Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Kremlin Ball by Curzio Malaparte The Kremlin Ball. by Curzio Malaparte, translated from the Italian and with a foreword by Jenny McPhee. An NYRB Classics Original. Perhaps only the impeccably perverse imagination of Curzio Malaparte could have conceived of The Kremlin Ball , which might be described as Proust in the corridors of Soviet power. The book is set at the end of the 1920s, when the Great Terror may have been nothing more than a twinkle in Stalin’s eye, but when the revolution was accompanied by a growing sense of doom. In Malaparte’s vision it is from his nightly opera box, rather than the Kremlin, that Stalin surveys Soviet high society, its scandals and amours and intrigues among beauties and bureaucrats, including the legendary ballerina Marina Semyonova and Olga Kameneva, a sister of the exiled Trotsky, who though a powerful politician is so consumed by dread that everywhere she goes she gives off the smell of rotting meat. This extraordinary court chronicle of Communist life (for which Malaparte also contemplated the title God Is a Killer ) was published posthumously and appears now in English for the first time. Praise. Malaparte may just be the original postmodernist, at least as far as genre-crossing is concerned…A head-swirling kaleidoscope that, though fictional, is never for a moment fictitious. — Kirkus Review. Surreal, disenchanted, on the edge of amoral, Malaparte broke literary ground for writers from Ryszard Kapuscinski to Joseph Heller. — Frederika Randall, The Wall Street Journal. Malaparte enlarged the art of fiction in more perverse, inventive, and darkly liberating ways than one would imagine possible, long before novelists like Philip Roth, Robert Coover, and E. L. Doctorow began using their own and other people’s histories as Play-Doh. —Gary Indiana. A scrupulous reporter? Probably not. One of the most remarkable writers of the twentieth century? Certainly. —Ian Buruma. The Kremlin Ball by Curzio Malaparte. - Return to top of the page - See our review for fuller assessment. Review Summaries Source Rating Date Reviewer Corriere della sera . 9/12/2012 M.A.Rigoni Il Giornale . 14/12/2012 Alessandro Gnocchi. "Essa, più che in certe paradossali elucubrazioni di un romanzo-cronaca che è anche un romanzo-saggio, si manifesta in due generi, poco frequenti nella tradizione letteraria italiana: il ritratto e l'aneddoto." - Mario Andrea Rigoni, Corriere della sera. - Return to top of the page - In an introductory section, Curzio Malaparte acknowledges and even emphasizes that the characters and incidents populating The Kremlin Ball are drawn from real life, but insists it is not so much a 'court chronicle' but rather: "a novel in the Proustian sense", characterized (so Malaparte) by the author's disinterstedness. Drawing on his own experiences and encounters in 1929-30 Moscow, and figuring, as himself, in his account, Malaparte's subject here is the (decadent) communist aristocracy -- a continuation of the old Russian aristocracy (if almost entirely with different actors) that he sees can only be similarly doomed. Appropriately enough, Malaparte begins his novel at a ball, the orchestra playing a Viennese waltz. The scene, and the fancy dress and everything else should seem incongruous in the Soviet state, but reflect a life-style and attitude -- a fin de siècle-holdover -- that Malaparte still finds in the Moscow circles he moves in, among many of those in power. Yet this attitude, the playing at a lifestyle, is an odd fit in the new order, as Malaparte shows by lingering over some of its excesses, whether in the flaunting infidelity of Anatloy Lunacharsky's wife or Dimitry Florinsky riding around Moscow in the city's last horse carriage, his own landau -- "an expression of supreme decadent elegance". And the system does respond, sooner and later: Malaparte isn't the only one to notice: "The days are numbered for this entire Soviet nobility", and he is still in Moscow when, for example, Lunacharsky is summoned before the Moscow Soviet Assembly and told that he must choose -- "Divorce or departure !" --, and he also describes how, eventually, Florinsky then: "disappeared from one day to the next during the Great Purge of 1936" (admittedly only long after Malaparte's Moscow-stay). The court Malaparte is exposed to is like the worst decadent royal ones -- the head of state notably distant (Stalin