User:KWatson/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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In Mailer’s description of the pre-revolutionary period in Russia in The Castle in the Forest there is virtually no mention of the Bolsheviks and other revolutionaries, for his interest is all in Nicholas, Alexandra, Rasputin, and

his narrator Dieter’s professed manipulations of events. Had Mailer finished the future Russian project he forecasts in Castle; he would certainly have dealt with the Reds. My own hunch is that he could not have resisted the temptation to give his own characterization of Lenin. Leaving aside such moot points, I find that Mailer, for all of his attention to politics on a national level, is greatly more interested in the inner workings of the personalities of his characters than in their politics.

And the same may be said of Hemingway, who largely on account of his time at the Hotel Gaylord in Madrid, where he met with a number of Soviet participants in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side, was exceptionally well informed about what was going on in the Soviet Union of the late 1930s. He knew about the purges, especially of the Red Army’s officer corps, including that of Tukachevsky. He also knew buzz words and phrases, such as “liquidated” and “enemy of the people,” and he knew about political

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 In Mailer’s description of the pre-revolutionary period in Russia in The Castle in the Forest there is virtually no mention of the Bolsheviks and other revolutionaries, for his interest is all in Nicholas, Alexandra, Rasputin, and
 his narrator Dieter’s professed manipulations of events. Had Mailer finished the future Russian project he forecasts in Castle; he would certainly have dealt with the Reds. My own hunch is that he could not have resisted the temptation to give his own characterization of Lenin. Leaving aside such moot points, I find that Mailer, for all of his attention to politics on a national level, is greatly more interested in the inner workings of the personalities of his characters than in their politics.
+And the same may be said of Hemingway, who largely on account of his time at the Hotel Gaylord in Madrid, where he met with a number of Soviet participants in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side, was exceptionally well informed about what was going on in the Soviet Union of the late 1930s. He knew about the purges, especially of the Red Army’s officer corps, including that of Tukachevsky. He also knew buzz words and phrases, such as “liquidated” and “enemy of the people,” and he knew about political
+Page Break