Comrade koba: a novel

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Publisher
Varies, see individual formats and editions
Publication Date
2020.
Language
English

Description

A tight, captivating story of a naive child’s encounters with a Soviet dictator, the 20th novel by Robert Littell   After the sudden death of his nuclear physicist father and the arrest of his mother during the Stalinist purge of Jewish doctors, young Leon Rozental—intellectually precocious and possessing a disarming candor—is hiding from the NKVD in the secret rooms of the House on the Embankment, a large building in Moscow where many Soviet officials and apparatchiks live and work. One day after following a passageway, Leon meets Koba, an old man whose apartment is protected by several guards. Koba is a high-ranking Soviet officer with troubling insight into the thoughts and machinations of Comrade Stalin.   Through encounters between a naive boy and a paranoid tyrant, Robert Littell creates in Comrade Koba a nuanced portrayal of the Soviet dictator, showing his human side and his simultaneous total disregard for and ignorance of the suffering he inflicted on the Russian people. The charm and spontaneity of young Leon make him an irresistible character—and not unlike Holden Caulfield, whom he admits to identifying with—caught in the spider’s web of the story woven by this enigmatic old man.

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ISBN
9781419748325
9781647000035

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Published Reviews

Booklist Review

"I can't decide whether he was hard-hearted or brokenhearted," says precocious, 12-year-old Leon Rozental about an old man he knows as Koba, a self-described advisor to Stalin in the postwar USSR. Living off the grid with other children of dead or imprisoned Russian Jews, Leon and his friends, including the equally precocious Isabeau, are hiding in boarded-up rooms within Moscow's House on the Embankment, where Leon lived with his parents before his nuclear-physicist father died and his physician mother was imprisoned for treason. Wandering the building's sub-basement, Leon stumbles upon rooms occupied by "Comrade Koba," whose real identity quickly becomes apparent to the reader. Over numerous meetings, Koba attempts to instruct Leon in the development of the Soviet state, celebrating Stalin and discounting Lenin as a "preening coffee-house brainbox." Leon's friends, especially Isabeau, question Koba's bona fides, but they can't deny the food that Leon brings with him from the sub-basement. In this short but compelling novel, Littell uses the interplay between a disarmingly discerning if naive boy and a tortured, self-justifying dictator to expose a tragic slice of muddled humanity behind the gray monolith of Stalinist Russia.

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Booklist Reviews

I can't decide whether he was hard-hearted or brokenhearted, says precocious, 12-year-old Leon Rozental about an old man he knows as Koba, a self-described advisor to Stalin in the postwar USSR. Living off the grid with other children of dead or imprisoned Russian Jews, Leon and his friends, including the equally precocious Isabeau, are hiding in boarded-up rooms within Moscow's House on the Embankment, where Leon lived with his parents before his nuclear-physicist father died and his physician mother was imprisoned for treason. Wandering the building's sub-basement, Leon stumbles upon rooms occupied by Comrade Koba, whose real identity quickly becomes apparent to the reader. Over numerous meetings, Koba attempts to instruct Leon in the development of the Soviet state, celebrating Stalin and discounting Lenin as a preening coffee-house brainbox. Leon's friends, especially Isabeau, question Koba's bona fides, but they can't deny the food that Leon brings with him from the sub-basement. In this short but compelling novel, Littell uses the interplay between a disarmingly discerning if naive boy and a tortured, self-justifying dictator to expose a tragic slice of muddled humanity behind the gray monolith of Stalinist Russia. Copyright 2020 Booklist Reviews.

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