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The Kremlin Ball
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.
223 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1971
About the author
Curzio Malaparte
101 books219 followersBorn Kurt Erich Suckert, he was an Italian journalist, dramatist, short-story writer, novelist and diplomat.
Born in Prato, Tuscany, he was a son of a German father and his Lombard wife, the former Evelina Perelli. He studied in Rome and then, in 1918, he started his career as a journalist. He fought in the First World War, and later, in 1922, he took part in the March on Rome.
He later saw he was wrong in supporting fascism. That is proved by reading Technique du coup d`etat (1931), where Malaparte attacked both Adolf Hitler and Mussolini. This book was the origin of his downfall inside the National Fascist Party. He was sent to internal exile from 1933 to 1938 on the island of Lipari.
He was freed on the personal intervention of Mussolini's son-in-law and heir apparent Galeazzo Ciano. Mussolini's regime arrested Malaparte again in 1938, 1939, 1941, and 1943 and imprisoned him in Rome's infamous jail Regina Coeli. His remarkable knowledge of Europe and its leaders is based upon his own experiences as a correspondent and in the Italian diplomatic service.
In 1941 he was sent to cover the Eastern Front as a correspondent for Corriere della Sera. He wrote articles about the front in Ukrania, but the fascist dictatorship of Mussollini censored it. But later, in 1943, they were collected and brought out under the title Il Volga nasce in Europa (The Volga Rises in Europe). Also, this experience provided the basis for his two most famous books, Kaputt (1944) and The Skin (1949).
Born in Prato, Tuscany, he was a son of a German father and his Lombard wife, the former Evelina Perelli. He studied in Rome and then, in 1918, he started his career as a journalist. He fought in the First World War, and later, in 1922, he took part in the March on Rome.
He later saw he was wrong in supporting fascism. That is proved by reading Technique du coup d`etat (1931), where Malaparte attacked both Adolf Hitler and Mussolini. This book was the origin of his downfall inside the National Fascist Party. He was sent to internal exile from 1933 to 1938 on the island of Lipari.
He was freed on the personal intervention of Mussolini's son-in-law and heir apparent Galeazzo Ciano. Mussolini's regime arrested Malaparte again in 1938, 1939, 1941, and 1943 and imprisoned him in Rome's infamous jail Regina Coeli. His remarkable knowledge of Europe and its leaders is based upon his own experiences as a correspondent and in the Italian diplomatic service.
In 1941 he was sent to cover the Eastern Front as a correspondent for Corriere della Sera. He wrote articles about the front in Ukrania, but the fascist dictatorship of Mussollini censored it. But later, in 1943, they were collected and brought out under the title Il Volga nasce in Europa (The Volga Rises in Europe). Also, this experience provided the basis for his two most famous books, Kaputt (1944) and The Skin (1949).
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 45 reviews
March 28, 2021
Malaparte is one of those people who could only have been produced by the 20th century. Born of a German father and an Italian mother, he was a fascist and an atheist until he fell out with Mussolini for, amongst other things, comparing Hitler to a woman – he then proceeded to be arrested several times and was exiled to Lipari. Later, he became a war correspondent which included stints at the front from where he retrieved material to write Kaputt and The Skin. After the war, and the fall of fascism, he became a communist and a Catholic. As I said, the 20th century.
Kremlin Ball takes him away from Italy and the war and deep into the Court of Stalin, the future Red Tsar. Malaparte went to the Soviet Union in the early 30s to prove, apparently, that the October Revolution only succeeded in creating a new aristocracy, now made of Bolcheviks, which managed to be thoroughly bourgeois. He identifies well the hypocrisy of the new ruling class, and skilfully hints at something far sinister behind it: Stalin’s cruelty and the bloodbath that would soon ensue.
Is this book fiction or reality? No doubt Malaparte met all the people he mentions. Many of the situations he describes likely took place, though not all of them. His feelings and reflections sound fabricated. The aristocratic environment Malaparte claims existed strikes me more as his perception of reality; he's imposing his feelings on what he was seeing rather than letting reality influence his opinion.
In other words, Malaparte makes for a lousy journalist; but he is a terrific novelist.
