very bureaucratic) I cannot recommend this book enough for the insight it gives into how governing a small slice of the empire worked.

The Life, Times and Moral Dilemma of Beria / Sanger

I was hoping that Sanger's biography might provide a more up-to-date alternative to Knight - no such luck. Sanger relies way to much on Sudoplatov to discuss the facts of Beria and the whole thing feels half-baked, as if he lost interest halfway through or didn't fully dedicate himself. The "moral dilemma" part - which could have been an interesting look at the way someone who did terrible things functioned - was rote, short, and lacked the commitment of Getty's Yezhov biography. Knight remains the authority on Beria for now, just read her book instead.

Stalin and His Hangmen / Rayfield

This list in incidentally in descending order of enjoyment. Donald Rayfield isn't a historian, he refuses to even properly and entirely cite his sources (dismissing it as too much trouble) so it's hard to tell where he's getting his information - except when he chooses to use the less-than-reliable Yezhov biography instead of the decent one. His one area of expertise is the cultural context of Georgia and Russian and his ability to read both languages; his insights into Georgian culture are genuinely interesting but not much else is. Frustratingly, it's hard to check many of the sources he does cite, as they're not in English. Adding an extra layer of frustration are his inane tangents about how "corruption of children" is "arguably Stalin's greatest crime", his Freudian psychoanalysis of Stalin's poetry; all of his opining is pedestrian and adds nothing (except the complaint about how Beria let everyone else outmaneuver him, which we (me) were all (me) thinking). One step up from pop-history bile - SKIP!

[deadpresidents]

Are there any specific historical figures that you wish there was a better all out biography about it? For example I know there are millions of books about Sir Winston Churchill but I have never found one that I feel stands out (also if you know of one please let me know!!!!!!) Same with stalin

I actually do think that Churchill and Stalin have definitive biographies that stand out amongst the scores of books written about them.

William Manchester's The Last Lion trilogy is the best biography I've read about Churchill. The entire trilogy is available in a boxed set (BOOK | KINDLE). The individual volumes that make up the trilogy are: •The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1874-1932 (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-1940 (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) -- The third and final volume of the biography was finished after William Manchester died by Paul Reid, using much of Manchester's research and prep work. While one author stepping in to finish the work of another can sometimes be an issue, Reid's work and writing blends seamlessly with Manchester's.

As for Stalin, I think that Simon Sebag Montefiore's Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) is the best single-volume biography published about the Soviet leader. Stephen Kotkin's two-volume biography on Stalin -- Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO), and Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) -- is excellent and also stands out amongst other books about Stalin's life.

When it comes to some other historical figures that I think are in dire need of new, updated, deeply-researched, definitive biographies, I think number one on my list would be Fidel Castro. It's not that there aren't any books written Fidel (or any other historical figures I mention), it's just that I don't feel like there's been a full-fledged, great biography yet written about them. I have a bunch of books about Fidel, but I think the most recent one was written in the mid-1980s. I also would be interested in a better biography of Saddam Hussein. Con Coughlin wrote a pretty good book about Saddam, but the most up-to-date edition of the book was published shortly after Saddam was captured and before he was tried and executed. I imagine that there's a significant amount of new information and research from the past 20 years that could go into a definitive Saddam biography.

I've also been waiting for years for a good biography about Muammar Qaddafi. All the books I have about Qaddafi are from the 80s when he was Ronald Reagan's nemesis as the "mad dog of the Middle East". None of those books cover his attempt to normalize relations with the West after 9/11 when he was seemingly scared straight by what happened to Saddam, and then his epic downfall during the Arab Spring and Libyan Revolution, when his convoy was bombed by NATO as he tried to flee his crumbling country and he ended up being brutally killed by the people he had terrorized for 40 years after they found him cowering in a drainage ditch with his gold-plated gun. Qaddafi was such a weird and fascinating character that I'm shocked that there haven't been more documentaries about him. Honestly, if I still knew how to write, I'd absolutely write a book or film about Qaddafi. Unfortunately, I forgot how to write somewhere around 2014 or 2015.

