Radek
(By Stefan Heym)
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| Author | Stefan Heym |
Radek was such a controversial and perennially ambiguous personality that even his historical biography seems a work of fiction. With his thick glasses and most non-Aryan appearance, he was what the French call beau-laid, and rumors spun around his torrid affair with the famously beautiful Larisa Reisner, a “young woman who flashed across the revolutionary sky like a burning meteor, blinding many.” In the struggles of the revolutionary movement Radek changed sides several times and came into conflict with Stalin, was exiled to Siberia, capitulated and resumed his editorial duties at Isvestia – only to get caught up in the purge trials and sentenced to prison, where he died.
Heym sculpts credible conversations with Lenin, Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Trotsky, Stalin, and many others (all seen from Radek’s perspective), marked by what some might have seen as distinctively Jewish argumentative skills and humor. As we follow him at every turn of the wheel of fate come to know Radek as a man haunted by the fear that the insurgency will cease to move forward, living his life as a frenzied chase in pursuit of the continuation of the revolution, until the very end. Originally published in Munich in 1995, this first-ever English translation of Radek fashions the inner voice of a unique figure in the global revolutionary wave of the first half of the twentieth century.”