Kremlin Ball takes him away from Italy and the war and deep into the Court of Stalin, the future Red Tsar. Malaparte went to the Soviet Union in the early 30s to prove, apparently, that the October Revolution only succeeded in creating a new aristocracy, now made of Bolcheviks, which managed to be thoroughly bourgeois. He identifies well the hypocrisy of the new ruling class, and skilfully hints at something far sinister behind it: Stalin’s cruelty and the bloodbath that would soon ensue.
Is this book fiction or reality? No doubt Malaparte met all the people he mentions. Many of the situations he describes likely took place, though not all of them. His feelings and reflections sound fabricated. The aristocratic environment Malaparte claims existed strikes me more as his perception of reality; he's imposing his feelings on what he was seeing rather than letting reality influence his opinion.
In other words, Malaparte makes for a lousy journalist; but he is a terrific novelist.
July 21, 2019
Foreword, by Jenny McPhee
--The Kremlin Ball
Notes
--The Kremlin Ball
Notes
January 14, 2019
This is in many ways, a story of chairs and miracles. That could strike some as odd, but given a focus on the new Moscow of the 1930s, maybe it isn’t. Malaparte was a journalist and diploma, one who served many masters. Always avoiding the lethal gaffe--he was imprisoned a number of times but still was able to press the flesh with his manicured hand dazzle and charm. Thus he was able to gossip with the inner circles of many a wartime regime.
The Kremlin Ball was published posthumously and it shows. I needed the snobbery of Soviet elite, the contradictions and the parvenus. Greta Garbo was not far off at all about materialistic dreams behind the Great Terror. Ninotschka could be considered an epilogue to the Kremlin Ball.
The episode relating to Mayakovsky appears inchoate. Malaparte may have merely lacked the time to embellish adequately the scene with his self aggrandizement. That’s a shame regardless of history’s shadow.
This is worth reading for who stare agape as Ivanka Trump is being positioned to serve on the World Bank.
The Kremlin Ball was published posthumously and it shows. I needed the snobbery of Soviet elite, the contradictions and the parvenus. Greta Garbo was not far off at all about materialistic dreams behind the Great Terror. Ninotschka could be considered an epilogue to the Kremlin Ball.
The episode relating to Mayakovsky appears inchoate. Malaparte may have merely lacked the time to embellish adequately the scene with his self aggrandizement. That’s a shame regardless of history’s shadow.
This is worth reading for who stare agape as Ivanka Trump is being positioned to serve on the World Bank.
November 17, 2014
Begun as an outgrowth of La pelle in 1946, subsequently developed into an autonomous work, ultimately left incomplete around 1950, Il ballo al Cremlino was to have been a “faithful portrait” of the Soviet Communist haute société that had taken the place of the Tsarist ancien régime, the same elite that would soon be swallowed up by Stalin’s show trials and purges. The project is based on a fascinating contradiction: the author arrived in Moscow in 1929 convinced he would find in power a working class bursting with revolutionary ideals and puritanical in style; instead he encountered, a mere five years after Lenin’s death, a Marxist aristocracy mimicking the West, drowning in vice and corruption, and dominated by fear. For a communist true believer, the portrait is a devastating one, but of course the suave and amoral Malaparte does not judge them particularly harshly; in his eyes they are merely parvenus whose greatest folly may have been aesthetic: pretending to take beauty away from their poets. Looking back at a remove of fifteen years, in many cases concerned with individuals who would be dead by the time Malaparte wrote about them, the six extant chapters of this novel-chronicle display less urgency than either the frontline reportage of Kaputt (1944) or the recounting of the Allied army’s progress up the Italian peninsula in La pelle (1949), but it is of a piece with those works and once you know it, it can indeed seem to constitute, as the recent Adelphi edition’s promotional copy has it, the missing panel of a Malapartian triptych on European decadence.
March 19, 2019
Marvellous, Proustian portrait of the Bolshevik ancien régime at the onset of the Stalinist purges. Would surely have been a 5 if the author had only managed to finish it.
September 4, 2020
Curzio Malaparte's The Kremlin Ball is unlikely any other book you are likely to have read about Stalin's Russia. Over a number of years, Malaparte visited Russia several times and got to know many of the leaders (though not Stalin himself). This book studies Soviet High Society as if it were the fin de siècle France of Marcel Proust.
It seems that Malaparte is deeply addicted to scandalous gossip. At several points he says things about the leadership and their wives that could have gotten them shot by the GPU (or NKVD or KGB). For instance: Soviet Minister of Culture's wife Anna Lunacharskaya wore theatrical costumes to social events.
