Product Description

"Koba The Dread" is the successor to Martin Amis's celebrated memoir, "Experience". It is largely political (while remaining personal). It addresses itself to the central lacuna of twentieth century thought: the indulgence of communism by intellectuals of the West. In between the personal beginning and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best one hundred pages ever written about Stalin: Koba the Dread, losif the Terrible. The author's father, Kingsley Amis, though later reactionary in tendency, was a Comintern dogsbody (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and then his closest friend (after the death of the poet Philip Larkin), was Robert Conquest, a leading Sovietologist, whose book of 1968, "The Great Terror", was second only to Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" in undermining the USSR. Amis's remarkable memoir explores these connections. Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of millions a mere statistic. "Koba The Dread", during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin's aphorism.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #125974 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Koba the Dread is a book about Stalin and the past and present culpability of intellectuals rather than a personal memoir. It's personal to Amis because his father Kingsley became a card-carrying Communist in 1941 and remained so for 15 years: along with the majority of intellectuals everywhere he chose the big Stalinist lie over the truth. The only reasonable excuse for believing the Stalinist story, Amis suggests, is perhaps that "the real story-–the truth—-was entirely unbelievable". The bulk of the book is taken up with the real story of Stalinism and--given the powerful subject matter and Amis's literary skill--one shouldn't be surprised to hear that it makes for a riveting read. Even if you are already familiar with the story the facts still stagger the imagination.

As well as being an indictment of the woolly-minded utopianism of his father's generation, the book is a direct challenge to the lingering romanticism that, even today, attaches itself to Bolshevism, to Lenin, and in particular to Trotsky. That challenge comes in the form of a splendid letter--in the final, personal section of the book--to his long-time friend Christopher Hitchens. In it, he reminds his friend "Comrade Hitchens" that "Bolshevism presents a record of baseness and inanity that exhausts all dictionaries" before confessing his confusion as to "why you wouldn't want to put more distance between yourself and these events than you do, with your reverence for Lenin and your unregretted discipleship of Trotsky".

The myth Amis wants to quash is the idea that the "real" revolution was lost with the death of Lenin, the murder of Trotsky and the liquidation of the Bolshevik old guard. Any "differences between the regimes of Lenin and Stalin were quantitative, not qualitative" and, as individuals, Lenin was a "congenital moral imbecile" while Trotsky's smattering of literary talent concealed "a murdering bastard and a fucking liar" who got what he deserved. They were nun-killers all and they did it with gusto. The final verdict, the final indictment, is that under Bolshevik rule--under Lenin as well as Stalin--"the value of human life collapsed".

It's a curious fact that Robert Conquest--the man who wrote the definitive account of the Stalinist purges while many intellectuals were still in denial--was a personal friend of the Amis family. Conquest's The Great Terror is still the source to visit if want the full story whereas Koba the Great is a short book packed with the most interesting and shocking facts about the Stalin era, with a thoughtful and often persuasive personal commentary from Amis. --Larry Brown

Review
'Indignant, angry, personal and strangely touching...Koba the dread carries a punch, artfully delivered' New York Times

In Koba the Dread Martin Amis impressively continues the autobiographical/biographical engagements of his last big book Experience, but here the fetchingly local and personal come marinaded in the scalding, blistering, scarifying cauldron of bad, mad, inhumane 20th-century history. For here the Amis family story, Martin Amis coming to terms with the death of his father and his sister Sally, meets the story of millions of deaths brought about by Joseph Stalin. The bridge is Kingsley Amis's youthful Communism, Martin's own juvenile anti-fascism, and his still leftist friends, notably the radical journalist Christopher Hitchens, and their shared past as jokers and jesters in the office and pages of the old liberal-leftist New Statesman. What now anguishes Martin Amis is the old question of how so many Western intellectuals, men and women of no ill-disposition, admired and supported, or just condoned (as some still condone) the vastest killing apparatus ever known. The terrifying malignities of the Soviet Union are framed in a certain amount of breast-beating of the How Could You Kingsley? and How Can You Christopher? variety. But the main burden of the book is an extended reiteration and reimagining of the evil works of Communism in the Soviet Sixth of the World. Stalin's works, in particular, of course. But the argument that Stalin perverted a purer Trotsyism and Leninism - the once fashionable case Christopher Hitchens is made to stand for here - is not allowed. Amis's argument is that evil Stalin was the acme and apogee of the revolution. The recycling of facts about terror, gulags, engineered famines, the killings, are indeed overaweing. Amis really makes you feel for the millions of ordinary victims of a vile system and a vile dictator, and even more, perhaps, for all the writers variously exiled, driven mad and to suicide, made subservient to the regime, bumped off in cruel and hideous circumstances. Amis works, as ever, by Amis-izing Stalin and his era. He meets inordinateness and exorbitance head-on with his own famously inordinate prose. Here, if anywhere, you think, overweening cruelty meets some kind of match in the Brobdignagian phrase making that seeks to encompass it: 'glandular sensuality', 'frothing debauchee', 'recreational hands-on torturer', 'fraudulently overweening ignoramus', 'unstoppably giganticized by power', and so on. Occasionally the attempts to outflank Stalin the grimly bad joker with wry and sneering satirical jabs - Stalin winning a war of moustaches with Hitler, for instance - and with a non-stop jeering eye for the tell-tale surreal detail (eight gramophone-record speeches with one whole record for the applause) - seem like boyish ways of not quite scaling the heights of horror. It's surely rather appalling to register one's appal by making Stalin a supplier of modern epic horror because where Virgil sang of 'arms', i.e. weapons, Stalin sang of arms, i.e. limbs chopped off by torturers. Some bad jokes are just too bad. But still, the occasional fallings short don't undo this most honourable attempt to take up writerly arms against an ocean of modern troubles. Here is a humanely eloquent act of remembrance, the most potent kind of elegy - for the millions of Soviet dead, for the purged writers, and yes for Kingsley and Sally Amis as well - that it is possible to imagine being accomplished in just a few hundred compressed, awed and aweing, and thus extremely moving, pages. Valentine Cunningham is Professor of English Literature at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (Kirkus UK)

From the Publisher
The successor to Experience.
Amis on Stalin – a brilliant, controversial study by a great writer.