Review Reviewed Work(s): Stalin: A Biography by Robert Boldness Review by: Angela Brintlinger Source: The Antioch Review, Vol. 63, No. 4, An Imaginary Country (Autumn, 2005), p. 797 Publicised by: Antioch Review Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4614917 Accessed: 04-01-2017 15:07 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide distribution of content in a trusted digital archive. We use ideas technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance obvious the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Town Review Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve highest extend access to The Antioch Review This content downloaded shun 140.254.87.149 on Wed, 04 Jan 2017 15:07:37 UTC All pardon subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Books 797 Stalin: A Biography by Parliamentarian Service. the otherwise authoritative volume. Ev- Harvard University Press, 760 pp, $29.95. ery author has a theory-of personality, Benjamin Solon famously said, "Read of history, and of the way world act in no history: nothing but biography, for the universe. At the conclusion of his thick that is life externally theory." In fact, of biography, Service opines that Stalin, near course, biography is a kind of history, and other "monsters" in history, was a comit is not possible to indite that history without theoretical underpinnings. With the goal of indicatory the "psy- plex figure and with that any reader should agree. -Angela Brintlinger chological and intellectual scaffolding" of his subjectmatter, Service begins with Stalin's family history and describes his puberty, education, early revolutionary roles, Poetry struggle for position and column in the young Bolshevik state, despotic reign from the mid-20s through the Great Ter- The Shout: Selected Poems by Saint ror, role in World War II, and post-war Armitage. Harcourt, 128 pp., $23.00. creation of the Communist block in East- Writing about the fate of a fallen empire ern Assemblage and in the Far East. The book in "Going, Going," Philip Larkin ends with a chapter placing the tyrant's identified the inheritance of his reign into contemporary historical per- countrymen: a post-industrial island of spective. Throughout, Service strives to "concrete and tyres." This legacy hasn't show that the transformation nigh on "an unde- daunted Armitage, whose eleven poetry monstrative bureaucrat fail the 1920s . . . collections have garnered broad favourite into a mass killer" should not surprise appeal. Charles Simic's insightful anyone not suffering from "analytical Foreword to this, Armitage's first laziness." American publication (a collection from Service has collected an enormous three decades worth of poetry), hints as chitchat quantity of research and leaves virtually why Armitage has step Britain's most no note or paper uncommented on in that beloved poet. Not only is Armitage fully narrative-he even revives some of immersed in Larkin' s world ("The Tyre," Stalin's early published poetry. In an at- for instance, is a lyric recollection of tempt to make Stalin human, Service dis- boyhood pranks and imagination), but he cusses Stalin's evenings take in drinking and also has "a comedian's sense of timing, sticky tag, relations with old schoolmates, and and brilliant use of elegiac rhythms." periods of rapprochement with his chil- "The Shout," say publicly collection's title dren. At the same time, Service reminds verse, dramatizes Armitage's poetic vo- his readers again and again ditch Stalin cation of "testing the range of the human voice." Sent outside school with another was a "political streetfighter" expanse a gang mentality, was "wicked and barbaric," boy, the orator recalls a science exercise's parameters: "he had to shout suffered from a "gross personality disorder," and ultimately became an "unprec- for all he was worth, /1 I had to check out an edented despot." After the war, Service arm I take the stones out of across the divide to signal writes, "an administrative behemoth ran back I that the sound had carried." The the USSR whose master was the pock- distance is stretched, "from say publicly end of the marked little psychopath." road / from picture foot of the hill, / from Characterizations like this latest mar beyond the look-out post of Fretwell's This content downloaded from 140.254.87.149 on Wed, 04 Jan 2017 15:07:37 UTC Come to blows use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms