House of Meetings (17 page)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe a debt to several recent books.
First, Anne Applebaum’s magisterial
Gulag: A History
(Allen Lane; Doubleday). Lucidly and elegantly constructed, simply and strongly written, and asking all the right questions, this is the single indispensable work, after Solzhenitsyn’s
Gulag Archipelago,
on the phenomenon of Soviet slavery.
With Andrew Meier’s
Black Earth: Russia After the Fall
(HarperCollins), you only have to look at the jacket photo of the author to know what lies ahead of you: honesty, intrepidity, wit, candor, and (a vital quality, hereabouts) cheerful unfastidiousness. This book combines travel writing and historiography at a formidably high level.
Orlando Figes’s
Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia
(Penguin; Metropolitan Books). I have an informal method of evaluating tomes of this kind (729 pp.): I look to see how many notes I have made at the back of them (e.g., “39—serf theaters and orchestras…552—Nabokov Sr.’s murderer”). My edition of
Natasha’s Dance
ends, generously, with ten blank sides. I needed them all.
Like Anne Applebaum’s
Gulag,
Simon Sebag Montefiore’s
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson; Knopf) is partly the result of heroic labor in the newly opened archives. This book changes the picture, and in a disturbing way. The author is very meticulous and very moral; but he can’t prevent the emergence of a Stalin more personally impressive than we generally believed him to be—more complex and more intelligent. Stalin was in possession of a certain amount of political poetry; he was also, alas, in possession of a soul.
Masha Gessen’s
Ester and Ruzya
(Dial Press) has an informative subtitle:
How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler’s War and Stalin’s Peace
. The family memoir is very smoothly assembled; but the experience of reading it is necessarily jagged and gaunt. Gessen is superlatively good at showing how state systems bend and tug the individual into all kinds of strange shapes. She is also especially evocative on the physical furniture and mental atmosphere of postwar Moscow.
As is Janusz Bardach, in
Surviving Freedom: After the Gulag
(University of California Press). In an earlier book of mine (
Koba the Dread
) I praised an earlier book of his (
Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving Stalin’s Gulag
); Dr. Bardach wrote to me, and we had a brief interchange in the months before his death. I knew the defector-historian Tibor Szamuely, who served time at Vorkuta. But Tibor died thirty years ago. And it was Janusz Bardach whom I felt to be my one human link to the events I describe in
House of Meetings;
and in my struggle, as I wrote it, I was greatly sustained by his ghost.
And by other ghosts—by Fyodor Dostoevsky, by Joseph Conrad, by Eugenia Ginzburg, and by the Tolstoy of the USSR, Vasily Grossman.
ALSO BY MARTIN AMIS
FICTION
The Rachel Papers
Dead Babies
Success
Other People
Money
Einstein’s Monsters
London Fields
Time’s Arrow
The Information
Night Train
Heavy Water and Other Stories
Yellow Dog
NONFICTION
Invasion of the Space Invaders
The Moronic Inferno
Visiting Mrs. Nabokov
Experience
The War Against Cliché
Koba the Dread
*1
Joseph Vissarionovich is Stalin, leader of Russia, 1928?–53. Lavrenti Beria was head of the Cheka, or secret police, 1938–53. Nikita Sergeyevich is Khrushchev, leader of Russia, 1953–64. I see no way around these footnotes. It would have cost the memoirist his soul, I know, to write out the word
Stalin
.
Return to text.
*2
Immobilized by an “anesthetic aerosol,” all thirty-five hostage-takers were executed in situ. Of the seven hundred hostages, one hundred and thirty were fatally gassed.
Return to text.
*3
Temachin is Genghis Khan; the Mongol warlord Hulagu is his grandson. Vladimir Ilich is Lenin, leader of Russia, 1917–24.
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*4
Dostoevsky was imprisoned from 1849 to 1853, for sedition. Vladimir Vladimirovich is Putin, leader of Russia since 1999.
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*5
Leonid Ilich is Brezhnev, leader of Russia, 1964–82.
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*6
Lazar Kaganovich and Vyacheslav Molotov belonged to the regnant inner circle from the mid-1920s to the mid-1950s. Both were key actors in the two great waves of terror, 1931–33 (the countryside), and 1937–38(the cities and towns). This is the last footnote. And the reader may want a question answered, in view of what is to come. Do I forgive him? In the end, yes, I do. The only thing I don’t forgive is that he wouldn’t let me drive him to the airport. That was
O’Hare:
at least another hour.
Return to text.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
AND ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA
Copyright © 2006 by Martin Amis
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Originally published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, a division of the Random House Group Ltd., London, in 2006.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Knopf Canada and colophon are trademarks.
LC Control Number: 2006047397
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Amis, Martin, 1949–
House of meetings / Martin Amis.
I. Title.
PR
6051.
M
58
H
68 2007 823'.914
C
2006-905392-8
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
eISBN: 978-0-307-26730-6
v3.0