Ransomed Dissident
Subtitle: A Life in Art under the Soviets
Publisher: I. B. Tauris & Company, Limited
Published: 2019
Language: eng
Number of pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9781788312950
Subjects: Soviet union, biography
Description: In 1939, a ten-year-old Igor Golomstock accompanied his mother, a medical doctor, to the vast network of labour camps in the Russian Far East. While she tended patients, he was minded by assorted 'trusty' prisoners - hardened criminals - and returned to Moscow an almost feral adolescent, fluent in obscene prison jargon but intellectually ignorant. Despite this dubious start he became a leading art historian and co-author (with his close friend Andrey Sinyavsky) of the first, deeply controversial, monograph on Picasso published in the Soviet Union. Here, Golomstock offers the reader a rare insight into what life was like as a quietly subversive art historian in the post-Stalin era.