[dogslayslaw]

I found this book on one of our bookshelves at home. I like looking through the shelves because there's always a mysterious book I've never seen before. Lately I've been spotting Soviet histories/literature. I found a biography on Stalin, which I found interesting, but not as much as this. I only got a few pages into that to know it probably wouldn't go into a lot of the atrocities. Personally, I like viewing the events through the eyes of the common people, the victims. You don't see that much in history textbooks! So I picked this one up (The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn), the word "gulag" catching my eye:

So I flipped it over and opened it, finding an interesting hand written note/warning by a woman who I'm not even sure is alive anymore and an author's note on the back which was also intriguing.

Now I had to read this! Yes, I'm very much in the right frame of mind right now, so Elaine's warning doesn't mean that much to me right now. If you can't read it, I did make alt text for every image I put here.

The book itself is partially researched and partially an autobiography to describe what it was like to be in the Gulag (and how it was to be arrested and such).

This is apparently the first of 3 volumes, though we only have this one. I haven't gotten far in it either; I'm only 10 pages in. But let me say, Elaine was right... Currently it's describing the arrests of citizens, which is traumatizing enough. Knowing the Gulag was even worse is just an eerie experience. I might update my thoughts as I read on, but no promises.

ANYWAY I recommend this book for anyone interested in stuff like this. Even if you're not, you should look into it anyway because I think it's important to learn about just how bad totalitarian governments are (FUCK THE KGB AND FUCK STALIN)

[imagoddamnonionmason]

HI GOOSE :D

For the ask meme!

🕳️- Talk about a research rabbit hole you fell down!

🎻- Where do you look when you need some inspiration?

Hello Witch 💖💖

🕳️- Talk about a research rabbit hole you fell down!

Lmao, I fall down so many 😂 the most recent one I think was either for Call of Booty or Jodie’s biography.

Either way, I spent a lot of time reading up on the Navy during the Golden Age of Piracy, to try and get a decent understanding of the hierarchy as a I was writing a chapter for Admiral Adler. That then lead to looking into their weapons, the clothing, Port Royal (both irl and in media) which then lead to looking into other islands and spaces to explore in the Caribbean.

I’ll be going down that rabbit hole again because I need to rejog my memory of everything and get it written down so it’s on hand somewhere.

As for Jodie’s bio, that was looking for historically accurate things - Stalin and political prisoners during the 50s, to his death, what would have to prisoners who were held in gulags, Christmas for the Soviet Union.

Wait- another one was for Keith’s dad. Looked into the civil war in Russia between the red and white army and how Russian immigrants were treated in America.

Yeah, these are briefly just a few of the rabbit holes I’ve jumped down, but I like to make sure that I’m being as accurate as I can be. It’s history, after all, and you can’t really fuck about with it.

🎻 - where do you look when you need inspiration?

Songs. Any of the jumbled up playlists that I have. Music has a huge effect on my mood and I often use it when I’m in a pickle.

Also using different kinds of songs for different moods.

If I need to write angst, I’ll listen to songs that are heavy, angsty.

Romance? Romantic songs.

Lyrics often help me, too, as I’ve always been the kind of person to read deeper into lyrics and find them vibing with a certain character or event.

[natequarter]

1, 9, 10 and 15 for the ask game!

1: Recommend your favourite fic ever.

well, that's one hell of a question! perhaps the only must-read for doctor who is Time v.3.0 by Teyke, a haunting and terrifying fic about the time war. nonetheless, it is not necessarily my favourite fic... i honestly don't know what that is. In Due Time We Shall Reap by Thascalos is beyond explicit, but, well, formative influences (aka 'that thing you read over and over again at A Certain Age') are formative influences whether or not you want them to be, i suppose. don't bury me by petroltogo is haunting.

as far as humour goes, The Grand Sci-Fi Fuckathon of Hitler and Stalin by yonderdarling is the funniest thing i've ever read. yes, really... don't drink whilst you read it. runners-up for Funniest are: How Now, Brown Monkey by Liadt and The King of Tallstoria by the_alchemist. all i can really say, i suppose, is don't give medieval kings candy crush.