This book was never really finished, so there are places where the same stories are repeated; and there are dashed entries for him to fill in later with facts and names.
The oddest thing about The Kremlin Ball is that I kept wondering what year a particular event was taking place. Malaparte's visits to the Soviet Union stretched out over a long period, so I would ask myself: Is this story before Stalin's purges? Had the Russians invaded yet? I am sure that Malaparte intended to smoothe over all these temporal glitches, but he was still mulling over the material when he died.
It seems that Malaparte is deeply addicted to scandalous gossip. At several points he says things about the leadership and their wives that could have gotten them shot by the GPU (or NKVD or KGB). For instance: Soviet Minister of Culture's wife Anna Lunacharskaya wore theatrical costumes to social events.
This book was never really finished, so there are places where the same stories are repeated; and there are dashed entries for him to fill in later with facts and names.
The oddest thing about The Kremlin Ball is that I kept wondering what year a particular event was taking place. Malaparte's visits to the Soviet Union stretched out over a long period, so I would ask myself: Is this story before Stalin's purges? Had the Russians invaded yet? I am sure that Malaparte intended to smoothe over all these temporal glitches, but he was still mulling over the material when he died.
November 24, 2018
Unfinished and probably not the best place to start with Malaparte. Sort of a Gawker for Moscow's pre-Terror smart set. The best parts are the descriptions of the people: Madame Budyonnaya the "small, busty, pleasantly crass brunette" married to a Red Army Marshall who can't seem to "raise his wife one rung on the ladder of pride, arrogance, and vulgarity." Some wanderings with Bulgakov and Mayakovsky (right before his suicide), and lots and lots of 'who's on first?' musings about Christ and Marxism. Read it for the wicked observations-- caustic enough to make Barnes' description of Jenny Petherbridge read like hagiography.
November 7, 2022
A lightly fictionalized insider's look at Moscow's elite society during the early Stalin period. The narrative became repetitive at times and was periodically interrupted by somewhat unwarranted musings about religion and the nature of Russian suffering, but what made this worth my while were the character studies of some of the most enigmatic figures of late-1920s Soviet politics--chief among them the beleaguered Lunacharsky, People's Commissar of Enlightenment and essentially a Western liberal, and the extravagant Florinsky, Chief of Protocol at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Moscow's most prominent homosexual.
October 8, 2019
I got bogged down in Malaparte's The Skin, but found this much more 'enjoyable'. It's posthumous, and probably not in an ideal form, but the idea of writing about the Soviets as if they were Proustian aristocrats was fabulous, and the whole thing is suitably hilarious and horrifying.
January 13, 2017
Una lectura muy agradable la de estos relatos, particularmente el primero
May 10, 2017
Curzio Malaparte is één van mijn favoriete schrijvers. Hij is een soort Proust van de Tweede Wereldoorlog. Het bal in het Kremlin speelt zich af in 1929 in Moskou en gaat over 'marxistische adel' van de Sovjet-Unie in de jaren vóór de zuiveringen van Stalin, die deze nieuwe aristocratie wegvaagde. Het boek is nooit voltooid, maar Malapartes barokke, bloemrijke taalgebruik is ook in deze roman een meeslepend genot. Zo laat hij USSR-president Kalinin met gesloten ogen om zich heen kijken. Zoals in zijn andere boeken is Malaparte een meester in beschrijvingen van de meest stuitende lichtzinnigheid en in filosofische beschouwingen van een bijtende ironie. Alle hoogdravendheid wordt genadeloos hoogdravend gefileerd.
May 21, 2023
It’s so interesting to read an unfinished novel, if you can even call it a novel. It really reads more like a travelogue or investigative journalism.
The best parts of The Kremlin Ball are it’s considerations of death and its significance. The weakest parts are those inevitable pitfalls of it being unfinished—repetitive sections, seemingly unconnected/irrelevant anecdotes and characters.
Still, i’m interested in reading more of Malaparte!
The best parts of The Kremlin Ball are it’s considerations of death and its significance. The weakest parts are those inevitable pitfalls of it being unfinished—repetitive sections, seemingly unconnected/irrelevant anecdotes and characters.
Still, i’m interested in reading more of Malaparte!
