Inside the Stalin Archives—A Preview

There is a moment in Jonathan Brent's enthralling book Inside the Stalin Archives (forthcoming in November) where, fifteen years after having embarked on his long journey toward access to the private papers of Josef Stalin, he finally sits down at a table in the Russian State Archive and gets his first glimpse of a book from Stalin's personal library: "To see the works of this library is somehow to be brought face to face with Stalin. To see the words his eyes saw. To touch the pages he touched and smelled." The experience of immediacy, of having a long-dead person brought to sudden life, is one that every biographer knows. It's an experience you'll have when you read this extraordinary book: and not just the image of Stalin but of Russia itself.

Add to this ground-breaking work the incandescent biographies of of two towering figures in French literary history by two of our greatest biographers and you have the makings of a terrific fall list. The critic R.P. Blackmur defined literature as "what adds to the store of available reality." I hope you'll agree that, in our first year as an independent publisher, we've done our part.

James Atlas
President and Publisher