it's unfinished, but i'm currently putting The Red Rose of York by medieval_scribe up there. Like Gods by Ade. Continuitas by skazka. Mary on a cross by Neolina_W. thou child of my right hand by heartofstanding. (shattering! i am not sure at this point that i am capable of identifying a favourite piece!) Periapsides by avani. No Indifferent Judge by edwardianspinsteraunt. sincerest apologies if you have not, for some strange reason, whiled away the hours haunted by baldwin iv.

of comfort and despair by damnedscribblingwoman is definitely an all-time favourite, and i really mean it this time.

anyway, here is the actual answer: Queenmaker by La Reine Noire (lareinenoire). delightfully fucked up.

9: Recommend a fic from your first fandom.

Le Donne Che Piangono (The Weeping Women) – The ‘Thrice Cursed’ Remix by aralias. The Boy Who Killed Time by Netgirl_y2k. , said the nightmare by patrexes. Burn Your Biographies by JaneTurenne. (i promise these are categorised. they really are.)

The Chronicles of The Oakdean-Smiths by PinkPunk010. Any Port Manteau In A Storm by yonderdarling. (actually, i recommend all their works, along with MayFairy. speaking of...) The Definition Of Trouble by evilqueenofgallifrey (MayFairy). probably not quite so good as i remember it, but the only good execution of 'twelve/missy lovechild' i've seen, so...

17 Reasons Why Romana Is Better Than The Doctor by calapine.

Girl in Every Port by tree_and_leaf. No Sacrifice: the What Are We Doing In Love? Remix by hhertzof. A Life Full of Compromises by paranoidangel. read the old stuff. it usually pays off.

did this say 'a fic'? suddenly i can't read.

10: Recommend a fic from your latest fandom!

What Twisted Webs We Weave by The_Purple_Opossum. obviously.

15: Recommend a gen fic!

Thick Skull by thehappybones. both sweet and inventive

(link)

[that-one-flute12]

book 2 of April!

Symphony For the City of the Dead by M.T. Anderson

This book is a bit of a change from the other books I've posted. It's a biography about my favorite composer, Dmitri Shostakovich. A few cool things:

It focuses not only on Shostakovich and the Leningrad symphony, but also the war and Stalinism and that's cool

Very well written. Often I have a hard time reading biographies but I liked this one a lot.

It doesn't use a lot of technical music terms, which wouldn't be a big issue for me if it did, but if you aren't a musician or can read music but are interested in classical music this is a good book for you.

Talks about his struggles with communism and Stalin

Overall very enjoyable. If you like Shostakovich's work or are interested in classical music or even the Siege of Leningrad, definitely recommend. 9/10

[uncleweed]

ARUNDHATI ROY

When I was growing up in Kerala, to nourish the English part of my brain—there was a Malayalam part, too—there was a lot of Shakespeare and a lot of Kipling, a combination of the most beautiful, lyrical language and some very unlyrical politics, although I didn’t see it that way then . . . I was definitely influenced by them, as I have been later by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, John Berger, Joyce, Nabokov. What an impossible task it is to list the writers one loves and admires. I’m grateful for the lessons one learns from great writers, but also from imperialists, sexists, friends, lovers, oppressors, revolutionaries—everybody. Everybody has something to teach a writer. My reading can switch rather oddly from Mrs. Dalloway to a report about the National Register of Citizens and the two million people in Assam who have been struck off it and have suddenly ceased to be Indian citizens. Ceased to have any rights whatsoever.