July 4, 2022
In this unfinished novel, Malaparte is not so twisted (like in Kaputt), and not so jaded (like in his Diary of A Foreigner in Paris), instead, he has an honest confrontation with his own Christian beliefs. This is Malaparte at his least dramatic, and while his unique (and horrifying) dialectical method is somewhat sidelined, this version of of him, of him as an author, is approachable. This author is the one that his other personas would laugh at. His other voices, ones from Kaputt and from The Skin would sit this Malaparte down and subject him to a little story, of a German soldier's glass eye, or maybe a sad story about a dog...
January 27, 2014
La verit� poetica. Col pretesto di un ballo (se ne facevano ancora) un ritratto di quel ceto emergente sovietico che s'interessava ai balli, alla letteratura, ai pettegolezzi, ad amori e gelosie, alle belle signore, anche in quanto signore, al tennis, che scopriva insomma quanto fosse piacevole sostituirsi nei ruoli dei cadaveri freschi. A lato di tutto ci�, � il 1929, c'� Stalin, cui non gliene poteva fregare di meno di quelle carabattole borghesi e reazionarie, nulla, tranne che del proprio crescente ma ancora traballante potere... e degli ultimi citati dei quali aument� esponenzialmente la produzione: furono annientati in pochi anni. Malaparte si prende qualche libert� e un po' del senno di poi (ma � onesto, lo dice elencando eventi noti solo a posteriori) , dai brani scartati, dalle bozze per fortuna allegate dall'editore in fondo al libro (avercene di scarti simili) si vede la difficolt� di trovare una quadratura romanzesca compiuta, di essere - nonostante ne dichiari l'impossibilit� - il Proust dei Soviet, giacch� i Soviet non perdonano chi svela. (anche i nobili proustificanalizzati s'incazzarono, ma non avevano n� la Ceka, tantomeno l'NKVD) Eppure, nonostante le libert� (del resto non lo chiama "report" ma "romanzo") che lo farebbero demolire da un bravo avvocato, (cercasse una verit� giuridica) o da uno storico pedante, (cercasse la verit� storica) tanto da recarsi nella casa del suicida Majakovskij in un anno che avrebbe visto il povero Vladimir Vladimirovi? protestare animatamente la propria esistenza in vita, eppure and� cos�. E le poche pagine dedicate a Majakovskij sono cos� vere da farti intuire pure perch� mor�. Suicida o no - come � stato ipotizzato da taluni, non cambia nulla. Se t'ammazzi perch� capisci cosa sta diventando ci� che hai amato o t'ammazzano quelli che amasti perch� sono diventati ci� che sono, non cambia nulla. Ti spacca, e tu con lui. Forse bisognerebbe introdurre il concetto di verit� poetica, forse ossimorica, ma probabilmente necessaria. si faceva mandare le palle da tennis da Londra non gradendo quelle di produzione locale: in Russia ci� che cade non rimbalza
December 12, 2018
I am often sympathetic to those who find themselves on the wrong side of history. Political affiliation means so extraordinarily little to me. My allegiance belongs neither to politics nor to ideology, but to literature above all. I identify not with the mob in their outrage and calls for erasure or censorship, but with Malaparte the ex-fascist, with Hamsun the apologetic advocate of Hitler, and with Ernst Junger and Yukio Mishima despite their nationalism. Renunciation or otherwise is of far less importance to me than to perhaps most others. Again, I am loyal to the republic of letters above all.
Malaparte has become a recent favorite of mine since reading his Kaputt last November, and The Skin a few months ago. His approach to writing could be described as historical, but his style, often bordering on the surreal or the farcical (an obvious influence on Kundera; there are undeniable echoes, for example, of Malaparte in the scenes involving Stalin in Kundera's Festival of Insignificance), renders fact and fiction indistinguishable.
One of so many brilliants writers born from the second world war, Malaparte troubles himself with the failures of fascism and communism with a formidable sense of humor - "You'll learn to perform miracles," a Soviet policeman says while arresting a doctor found guilty of performing a lifesaving operation.
The Kremlin Ball is the much lighter thematic work compared to Kaputt and The Skin which are quite heavy-handed, although given Malaparte's comic treatment, in the bleakness and devastation left in the wake of the war. The Kremlin Ball was born out of an outtake of The Skin, but is a work all its own, dealing primarily with the Soviet Union around the time of Stalin's Five-Year Plan, and detailing his view of the *ancien regime* of Communist society; the new aristocracy interested not in classlessness but luxuries of European import.
