Moscow Summer

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Mihajlo Mihajlov MOSCOW SUMMER A New Leader Book In the summer of 1964 Mihajlo Mihajlov, a Yugoslav teacher at the University of Zagreb, visited Russia as an exchange scholar. His experiences are recorded in Moscow Summer, a revealing book by a linguist and writer who was able to move around and see people, including the literati, with a freedom denied to Western visitors. Mihajlov recorded notes of conversations with dozens of writers, poets, and folk singers, most of whom he found to be vigorously pro-Russian and stubbornly anti-bureaucratic (many of the folk songs have to be circulated surreptitiously). Mihajlov, himself a socialist, includes a sharply critical but understanding chapter on the mentality of the government ruling class. "Homo sovieticus" (Mihajlov's term for the Soviet bureaucrat) 'approves and accepts everything that is decided at the top with complete sincerity. . . . He possesses a naive ability to believe his own lies. . . . Centuries of imperial autocracy and... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Mihajlo Mihajlov MOSCOW SUMMER A New Leader Book In the summer of 1964 Mihajlo Mihajlov, a Yugoslav teacher at the University of Zagreb, visited Russia as an exchange scholar. His experiences are recorded in Moscow Summer, a revealing book by a linguist and writer who was able to move around and see people, including the literati, with a freedom denied to Western visitors. Mihajlov recorded notes of conversations with dozens of writers, poets, and folk singers, most of whom he found to be vigorously pro-Russian and stubbornly anti-bureaucratic (many of the folk songs have to be circulated surreptitiously). Mihajlov, himself a socialist, includes a sharply critical but understanding chapter on the mentality of the government ruling class. "Homo sovieticus" (Mihajlov's term for the Soviet bureaucrat) 'approves and accepts everything that is decided at the top with complete sincerity. . . . He possesses a naive ability to believe his own lies. . . . Centuries of imperial autocracy and decades of Stalinism have left the Soviets a terrifying inheritance- limidess paternalism/' 1 he first third of Moscow Summer was first published in Delo, a Belgrade Ktferary monthly. When the second installment appeared, the magazine was suppressed and Mihajlov was jailed. The third section was never published behind the Iron Curtain. Moscow Summer also contains an 'open letter" from Mihajlov; an introduction, notes, and biographical information on contemporary Russian writers by Andrew Field; and a foreword by Myron Kolatch, editor of The New Leader magazine, in whose pages Moscow Summer first appeared. Vissza