A novel that overwhelmed me recently is Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. Just incredible—the audacity, the range of characters and situations. It begins with a surreal description of the Volga burning—the gasoline floating on the surface of the water catching fire, giving the illusion of a burning river—as the battle for Stalingrad rages. The manuscript was arrested by the Soviet authorities, as though it were a person. Another recent read was The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, by Giorgio Bassani. It’s about the time just before World War II, when many Jews in Italy were members of the Fascist Party. The Finzi-Continis are an elite Jewish family who live in a mansion with huge grounds and tennis courts. The book is centered around a love affair between the daughter of the Finzi-Continis and a person who is an outsider to that world as the Holocaust closes in. There is something about the unchanging stillness of that compound, the refusal to acknowledge what is happening, even while the darkness deepens around it. It is chilling and so eerily contemporary. All of the entitled Finzi-Continis end up dead. Considering what happened in Stalinist Russia, what happened in Europe during World War II—one is reading, searching for ways to understand the present. What fascinates me is how some of the people who were shot by Stalin’s firing squads died shouting “Long live Stalin!” People who labored in the gulag camps wept when he died. Ordinary Germans never rose up against Hitler, even as he persisted with a war that turned their cities into rubble. I look for clues to human psychology in Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler, in the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, whom Stalin basically killed, in the poems of Anna Akhmatova and Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov.

[master-of-the-opera-house]

thanks for the tag this is so fun and dire bc im actually jared 19

Last book I read: Hamlet by William Shakespeare ((I think?? trying to go off my last theatre class here))

Book I recommend: I think everyone's read it but if they haven't The Great Gatsby by F Scott. Fitzgerald.

Book I couldn't put down: Oh baby, executive dysfunction has made me put every book down..... K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist by Peter Carlson took me the shortest amount of time ((4 months??)) to finish recently.

A book on my TBR: Mad King: The Life and Times of Ludwig II of Bavaria by Greg King bc he wrote another historical biography that I really, really liked about a similarly misunderstood person ((with Sue Woolmans)) ((hehe)) and I trust him to handle my dear lad with grace, but because my attention span is a bitch I never got past the first 40 pages but I WILL. one day.,,,,,,,,

A book I've put down: HITLER AND THE HABSBURGS BY JAMES LONGO!!1! Sorry not sorry but SOD that son of a cunt NO footnotes so half the things he said could've been made up for all I care bUT THE LAST STRAW was him PERVING OVER poor sophie von hohenberg when she was ON HER WAY TO CONFRONT THE NAZIS like piss offfffffff

A book on my wishlist: BBC Ghosts Button House Archives *finger guns* ooh and 'Allo 'Allo!: The War Diaries of Rene Artois

A favourite book from childhood: I don't remember a favourite bc I was actually a voracious reader once upon a time so I tore through them like it was nothing but The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo destroyed me even if I am now morally opposed to the fundamental idea framing the narrative that rats arent cute little besties

A book you would give to a friend: Harry Clarke: An Imaginative Genius in Illustrations and Stained-Glass Arts by Hiroshi Umino bc I LOVE Harry Clarke's work and I think everyone should have a nice book full of pretty pictures to look at. It's also technically on my wishlist as well

A book of poetry/lyrics you own: I don't "own" any "books" bc im flat broke but a favourite would be that compilation of Oscar Wilde's nonsense quotations. I know he did real poetry but that's poetry in itself to me.

A non-fiction book you own: Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva by Rosemary Sullivan :)))))) this i actually DO own!1!

Currently reading: *sweats nervously in executive dysfunction*

Planning on reading next: Florian: The Emperor's Stallion by Felix Saltern bc it's got my meow meow in it and it's a kids book and I want to practice focusing enough to read like a normal human person again

tagging @pqnnier @alliluyevas whom I know for sure have read a lot and anyone who wants to do it bc idk whos a reader and who isnt!

Thanks for the tag, @enlitment!

Last book I read: The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy. Charming!

Book I recommend: Impossible question. Show me your soul and then ask me again.

Book I couldn't put down: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. Grabbed me by the throat and would not let go. Sublime.

A book on my TBR: Vicious and Immoral by John Gilbert McCurdy is right up there; it looks fascinating and relevant to my research.

A book I've put down: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. Surprising that I got as far as I did (the first 120 or so pages), since that could all have been covered in a two-page prologue.

A book on my wishlist: At some point I also need to drop €60 (🥲) on André Weibel's »Einen Spiegel hast gefunden, der in allem Dich reflectirt«.

A book on my wishlist: The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien. Unquestioned reigning champion of being read approx one million times.

A book you would give to a friend: Anything by David Mitchell or Scarlett Thomas, depending on the friend.