Malaparte writes: " “I came to Moscow convinced that it was an anti-Europe, or even just an alternative Europe, but had the painful realization that the whole Soviet nobility nurtured for Europe . . . an unconditional admiration.”
Malaparte has become a recent favorite of mine since reading his Kaputt last November, and The Skin a few months ago. His approach to writing could be described as historical, but his style, often bordering on the surreal or the farcical (an obvious influence on Kundera; there are undeniable echoes, for example, of Malaparte in the scenes involving Stalin in Kundera's Festival of Insignificance), renders fact and fiction indistinguishable.
One of so many brilliants writers born from the second world war, Malaparte troubles himself with the failures of fascism and communism with a formidable sense of humor - "You'll learn to perform miracles," a Soviet policeman says while arresting a doctor found guilty of performing a lifesaving operation.
The Kremlin Ball is the much lighter thematic work compared to Kaputt and The Skin which are quite heavy-handed, although given Malaparte's comic treatment, in the bleakness and devastation left in the wake of the war. The Kremlin Ball was born out of an outtake of The Skin, but is a work all its own, dealing primarily with the Soviet Union around the time of Stalin's Five-Year Plan, and detailing his view of the *ancien regime* of Communist society; the new aristocracy interested not in classlessness but luxuries of European import.
Malaparte writes: " “I came to Moscow convinced that it was an anti-Europe, or even just an alternative Europe, but had the painful realization that the whole Soviet nobility nurtured for Europe . . . an unconditional admiration.”
January 15, 2017
"Dell'alta società sovietica di quel tempo, corrotta, assetata di piaceri, avida di denaro, di gloria, di potenza, orgogliosa e snob, capace di qualsiasi infamia pur di conservare l'effimero potere, pronta a tradire il popolo, la rivoluzione, il comunismo, la Russia, a rinnegare il proprio passato rivoluzionario, pur di non dover rinunciare agli onori e ai privilegi del suo stato, di quella nobiltà sovietica corrotta di trozkismo, di bonapartismo, quasi nessuno, ormai, è ancora vivo [...].
Di tutte le merveilleuses dell'ancien régime comunista, non resta che il ricordo: gli "snap shots" dei plotoni d'esecuzione li hanno colti nel supremo istante, col pallido viso rivolto verso le canne dei fucili, i pugni chiusi, gli occhi sbarrati, le fronti livide, sgombre dal gran vento della morte, in quella fredda e squallida luce delle fotografie al lampo di magnesio che illumina, in uno zenit invisibile, le scene delle esecuzioni nell'Europa moderna."
Di tutte le merveilleuses dell'ancien régime comunista, non resta che il ricordo: gli "snap shots" dei plotoni d'esecuzione li hanno colti nel supremo istante, col pallido viso rivolto verso le canne dei fucili, i pugni chiusi, gli occhi sbarrati, le fronti livide, sgombre dal gran vento della morte, in quella fredda e squallida luce delle fotografie al lampo di magnesio che illumina, in uno zenit invisibile, le scene delle esecuzioni nell'Europa moderna."
May 6, 2017
Onvoltooide roman die samen met 'Kaputt' en 'De huid' een trilogie had moeten vormen over de neergang van Europa. Mooie vignettes, knappe dialogen en mondain onderhoudend, zoals steeds bij Malaparte. Mustread voor Ruslandliefhebbers: de beschrijvingen van Moskou en Sint-Petersburg zijn zo levendig dat ze meteen zin geven om in de Wolga en/of Neva te duiken.
July 1, 2018
Very clearly unfinished and unedited, with the same anecdotes cropping up multiple times over the course of the narrative. Repetition does detract from the enjoyment of the work, not nearly as gripping as The Skin or Kaputt. I only wonder what might have been had Malaparte finished it in his lifetime.
September 30, 2020
In his review (LitHub, 20 May 2020) of Malaparte’s Diary of a Foreigner in Paris, Edmund White refers to the author as a ‘mythomane’, a compulsive liar. So when Malaparte himself declares in the foreword to this unfinished and posthumously reconstructed work, ‘In thus novel, a faithful portrait of the USSR’s Marxist nobility, of Moscow’s Communist high society, of their haute société, everything is true,’ we should be on our guard. In fact, it’s no use trying to pin down Curzio Malaparte [Kurt Erich Suckert], a member of Mussolini’s Fascist Party from the March on Rome, 1922, dismissed by Goebbels’ propaganda agency for whom he worked during World War II and imprisoned or put under house arrest several times back in Italy, who was then hired by the American forces in Naples, reconciled to Catholicism on his deathbed but left his estate to the People’s Republic of China.
