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: Kerry Myler (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

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 “…

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2142 words

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

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