A book of poetry/lyrics you own: The Loeb Greek Lyric: Anacreon, Anacreontea & Early Choral Lyric. Bangers on every page. Very gay.

A non-fiction book you own: Tom Cutterham's Gentlemen Revolutionaries is well worth a read for anyone interested in late 18th century masculinity and culture.

Currently reading: Temeraire by Naomi Novik. An old favourite that I'm discovering brand new joy in.

Planning on reading next: I have almost no time for fiction in between academic reading and writing and work, but These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever has been waiting very patiently on my nightstand.

Tagging @permanenthistorydamage @iron--and--blood @nordleuchten @ouiouixmonami @clove-pinks and you!

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

John Lennon and Sir Paul McCartney at 20 Forthlin Road (Mike McCartney/PA)

* * * *

Simon Kuper: If you put together Anna Funder’s recent book on George Orwell with Jennifer Burns’ biography of Milton Friedman, an oddly similar story emerges. Both men, especially Friedman, co-created their most famous works with their wives. In Friedman’s case, with several other women besides. Orwell’s marriage to Eileen O’Shaughnessy seems to have prompted his best writing. She had written a dystopian poem about 1984 and helped convince him to turn his anti-Stalinism into a fable, Animal Farm. A little later, Friedman had the advantage over sexist male peers in realising that there were brilliant female economists who possessed few career options beyond working for him. To quote his wife Rose: “You can’t tell who wrote what, the style is the same throughout the books. I always tell people we work as one; we are one.” Funder and Burns have given forgotten women their place in history. But their findings also point to a truth that’s becoming evident about writing: often it’s collective rather than singular. The myth of the Great Writer creating in solitude is only sometimes true.

People have long understood that most acts of creation are collaborative: pop music, sport, films, inventing the atomic bomb. Only for books, especially fiction, does the presumption of the lone genius hang on. That might have surprised Shakespeare, who co-wrote some of his plays and adapted many from other writers’ work. But at some point, literature grew snooty about collaboration. Writers who did do it, like the two cousins who co-wrote detective stories under the name Ellery Queen, often pretended there was a single author. The author Malcolm Gladwell told Vanity Fair: “Writers . . . have this false ethic of originality. Whereas musicians are like, ‘Yeah, totally — we took this little bit from that song. And it’s inspired by this.’ I love how open they are about the fact that creativity is a collective enterprise. I want writers to be able to talk that way.”

Look at what happened when two musicians, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, co-wrote. They took collaboration for granted. Their biographer Hunter Davies, who had the unfathomable privilege of sitting in Paul’s house in Cavendish Avenue, St John’s Wood, watching them write “With a Little Help from my Friends”, recounts their method. They would sit there for hours, John playing the guitar and Paul “banging on the piano”, and when one of them thought up a line, they would edit it together. “Do you believe in love at first sight?” tried John, but there weren’t enough syllables for the melody. Paul added “a” in front of love, then John changed the opening to “Would you believe . . . ” While they were writing, visitors often dropped by — one friend sat reading a horoscope magazine — and John and Paul asked them for suggestions. The two would collaborate with anyone. Davies says that their assistant roadie Mal Evans, who wasn’t even a big Beatles fan, supposedly came up with the name “Sergeant Pepper”. Lennon and McCartney, equal parts inspiration and irritation, were better together, perhaps like Orwell and O’Shaughnessy.

This kind of literary collaboration made a comeback in our century. During the “golden age of streaming”, now ending, some great novelists co-wrote television series in writers’ rooms. Dramatists in Shakespeare’s time had worked in much the same way. In my brief glimpses of writers’ rooms, I saw the potential. One day, working on a fictional series that went nowhere, our team included an Italian woman who had been flown in for her expertise in writing female characters. Every writer has weaknesses and blind spots. A good writers’ room has fewer. No wonder that one of the most admired novelists of our time, Elena Ferrante, may in fact be a writers’ room. Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym. There is a whole genre of literary sleuthing devoted to uncovering who she is. In 2018, Rachel Donadio wrote an essay in The Atlantic magazine that possibly solved the mystery. Donadio suggested that Ferrante is at least two people: Anita Raja and her husband Domenico Starnone. Other writers and editors may have chipped in, too. After all, both Raja, as a literary translator, and Starnone, a successful screenwriter, had backgrounds in collaborative writing. Donadio also unearthed Starnone’s novel Autobiografia Erotica di Aristide Gambía, never published in English, which riffs on the mystery of Ferrante’s identity and laments a male author’s inability to create female characters. Perhaps Milton Friedman was also a writers’ room and (to a much lesser degree) Orwell. They should have just said so.

