Stalin's Barber

Paul M. Levitt is professor of English at the University of Colorado and the author of several novels, plays, and works of literary criticism. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

• AcknowledgmentsPart IChapter 1: ExileChapter 2: Making the Family Skeletons DanceChapter 3: Purging the PartyChapter 4: The LetterChapter 5: Iosif Vissarionovich DzhugashviliChapter 6: To Mosocw, to Moscow, to Moscow!Chapter 7: In Voronezh, a City Peter Built and Poets BravedChapter 8: In the Most High and Palmy State of RomeChapter 9: That Way Madness LiesChapter 10: Only the PitilessChapter 11: StatisticsPart IIChapter 12: Pavel’s Polish PelagiaChapter 13: Escape from ParadiseChapter 14: The Haughty BarberChapter 15: Anna on the BubbleChapter 16: The Worst Cut of AllChapter 17: To the Finland StationRazan’s ListAnna’s NotesGlossary

Stalin's Barber is all that the great historical novels used to be—epic in scope, with powerful characterizations, visceral action, and a blazingly intelligent authorial point of view. Here we meet—and know—the chief players in the extraordinary centrifuge that was Stalin's Soviet Union. The culture is revealed and flayed; the lives are displayed and understood—this is ‘grand’ writing, in the sense of ‘grand’ opera, from a man who is already a master playwright, and now deserves to be a world figure.