La casa eterna: Saga de la Revolución Rusa

by Yuri Slezkine (Auteur)

Paperback, 2021

Status

Available

Call number

111

Description

Proyectada por el visionario arquitecto Borís Iofán e inaugurada en 1931, la Casa del Gobierno es un colosal edificio de más de quinientos apartamentos que se alza en la orilla del río Moscova, delante del Kremlin, destinado en origen a alojar a los principales dirigentes e intelectuales soviéticos y a sus familias. Yuri Slezkine rastrea la historia de los devotos e ideólogos de la causa bolchevique que gobernaron la URSS y terminaron convirtiéndose en víctimas de las purgas estalinistas. Un texto que combina hábilmente biografía, crítica literaria e historia con las fascinantes teorías sobre las revoluciones, las profecías milenaristas y las utopías. El resultado es el relato, en la tradición de Guerra y paz, Vida y destino y Archipiélago Gulag, de los avatares de los inquilinos de un edificio que, como la propia Unión Soviética, fue un inquietante experimento humano y terminó habitado por los fantasmas de los desaparecidos que, pese a los empeños del régimen, jamás cayeron en el olvido.

Description

"On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction. The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Grossman's Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine's gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin's purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children's loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union. Completed in 1931, the House of Government, later known as the House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 550 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater and a library to a tennis court and a shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building's residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some eight hundred of them were evicted from the House and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, The House of Government weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared"--Provided by publisher.… (more)

Collection

Publication

Acantilado (2021), Edition: 1, 1632 pages

User reviews

LibraryThing member cygnet81
Very long. Parts, especially about the children of the officials and the purges, were fascinating but the attempt to tie Bolshevism to other religions was cumbersome.
LibraryThing member Lapsus16
A bit tedious and over detailed. It is a true document against the russian revolution, and as such it is very partial and skewed.

Call number

111

Language

Awards

PROSE Award (Winner — 2018)
Просветитель (Longlist — 2019)

Original publication date

2017

ISBN

841837022X / 9788418370229
Page: 1.989 seconds