The Blumkin Project: A Biographical Novel
Histoire (romans), Littérature générale (romans), Espionnage (récits)
Audio avec voix de synthèse, Braille automatisé
Résumé
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.