appears practically only in passing -- but then: "Stalin did not belong to the communist nobility"), but as for the rest: The Kremlin Ball. THE ITALIAN WRITER Curzio Malaparte (1898-1957) is best-known for his two semi-documentary novels, Kaputt , which covers the period the author spent as a journalist embedded with the Italians fighting alongside the German army in Russia, and The Skin , a portrait of post-war Naples. Many of the events he seemingly witnessed have struck some as so outrageous as to cast doubts on their veracity, though the charge is meaningless when leveled against works presented as fiction. Like his earlier novels, The Kremlin Ball , an unfinished work by Malaparte that only appeared in 1971, is presented as a true account of actual events. In fact, the novel is a fascinating mix of the real, the improbable, and the impossible. It follows the doings of several Soviet figures in 1929, men like Soviet People’s Commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, and diplomat Maxim Litvinov. But The Kremlin Ball’s air of veracity is heightened by its biting depictions of those characters who certainly are not center stage in accounts of this period of Soviet history, but who, for Malaparte, are exemplary of the state of Soviet Russia. These characters include Marina Semyonovna, the first great Soviet-trained ballerina, Lev Karakhan, supposedly the “most handsome man in Russia,” and Dimitry Florinsky, the gay Soviet Chief of Protocol, and Lunacharsky’s scandalous wife, a beautiful actress and unfaithful spouse who is guilty of wearing expensive gowns intended only for use in the plays she performs in. It is this odd and disreputable beau monde that serves as the backdrop for Malaparte’s searing and unforgiving portrait of a new society that has already failed. Malaparte saw nothing but falsehood and hypocrisy around him, “and in a revolutionary society corrupt habits are a sign of corrupt ideas.” As an observer—or imaginer—of Soviet Russia and its elite, Malaparte sees things few else did. “In Moscow,” he claims, “one spoke far more frequently of [the designer] Madame Schiaparelli than of Stalin—and it was no less dangerous to speak of Madame Schiaparelli than to speak of Stalin.” The sheer perversity of this observation is the essence of the Malapartean style. And so one reads The Kremlin Ball more for its unique and off-kilter vision of the Soviet Union and the beauty of its writing than for any serious analysis of the collapsing revolution. Nevertheless, Malaparte is on to something when he says that, “What mattered to me was the manifest emergence of a new revolutionary class and I was astonished by the Trotskyists who had deluded themselves into believing that they could entraver , or impede, the rise of the new puritanical, cruel, hard, inflexible, monstrous class.” Not that those around him care about the Stalin- Trotsky split— “that boring story about Trotsky and his squabbles with Stalin,” as a diplomat describes it. Translator Jenny McPhee gets Malaparte exactly right in her excellent introduction, saying that Malaparte’s truth “is inevitably accompanied by an aura of the incredible,” as when he represents as absolute fact Soviet experiments that involved a woman having sex with an orangutan. Malaparte, she says, writes “with a sneer and a leer, and in doing so takes the unreliable narrator to a new level.” This is precisely how Malaparte should be read. Nothing he reports should be taken at face value, but in his death-and-decay-obsessed vision, it all could and should be true. MALAPARTE , who served as a fascist diplomat, is supposed to have abandoned fascism and indeed to have moved to the left after World War II. Nevertheless, The Kremlin Ball demonstrates the fascination with death that was so important a part of the attraction to fascism for a certain type of intellectual, writers like the French fascist Pierre Drieu la Rochelle and like Malaparte himself, and leads one to wonder if he ever truly freed himself of it. Death is the subject for a kind of mini-essay that closes the book. Malaparte theorizes that “Christ introduced into the classic world the horror of death. Communism took it further by introducing into the Christian world the shame of death. As such, communism was a characteristic of modern life.” He is obsessed with corpses, asking Litvinov to visit a morgue, and being met by blank stares. Do the Soviets even