[Financial Times]

[yaoist]

Book Roundup

Beria, My Father: Inside Stalin's Kremlin / Sergo Beria

This is the book of Sergo Beria's recollections of his father and his time under Stalin (up until his father's arrest and the arrests of himself and his mother). As every memoir is, it should be taken not as history per se but as a self-serving account limited greatly by its perspective, but I still enjoyed it a lot as someone who reads everything about Beria he can get his hands on. Sergo repeatedly gets dates and facts wrong and seems to both be intentionally fudging to make his father look better and uninformed about what actually went on (a lot of information he relates as being told to him by his father, who I don't think is an accurate source). At the same time, I enjoy any insights into the personal character of the people involved in Stalinist politics, and Sergo relating Beria making fun of Marx and being fixated on George Sakaadze ring true to me. Absolutely don't read this book without a companion like On Stalin's Team or Beria by Amy Knight, because you will come away with a very strange view of someone who was evil if the word has meaning. Recommended with heavy caveats.

Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity / Daniel Hoffman

This book was my first foray into understanding Soviet culture and I found it very interesting even if it wasn't what I was initially looking for. The premise of the book is refuting the idea that the resurgence of more conservative values was a turn away from socialism, and instead argues that the new cultural line was in fact co-opting previous cultural ideals and incorporating them into socialism. Whether you agree with this will probably depend on what you think socialism should stand for, but it's very interesting to see more radical values be pushed aside for the interests of state consolidation and the construction of a national identity. Hoffman points out that this was basically what everyone else was doing and expounds on the forces that made these things desirable - like world war one creating the necessity of mass mobilization of population. It touches on something important in Soviet party culture, the desire for legitimacy as a ruling class, multiple times and gave a lot of insight into how that played out and how it was encouraged or discouraged. Life has become more joyous! Recommended.

Court of the Red Tsar / Simon Montefiore

Much-maligned (by me and others), this book keeps getting cited and is the unfortunate creator of many a historical fiction on Stalin. It leans hard into just about every dramatic and lurid claim about Stalin and despite the claims of the author that he had a high standard of proof that doesn't seem to have stopped him from jumping immediately to every conclusion he can once he gets his hands on whatever memoir source he's using. He also seems to think that using esoteric words will justify him as a real historian despite his poor credentials and conviction that "Jewess" is a word that's normal to use in 2000s english. You should not be reading this book at all if you don't have a solid history background and for god's sake don't cite it to me. Read a real Stalin biography and only resort to this if you've exhausted every other memoir. Anti-recommended.

Stalin's World: Dictating the Soviet Order / Sarah Davies and James Harris

This book is newer and discusses recent documents released from Stalin's archives. It tries to form a picture of what information Stalin was getting and what he was doing with it. My one quibble with this book is how general it is; it only devotes a chapter to most things and admits that there's a lot more scholarship and examination to be done. It also brought my attention to a part of the Terror (36-38) that hadn't been covered in my reading which was the foreign incidents that were taking place while the terror was going on. The Soviets were absolutely both terrified and obsessed with other European countries, which they were convinced were preparing to attack them at any moment. They were also under delusions about what other countries were actually up to diplomatically and assumed they were all colluding. I appreciate it for highlighting just how limited Stalin's perspective was and how that played into his decisions - while he was at the top, he relied on everyone below him for information and suspected them of lying and misinforming him at every turn. It also discusses some of the factors that lead to the Soviet system being so deeply dysfunctional and ineffective: not just the lack of skilled personnel but the pressure from the top to meet impossible targets and Stalin's refusal to acknowledge his role in creating mass dysfunction. In addition, it dispels the idea that Stalin didn't believe in what he preached. Perhaps he didn't believe in what he said, but his words still carried a direct relationship to the beliefs and principles that lead him to act, much in the way that politicians speak today. It's inspired me to take a close look at the words of the Bolsheviks and how they expressed themselves politically - the words and metaphors that made up their ideas, the concepts they obsessed over, the catchall smears that were ambiguous enough to be meaningless but specific enough to have meaning to the people who used them, the dramatic political rhetoric and how it related to their specific ideological interests. Highly Recommended.

