This page-turning biographical novel follows the footsteps of a forgotten legend of the Russian Revolution, from Odessa to Moscow, Istanbul, and beyond.
Yakov Blumkin claimed to have had nine lives. Born to a poor Jewish family and orphaned as a child, he was a Socialist Revolutionary, a terrorist, the assassin of the German ambassador Wilhelm von Mirbach, a poet close to the avant-garde, a member of Cheka, a military strategist, a secret agent, and Leon Trotsky’s secretary. Executed in 1929 on Stalin’s orders at the age of only twenty-nine, he has continued to inspire a powerful curiosity, and wild rumors and falsehoods about his extraordinary life abound today.
As a young man in 1980s Paris, Christian Salmon identified strongly as a Bolshevik, drawn to the glorious October Revolution immortalized in literature and films such as Warren Beatty’s Reds and Sergei Eisenstein’s trilogy. Picking up the thread of his dream thirty years later, he sets out to reconstruct Blumkin’s shadowy past and ever-shifting identity with a trove of manuscripts, documents, rare photographs, and personal souvenirs.
GenreHumor, General Fiction, Christian & Inspirational
Length8 hrs 56 mins
Narrated byRamiz Monsef
FormatAudiobook
Publish dateSep 27, 2022
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1#1
8#8
2#2
9#9
3#3
10#10
4#4
11#11
5#5
12#12
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6#6
13#13
7#7
14#14
About the author
Christian Salmon
Christian Salmon is a writer and researcher at France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). He founded and was a member of the International Parliament of Writers from 1993 to 2003. He is the author of several books, including Verbicide, Devenir minoritaire: Pour une nouvelle politique de la littérature (coauthored with Joseph Hanimann), and Tombeau de la fiction.View all by Christian Salmon
