Back to Anniversaries

[Mark Kohut]

So I decide to look up the NYT obituary of her: LOL at first line.

Ms. Peters’s initial prominence came only from being Stalin’s daughter, a
distinction that fed public curiosity about her life across three
continents and many decades. She said she hated her past and felt like a
slave to extraordinary circumstances. Yet she drew on that past, and the
infamous Stalin name, in writing two best-selling autobiographies.



On Wed, Apr 24, 2019 at 8:40 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> There is an extended couple--three pages on the post office, the NY
> section.
>
> More when I make the time.
>
> PS. I might be the first American to *use ANNIVERSARIES, the *new full
> English translation
> in a classroom--or one of the first, anyway. NOTES were taken about the
> book and I may have "sold' at least one.
> (Although I had not finished it yet. Too long and too much else).
>
> Structured some of my Sixties class with it---the timeline and some themes
> via NYTimes' diary entries,
> chosen by Johnson as *entries* to give a national perspective on the
> nation then. (And his sarcasm about
> the *newspaper of record *is also so fine). He records a mention of
> Gunter Grass, spelled Gunther Grass by
> the newspaper of record.
>
> I may have mentioned this before so your milage may vary but Johnson's
> ongoing thread about the NYT
> ongoing "reporting on"/interviewing/ going shopping with Stalin's
> daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, is among the
> best things I know of, or can imagine about a person only famous for being
> famous. Johnson saw her--in the Times
> and therefore the culture then...(I remember her book when I was a young
> bookseller).... as we joke about Kim Kardashian today.
> She has absolutely nothing beyond banalities to say--ever. Nothing about
> Russia but the most superficial. Buying American things.
> Her apartment and color schemes and a day in her life! Were her dad not
> Stalin, she'd be absolutely invisible.
> Like Gesine, the narrator (who is, however,
> infinitely smarter and more observant, so to exaggerate)
>