[darkficsyouneveraskedfor]

Could you recommend heavy history books, I’m here for it. I want more brain juiced and nourished.

I'm going by what I currently have on my bookshelf and on kindle bc I lost about 80 percent of my books when I moved in with my bf.

Biographies

Her Little Majesty: the Life of Queen Victoria by Carolly Erickson

Josephine: a Life of the Empress by Carolly Erickson (this author has also done historical fiction novels I enjoyed)

Autobiographies and memoirs:

With the Old Breed at Peleilu and Okinawa by EB Sledge

Night by Eli Wiesel

Other books, sorted chronologically as best I can:

Great Tales from English History by Robert Lacey

The History of England by Peter Ackroyd (multiple volumes)

The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn by Eric Ives (quintessential reading on Anne)

The Terror: The coming of the Terror in the French Revolution by Timothy Tackett

(I cannot for the life of me recall what book it was but I read a goodbone on Charlotte Corday I'm gonna keep searching for)

The Company: the Rise and Fall of the Hudsons Bay Company by Stephen Bown

Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown (first history written about colonization from an indigenous perspective)

Nothing Like it In the World: the Men who Built the Transcontinental Railroad by Stephen E Ambrose (author also wrote Band of Brothers about E Company featured in the HBO series)

Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder (Snyder also wrote a small book called On Tyranny I also own)

Hitters American Friends: the Third Reichs Supporters in the US by Bradley W Hart

And that's it for now. I probably have a bunch hidden in my closet. I know I missed my War of Roses book I just read this year but I can dig it out atm.

[frevandrest]

Hi! I found your blog these days and your posts REALLY got me into the french revolution and Robespierre. I'm sorry in advance if you already spoke about this subject (maybe you could link me your post?) but now I have a big doubt. One article on history.com says exactly this, about Robespierre: "[...] Robespierre encouraged the execution, mostly by guillotine, of more than....".

Is this true, by any means? Was he... this cruel? Did he support it? It's silly and I feel dumb asking this, but media portray him in a rather mystic, often cruel amd unforgiving, light. As if he's the heart of all evil.

Oh anon, thank you! It is not a false humility when I say that I never expected my blog to introduce people to frev!  As for your question... eeh. When it comes to Robespierre, it is important to keep two things in mind: 1. Thermidorian reaction. There was a conspiracy against Robespierre made by his opponents (typically those more responsible of killings), which resulted in his death. After the death of Robespierre and his supporters, Thermidorians built a smear campaign that is still alive today about Robespierre the powerful tyrant. In some cases, they insisted that he “made them do it” (even when there is proof that he actively tried to stop it), while in others, they pinned their own misdoings on Robespierre. (In addition to making up over the top accusations such as that Robespierre wanted to marry Louis XVI’s daughter and become the king of France.) Please note that this is not a theory or an interpretation, but a historical fact - many of them admitted that they lied about it (or their words were proven to be lies). 

2. Modern Anglo (Western?) ideas about totalitarian regimes (such as Hitler or Stalin) get retroactively applied to Robespierre and frev. This is an extremely popular view, particularly by those who wish to demonstrate how doing a revolution/change always results in horrible atrocities (worse than the oppression that started it), but it is not a correct way to describe Robespierre (if nothing else, because he did not have that sort of control over France or what was going on).  Because of these, it is difficult to get any “neutralish” explanation of Robespierre or what was going on, particularly in Anglo sources. (”Neutralish” is a bad word; “non-biased” could be better, but I don’t believe it is ever possible not to be biased. What I’m trying to say is that it is difficult - though not impossible - to find accounts that are not influenced by #1 and/or #2 above). 

