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Title: A brilliant tour-de-force of literary impersonation
Review: If Joseph Stalin had possessed a sense of humour, he never would have been Joseph Stalin, and then and only then could he possibly have possessed the insight to write this "autobiography" by Richard Lourie, who has in this book created the greatest book of Russian fiction in decades.The novel is darkly hilarious, hilariously dark, mordant, pungent, historically accurate, psychologically sound, and line-for-line breathtaking in the baneful beauty of its sentences and its insights into the mind of the Greatest Dictator of them all. It reads like a lost novel by Nabokov by way of Doestoyevsky and Henry Miller.Once you have learned Stalin's three great truths from this book, you will come to understand upon what rocks the Soviet Union was really established.The book is every bit as brilliant and imaginative as Stalin was evil.
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