White assures us, however, of what we can count on with this author: ‘the beauty of his prose and the fascination of his personality’. From the earliest pages the reader encounters the kinds of ‘phrases’ White admires, luminous descriptions of the Russian sky and others that are so perfectly matched to the Soviet paradise's decadent hypocrisy and increasing danger as the 1920s slide into the next decade’s era of the Great Purge. Women are described with a lush misogynistic mix of desire and disgust:
Compare/contrast this with his several pages of adoring praise for Lev Karakhan, known as ‘the Adonis of the Bolshevik party’ – or this observation of a German journalist in a tuxedo:
Malaparte, himself protected by diplomatic immunity, leads the reader through the increasingly dangerous and shifting Russian ‘moral landscape’. We meet such characters as the urbane writer Mikhail Bulgakov; Prince Lvov, one-time President of the Duma, now trying to flog off a gilt armchair in an open-air market; the doomed poet Mayakovsky days before his suicide; and Chief of Protocol of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs Dmitry Florinsky, who travels through the streets in Moscow’s last horse-drawn landau, brazenly camp yet terrified of being outed.
Pointed gossip and revealing observations alternate with riffs on Christ, God, suffering that tend to spin off into incoherence. (Don’t even attempt to work out where Malaparte himself really stands on any issue!) As the novel progresses, the dark clouds of death pile up. The last scene, where members of the Supreme Soviet have gathered on the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre to condemn one of their own for his wife’s affairs (Stalin seated silently in the back row), fades into nothingness with the author’s final words on Lenin’s remains:
White assures us, however, of what we can count on with this author: ‘the beauty of his prose and the fascination of his personality’. From the earliest pages the reader encounters the kinds of ‘phrases’ White admires, luminous descriptions of the Russian sky and others that are so perfectly matched to the Soviet paradise's decadent hypocrisy and increasing danger as the 1920s slide into the next decade’s era of the Great Purge. Women are described with a lush misogynistic mix of desire and disgust:
[She was] a petite brunette, very beautiful, clad in soft flab like a pearl in a velvet case, and, like a pearl, she had a damp, cold listlessness, a savage delicacy, a multi-shaded gray sheen of indifference, a distracted, distant callousness.
Compare/contrast this with his several pages of adoring praise for Lev Karakhan, known as ‘the Adonis of the Bolshevik party’ – or this observation of a German journalist in a tuxedo:
His black jacket, the shiny whiteness of his starched shirt, the dull sheen of his of his silk lapels, lent a grotesque aspect to his red face, his white hands, the gleaming skull beneath his thinning hair. It was that same … aspect that one finds in the people painted by Lucas Cranach in which the pink German skin speckled with golden reflections becomes dulled ivory spotted with greenish reflections and assumes, in contrast with the black clothing, that pallor of decomposing flesh that is the fundamental color of every German moral landscape.
Malaparte, himself protected by diplomatic immunity, leads the reader through the increasingly dangerous and shifting Russian ‘moral landscape’. We meet such characters as the urbane writer Mikhail Bulgakov; Prince Lvov, one-time President of the Duma, now trying to flog off a gilt armchair in an open-air market; the doomed poet Mayakovsky days before his suicide; and Chief of Protocol of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs Dmitry Florinsky, who travels through the streets in Moscow’s last horse-drawn landau, brazenly camp yet terrified of being outed.
Pointed gossip and revealing observations alternate with riffs on Christ, God, suffering that tend to spin off into incoherence. (Don’t even attempt to work out where Malaparte himself really stands on any issue!) As the novel progresses, the dark clouds of death pile up. The last scene, where members of the Supreme Soviet have gathered on the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre to condemn one of their own for his wife’s affairs (Stalin seated silently in the back row), fades into nothingness with the author’s final words on Lenin’s remains:
[I]t became clear that the mummy was decomposing, crumbling, becoming flaky, soft to the touch, damp and spoiled.