Is this true, by any means? Was he... this cruel? Did he support it? It's silly and I feel dumb asking this, but media portray him in a rather mystic, often cruel amd unforgiving, light. As if he's the heart of all evil.

I am not sure what the source you mentioned says exactly. It is a historical fact that Robespierre took an important part in the politics of this period, including actions that resulted in people being arrested and/or guillotined. It is also a historical fact that what happened was not a result of a single person (or a single “regime”, to use an anachronistic term). France at the time was at war with a good part of Europe (a fact that is not mentioned nor highlighted enough) + counter-revolutionary efforts from within France itself (which, if someone is anti-revolution might be seen as justified, but not if you want to save the revolution). The entire revolutionary government took measures to save the country and the revolution. We can discuss whether these measures were (always? generally?) justified or effective, or - what I am particularly interested in - what would the alternative be, but this was definitely not something that was only about Robespierre.  

@montagnarde1793 has an excellent rundown of the Terror and violence and the way it is perceived (but I cannot find it now). @montagnarde1793​ ?

What is important to understand is that Robespierre was not a totalitarian dictator who controlled France and what was going on. He was also not the most radical/extreme option (in fact, some of those were his direct political opponents). It is another historical fact that he was against many (though not all) of the extreme stuff that was done, but he was not listened when he tried to speak/intervene against it (because he was not the ever-powerful factor who decided everything, as he is often portrayed). A lot of what we know about the man is a result of a smear campaign done after his death (see #1 above).

Here are some reading recommendations from people who are more knowledgeable about Robespierre (and what is written about him):

https://bunniesandbeheadings.tumblr.com/post/176777600490/hi-could-u-please-rec-a-good-biography-of

See also: The Invention of Terror  and Robespierre’s “Black Legend” 

[t4tbruharvey]

3 6 18 📕📙📔📗📘

3 - what is your favourite genre?

prooobably character study? like when the plot is about internal growth (e.g. the goldfinch, my year of rest and relaxation, the catcher in the rye) which i guess isn't really a genre? i like historical fantasy but in the way the letter for the king does it, FUCK ACOTAR i refuse to read shitty YA fantasy which booktokkers only read for the fucking sex scenes. also gothic lit i guess because it feels kind of decadent? and also you have to think critically from the get go because the authors will bring prejudices to it, so it's not gonna catch me off guard in the way, like, geek girl would. and modern horror would fall into that i would LOVE to get my hands on 'tell me i'm worthless'

6 - what books have you read in the last month?

iiiii haven't really been reading because of like, a levels :( but i HAVE read some of stalin's biography by simon sebag montefiore (INSANE BOOK not because of the content but because of how sebag presents it it's SO fucked up the way he talks about stalin like he's some kind of romance protagonist like stop itttt stop it for real) and also 'something that may shock and discredit you' by daniel lavery, which is very good if somewhat opaque, and pretty fun in how it presents his experience of being trans. it's incredibly personal and specific but the underlying feelings are incredibly relatable, and also the more romantic parts of it (like jacob and the angel's fight, which gets brought up a lot but one of the versions of it is particularly heartwrenching; and the interlude about arthur's death) just really get to me. i wanted to read it for AGES so i'm really happy i own a copy of it now and when i'm done i'll go through with tabs to pick up on recurring motifs. also really good for the way it handles religion, which again isn't personally relatable in the specifics but the intersection of how lavery experiences religion and his gender feel like the dark mirror of how i do it :)

18 - do you like historical books? which time period?

YEAS i'll read any time period except regency onwards. i ESPECIALLY won't read ww1/ww2 books because it's overdone and also i find it boring or upsetting depending on who the focus is on (the only exception is the book thief, which i read when i was like 10 and really loved). i like it when the authors get super in depth with the historical accuracy like not necessarily because i'm a pedant (i am) but because it, again, makes it feel SO much more real and comfy <3