  | Book Details Title: Death at the Dacha: Stalin’s Last Movie, A Novel |
Book DescriptionReview In Paul A. Levitt’s Death at the Dacha, his novel is more a screenplay than a simple narrative. Each passage paralleling Stalin’s flash beforehis failing life becomes a remembered or imagined scene where he did not achieve his expectation or lost what he thought he had won. Retribution is also in scenes with his wives and mistresses, other family members or family of others who were part of the revolution he mistreated; also with members of the Politburo who whisper their true negative feelings when they think Stalin has already died. Thus, Stalin’s final hours and words are just another movie, a medium he loved most, which could be called, Stalin’s Failure, a fitting end to this murderous dictator’s life.—Stanley H. BarkanPoet-Publisher of Cross-Cultural Communications Read more About the Author Paul M. Levitt, professor emeritus of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder, taught modern drama, theatre history, and the gangster novel. He has written more than twenty books (five of them novels), radio plays for the BBC, books about medicine, stories for children, and numerous scholarly and popular articles. He lives in Boulder, Colorado. Read more Customers Review:I prefer the narrative style of Levitt’s excellent period novel from 2012, Stalin’s Barber, over the more associative flow in “Death at the Dacha,” as Stalin ponders the screenplay of his life on his deathbed. This one too, though, is a carefully scripted stimulant to the historical imagination, as Stalin tries – without much success – to control the script of his life story as ghosts from his past return. Levitt gets at the politics and the paranoia, but also shows traces of humanity in Stalin’s early life. This doesn’t minimize the evil deeds of the later man, but does make an interesting case study in how someone can start out human and become so monstrous that he cannot turn back or accept his own enormous moral failures. | |
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