August 16, 2024
THE KREMLIN BALL (2012) by Curzio Malaparte is at times brilliant, boring, poetic, philosophical, dull, and intriguing. I wouldn't call it a novel, but more of a travelogue. I can't recommend it, but I didn't dislike it.
Was that paragraph full of contradictions? Well, so is the author. Curzio Malaparte was the pseudonym of Kurt Eric Suckert. So, when “Malaparte,” the character in this novel, tells you everything is true and this actually really happened, maybe you should eat the chicken and spit out the bones.
Yet, frightfully, the part that's real is the thing you wish you could disbelieve.
From 1936 to 1938, Joseph Stalin implemented a campaign of political repression and mass persecution in what was known as The Great Purge. The Purge was characterized by widespread arrests, executions, and deportations of individuals who were perceived as threats to Stalin’s power, including members of the Communist Party, government officials, military leaders, and ordinary citizens.
The Purge was also marked by show trials, where many prominent figures were forced to confess to crimes they did not commit, often under torture or the threat of violence against their families. The purge led to the execution of hundreds of thousands of people and the imprisonment of millions more in labor camps.
Yet, oddly enough, Malaparte places the book in 1929 Moscow, where the Russian Revolution is over, and the Great Purge hasn’t yet happened, but there’s a growing sense of doom.
The book follows journalist Curzio Malaparte as he travels from place to place, meeting real historical Russian rulers and artists in thrall to (and in fear of) Joseph Stalin. The old aristocracy has been replaced, but the new rulers, despite their commitment to communism, remain bourgeoisie to the core.
“In today’s Soviet Russia, however, one always had a suspicion that people were thinking about something else, that they were dominated by a lofty and fixed idea from which their attention never strayed. And they were tied to that idea like a man condemned to death is tied to the stake, his eyes blindfolded, his hands bound behind his back.“
There's brilliance, but your mileage may vary.
Was that paragraph full of contradictions? Well, so is the author. Curzio Malaparte was the pseudonym of Kurt Eric Suckert. So, when “Malaparte,” the character in this novel, tells you everything is true and this actually really happened, maybe you should eat the chicken and spit out the bones.
Yet, frightfully, the part that's real is the thing you wish you could disbelieve.
From 1936 to 1938, Joseph Stalin implemented a campaign of political repression and mass persecution in what was known as The Great Purge. The Purge was characterized by widespread arrests, executions, and deportations of individuals who were perceived as threats to Stalin’s power, including members of the Communist Party, government officials, military leaders, and ordinary citizens.
The Purge was also marked by show trials, where many prominent figures were forced to confess to crimes they did not commit, often under torture or the threat of violence against their families. The purge led to the execution of hundreds of thousands of people and the imprisonment of millions more in labor camps.
Yet, oddly enough, Malaparte places the book in 1929 Moscow, where the Russian Revolution is over, and the Great Purge hasn’t yet happened, but there’s a growing sense of doom.
The book follows journalist Curzio Malaparte as he travels from place to place, meeting real historical Russian rulers and artists in thrall to (and in fear of) Joseph Stalin. The old aristocracy has been replaced, but the new rulers, despite their commitment to communism, remain bourgeoisie to the core.
“In today’s Soviet Russia, however, one always had a suspicion that people were thinking about something else, that they were dominated by a lofty and fixed idea from which their attention never strayed. And they were tied to that idea like a man condemned to death is tied to the stake, his eyes blindfolded, his hands bound behind his back.“
There's brilliance, but your mileage may vary.
May 8, 2024
A great premise for a novel; a study of the Soviet elite in 1920s Russia written in imitation of the style of Marcel Proust, with Proust's French aristocracy substituted for what Malaparte calls 'the Marxist Nobility'. The two writers share an elegiac quality, Malaparte having written the book from a remove of twenty or so years, after many of the real life models for his novel had been killed in the Stalinist purges of the thirties. Also similar to 'In Search of Lost Time', the Kremlin Ball' was unfinished before Malaparte died; this maybe shows up in the text a bit, with parts feeling roughly sketched or repetitive. It's also possible this is just a characteristic of Malaparte's writing; quite a bit of the political commentary in the book, while more fully formed, also feels patchy and frankly off the wall (although it might be a lot to expect coherent politics from a writer who seem to have pinballed erratically between facism, communism, catholicism and maoism in his own life). The sections of the novel that work best in general are the ones that stick mostly closely to Proust, and contain satirical character sketches of the Soviet elite. An exception to this is the one chapter where Malaparte engages with the remnants of the old, pre revolutionary Tsarist elite left in Moscow; this chapter has its distinct power, and makes me want to read some of Malaparte's properly completed novels to see what they're like.
