From Lenin to Lennon

LENIN TO LENNON Harcourt Brace 1991	wrote TERRY TEACHOUT in The! New! York! Times! To read "From Lenin to Lennon" is to learn an important (and easily overlooked) lesson about life under a totalitarian regime: its most typical horrors are not the savage methods by which open rebellion is put down, but the day-to-day humiliations to which the average citizen is subjected in a society ruled by ideology run rampant. It is a lesson that the self-righteous prigs of the 90's, who measure all things against the blunt yardsticks of their preferred political orthodoxies, would do well to take to heart.
"...a sharp, sometimes hilarious and always marvelously readable account of growing up absurd in the Soviet Union. It is at once a classic tale of adolescent rebellion in a totalitarian society and the story of a young man from the provinces discovering his intellectual vocation in the bizarre turmoil of Moscow’s elite educational circles and in the Soviet tourist industry, where the only true believers in the socialist utopia are the foreign left-wing visitors who come to worship at the shrines of revolution. Often grim and heartbreaking in its vignettes of Soviet life, the book is nonetheless closer to spirit to a comic novel than an autobiography, and it establishes David Gurevich as a writer – a writer in English, by the way – of extraordinary literary gifts." HILTON KRAMER

LENIN TO LENNON
Harcourt Brace 1991

wrote TERRY TEACHOUT in The! New! York! Times!
To read "From Lenin to Lennon" is to learn an important (and easily overlooked) lesson about life under a totalitarian regime: its most typical horrors are not the savage methods by which open rebellion is put down, but the day-to-day humiliations to which the average citizen is subjected in a society ruled by ideology run rampant. It is a lesson that the self-righteous prigs of the 90's, who measure all things against the blunt yardsticks of their preferred political orthodoxies, would do well to take to heart.

"...a sharp, sometimes hilarious and always marvelously readable account of growing up absurd in the Soviet Union. It is at once a classic tale of adolescent rebellion in a totalitarian society and the story of a young man from the provinces discovering his intellectual vocation in the bizarre turmoil of Moscow’s elite educational circles and in the Soviet tourist industry, where the only true believers in the socialist utopia are the foreign left-wing visitors who come to worship at the shrines of revolution. Often grim and heartbreaking in its vignettes of Soviet life, the book is nonetheless closer to spirit to a comic novel than an autobiography, and it establishes David Gurevich as a writer – a writer in English, by the way – of extraordinary literary gifts."
HILTON KRAMER

For now you can buy only a paper copy (autographed! but of course!)
for $19 + $5 handling and shipping (in the 48 states)

You can go through Amazon (below) or send $24 via PayPal to scribe@davidgurevich.com.

now e-book available on Amazon and Kindle-Schmindle! Cheap! Click and buy!

On NOOK, TOO!