have morgues? “Communism returned Christianity to its deep, programmatic, fundamental contempt, not of death, but of the corpse.” But if for Malaparte “Communism replaced the Western fear of death with the shame of death,” it nevertheless fetishized a dead body, that of Lenin, whose “mummy” Malaparte discusses several times in The Kremlin Ball , and at the end of which he visits for the tenth time. Lenin’s body, “the mummy[,] was decomposing, becoming flaky, soft to the touch, damp and spoiled.” This rot (earlier he speaks of the body being eaten by rats) is Malaparte’s final statement on the Soviet Union, on humanity, on hope. Mitchell Abidor , a contributing writer to Jewish Currents , is a writer and translator living in Brooklyn. His May Made Me: An Oral History of 1968 in France, has just been published in England and is about to appear in the US. His latest translation is Daniel Guérin’s For a Libertarian Communism . Malaparte's "The Kremlin Ball" presentation. Translator Jenny McPhee (NYU) and Franco Baldasso (Bard) present the English translation of Curzio Malaparte's posthumous book. October 3, 2018. Popular Tags. L’Italia s’è desta nella violenza: dall’Unità ad oggi, il sangue scorso tra gli italiani. A "Tutti a casa" della New York University, il libro di David Forgacs "Messaggi di sangue" discusso con Walter Veltroni, Ruth Ben-Ghiat e Benedetta. Millennials at the Opera. New York Transatlantic podcast featuring interviews with Casa Italiana Program Coordinator Julian Sachs and members of Casa's student opera club Op. Violence in Italian History. Ottocento: Italy & Austria. Settecento: Venice & Paris. Briefs II. Join the Casa Italiana Zerilli - Marimò Mailing List. facebook twitter youtube. Copyright © 2018 Casa Italiana Zerilli - Marimò. All rights reserved. All events and activities of Casa Italiana Casa Italiana Zerilli - Marimò are supported through the Baroness Zerilli - Marimò Endowment Fund. The Kremlin Ball by Curzio Malaparte. Part journalist, part surrealist: Curzio Malaparte recounts the early years of postrevolutionary Moscow. The Kremlin Ball , by Curzio Malaparte, translated Jenny McPhee, New York Review Books, 223 pages, $15.95. While he no longer commands the same lines he did during communism, Lenin, asleep in his tomb, still draws tourists to Red Square. To pay their respects, visitors file past the graves of Soviet luminaries and down into the vault, where the air is chilly and speech is forbidden. Lenin is smaller than one would expect, and little about his physical presence suggests, as Curzio Malaparte writes in his novel The Kremlin Ball , that “one cannot understand the underlying meaning of the Russian Revolution if one hasn’t seen Lenin, either dead or alive.” His cheeks are rouged, his tiny red goatee carefully combed, and his skin is reminiscent of nothing so much as a candle. “Everyone knows in Moscow that the embalming of Lenin was performed in a hurry and badly,” Malaparte continues. “After a few months of lying in his glass coffin, it became clear that the mummy was decomposing, crumbling, becoming flaky, soft to the touch, damp and spoiled.” Even by 1929, the year in which The Kremlin Ball is set, the revolution had assumed a moribund quality. Many pages can be dedicated to Malaparte’s fascinating and politically fungible life (the definitive biography to date, Maurizio Serra’s, has yet to be translated into English), but I’ll keep things short. Malaparte was born Kurt Suckert in 1898 to a German father and Italian mother, and rose to fame as the founding editor of the literary journal Perspectives . (He changed his name to pun on that of a notorious French emperor.) A fascist- turned-communist and adept social climber, Malaparte was reprimanded multiple times by the Mussolini regime—once for insulting the minister of aviation, another time for titling a book chapter “A Woman: Hitler.” Following a period of exile he built the Casa Malaparte on the island of Capri, a dramatic cliffside home that would star in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt , and which he left to the Maoist People’s Republic of China upon his death in 1957. When WWII broke out, he reported for Corriere della Serra on the Russian fronts, and later on the liberation of Florence. What Malaparte witnessed during his time as a journalist provided him with material for his two best-known novels, Kaputt (1944) and The Skin (1949), which coolly, even gleefully, detail outrageous wartime atrocities against the backdrop of decaying old-world Europe. The novels take real events as their points of departure, and when they depart they do so violently. For instance, while it is true that American soldiers stationed in Naples ate the exotic fish in the local aquarium, contra The Skin they were never served a boiled child dressed as a mermaid. (At least, not that anybody knows of.) Scenes such as that one explain why many of Malaparte’s books were banned in parts of Catholic Italy, and why, until New York Review Books started translating him a little more than a decade ago, he was broadly unknown to English readers. Amorality is central to his aesthetic, which often edges a bit too close to reality. The already fuzzy line between fiction and reportage is further distorted by the fact that Kaputt and The Skin are both narrated by an alter ego named Malaparte, who, like his namesake, enjoys the company of high society and takes little interest in its moral failings. Malaparte began writing The Kremlin Ball in 1946 as a section of The Skin , but by the time he stopped working on the Kremlin manuscript in 1950 to try his hand at playwriting it had become its own project. The separate novella was published in Italy several years after his death; this new release marks its debut in English. Though technically unfinished, one wouldn’t know that without reading the foreword. A Dantean account of a young Marxist visiting Stalinist Russia, it is, like his previous novels, surreal and quasi-journalistic. The narrator, Malaparte’s alter ego, is there to do book research, and to see for himself the workers’ paradise. “I was looking for sincerity and coherence in the lives of the people,” he writes. He arrives early in Stalin’s first five-year plan, and in lieu of a classless society Malaparte finds what he calls the ancien régime of the Communist Revolution: an aristocracy amusing itself with infidelities and imported fashions. “I came to Moscow convinced that it was an anti-Europe, or even just an alternative Europe,” our narrator tells us, “but had the painful realization that the whole Soviet nobility nurtured for Europe . . . an unconditional admiration.” This may sound like dashed idealism, but Malaparte’s acerbic worldview, captured in his dark observations about the Soviet elite, make any claim to optimism seem suspect. There are Goncourt-style accounts of embassy balls and rides with grotesque dignitaries in decrepit carriages. When he is not documenting the anemic characters that populate this world, our hero walks the streets of the city. Death hangs in the air in Moscow, even before the purges. Malaparte is accosted by a young woman who desperately tries to sell him her used underwear; he visits a Soviet official who, waiting to be prosecuted for her political affiliations, stinks of rotting flesh. He goes to Mayakovsky’s apartment hours after the poet commits suicide, only to be kicked out by an incoming tenant. There is certainly less shock value in The Kremlin Ball than in Malaparte’s other works (no cannibalism, pedophilia, or orgies). Instead, the novel invokes Dostoevsky in its attention to the fatalism at the heart of Russian society. In communism, Malaparte sees a system that obliges Russians to suffer for others while disempowering the people. This turns the populace into something like zombies, and makes Moscow society “the mirror image of European society but dominated by fear.” In a scene at the Bolshoi Theater, the narrator looks around at the Soviet elite, including, glancingly, at Stalin, and sees them as corpses. Russia, he realizes, must reckon with the fact that “communism can do nothing against the supreme wretchedness, the supreme nakedness, the supreme loneliness, the supreme degradation of death.” Though death’s byproducts fuel the modern world—corpses, he writes, “were used scientifically, chemically; the fat, the pus, the bones, the hair were made into pills, medical ointments, pharmaceuticals”—it remains the ultimate shame of communism. It is the single thing that cannot be overcome. Yet the fight for immortality continues. Every day, people line up in Red Square to see it. Jessica Loudis is the editor of World Policy Journal . Her criticism and essays have appeared in n+1 , the New York Times , the Times Literary Supplement , Bookforum , the New Republic , and many other fine publications.