February 22, 2024
Ik kocht het boek in Antwerpen bij De Slegte. Van Malaparte begon ik ooit in De huid, maar ik las het niet uit, al staat een passage over berooide vrouwen in het pas op de Duitsers veroverde Italië me nog altijd voor de geest. Ook Kaputt - net als De huid over de oorlog - zou ik moeten lezen (als ik er de moed voor vind). Tom Lanoye raadde het aan. Het bal in het Kremlin maakt naar mijn mening zijn belofte niet waar als beschrijving van de elite in het communistische Rusland voor Stalin ze aan de kant schuift. Net de passages waarin dat wél gebeurt, boeiden me in het boek dat overduidelijk niet is afgeraakt en daardoor wel eens passages bevat die elkaar overlappen. Ook de ellenlange passages over de plaats van de dood in Rusland en elders, of over de plaats van God in de communistische samenleving, konden me niet boeien.
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July 19, 2023“When he returned from America, he was profoundly changed. I must confess that I never put much stock in what he said about his crisis of conscience, full of bourgeois ideas and ridiculous individualistic sentimentality. People said he had been converted while in America. To what, I asked myself, could an intelligent man every be converted to in America? I never took seriously his supposed crisis of conscience. I was mistaken. I was mistaken to pity him. His act had nothing to do with his faith in God. It was not an act of Christian faith, but a banal example of bourgeois pessimism. It was a bourgeois act, that’s all.”
March 3, 2022
malaparte in his proustian mode of verfabula sees a figure more like de charlus than marcel take the reigns. the narrator’s piggish pursuit of self recognition and privileged access to himself in the other sees a growing disillusionment not with whatever facts of the revolution after lenin there are but with himself. there is no christian miracle of radical transform complete with a losslessly conserved ego for the narrator to be found in soviet russia or anywhere but he’s far from alone in that.
April 12, 2020
All of Malaparte’s books have a poetic beauty. His descriptions swim with life and, sometimes, those waters overpower you and it feels like you’ll be dragged away by that current, but the waves always return you to a safe shore; where you are happy to see the land after the ocean you just crossed. This is one of his shortest books, and it definitely feels like a narativised essay, but it still has all his wonder and insight.
April 26, 2020
It was a promising start but the book fails to engage. It gets very repetitive. The author never left a definitive copy of his work and drafts were put together to publish this book. I do wonder if the people responsible for putting it together actually reviewed the drafts.
Also, it doesn't help that the author is a difficult person to empathise with so that impacts how you'd view his "portraits of high society".
Also, it doesn't help that the author is a difficult person to empathise with so that impacts how you'd view his "portraits of high society".
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October 10, 2021Semi autobiographical account of 1929 Russia as told by journalist/diplomat in this unfinished novel. Uses real names of key people in the Soviet upper echelons, all of whom he seems to have had a relationship with. No actual plot, but rather series of scenes and philosophical conversations which conveys the corrupt Soviet elite. Had the benefit of hindsight, as the book was written around 1945.
March 28, 2023
It’s not about how well written it is — no, not at all — but a fascinating historical document. And while the facts are almost all made up and imaginary, the emotional response is not — or so I hope. And that emotional response is exactly what makes it a historical document. And a fascinating one at that.
March 26, 2024
This is a memoir about living with the Moscow elite in 1929. It has some beautiful writing. Parts are incredibly visual like being in a painting by Chagall or Manet.
But this unfinished book is too thin. There is not enough content.
Malaparte was a fanatical admirer of Proust (who has repeated mentions in this book). However, Proust can write 120 pages about a single dinner party and have it be entertaining. Malaparte cannot.
But this unfinished book is too thin. There is not enough content.
Malaparte was a fanatical admirer of Proust (who has repeated mentions in this book). However, Proust can write 120 pages about a single dinner party and have it be entertaining. Malaparte cannot.
September 24, 2018
a social history/novel of the USSR in the late 1920's and beyond, showing the communist leaders as being a hierarchy much like those under the czar, lots of gossiping, preening, and then they start to be purged...
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