cover image The Tiger's Tender Touch: The Erotic Life of Goethe

The Tiger's Tender Touch: The Erotic Life of Goethe

Michael Scammell, Karl Hugo Pruys. Edition Q, $29.95 (220pp) ISBN 978-1-883695-06-4

This amazing compilation of once top-secret Soviet government documents--declassified by President Boris Yeltsin in 1992--fully chronicles the KGB's and the Politburo's campaign to harass and silence Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from 1965 through the late 1970s. Transcripts of bugged conversations, KGB memos, reports from ministries and minutes of Politburo sessions show how the Soviet ruling elite spied on Solzhenitsyn, tapped his phone and seized his manuscripts while orchestrating a campaign to discredit him as a reactionary elitist. We learn new details of ex-KGB chief Yuri Andropov's personal vendetta against Solzhenitsyn, whom he painted as a dissident leader of a full-fledged ``political opposition,'' resulting in the novelist's arrest and deportation in 1974. This newsworthy book reveals the Soviet leadership as complacent, inept and out of touch with the masses of people who welcomed Solzhenitsyn's works, first published in the West and smuggled into his native land. Scammel is chair of Russian language and literature at Cornell University. (Sept.)