Martin Amis, Koba, The Dread

Nicolas Tredell (Independent Scholar - Europe)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: English Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary Britain , 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Gina Lyle (University of Glasgow), Graham MacPhee (University of Manchester), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Jenni Ramone (The Nottingham Trent University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 2002

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Historical representation

Resources

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Recommended Reading

Martin Amis’s

Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

(2002) is his sixth nonfiction work. It is

an impassioned record of his horrified reactions to reading “several yards of books” (4) about Stalinism, and an attack on the participants in “the great intellectual abasement” (38) – the denial or diminution of the scale and nature of the atrocities perpetrated by Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) and/or the claim that Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) and Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) were significantly better than Stalin. The main title of

Koba the Dread

comes from Stalin’s own nickname for himself as a boy, Koba, after a Robin Hood figure in a popular novel called

The Patricide

, and from the Russian word “grozny”, applied to Ivan IV (1530-84) and more usually translated as…

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2312 words

Citation: Tredell, Nicolas. "Koba, The Dread". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 December 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10379, accessed 26 April 2024.]

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