Dmitry Bykov read for us the book “The world could be different. William Bullitt in an attempt to change the twentieth century

“Alexander Etkind seems to me to be one of our greatest thinkers and, I dare say, writers, because his books, written on fairly complex and exotic material, are extraordinarily fascinating. For me, at one time, the milestone books were Whiplash (1998) about the connection between Russian sects and the revolution and Internal Colonization (2013), which for the first time describes the laws of the formation of the Russian Empire with absolutely merciless directness.

When I met Etkind at Cambridge, I suggested that he write some kind of biographical book for the Life of Remarkable People series, and he named a figure that seemed to me extremely interesting. It was about a man who is considered one of the prototypes of Woland. The man who ransomed Freud from the Gestapo. A writer, an adventurer, a victorious hero in all areas that he undertook, and with this female idol, one of the “Kazans” of the XNUMXth century. In short, it was about William Bullitt, the first after the United States in Soviet Russia. ZhZL plans changed at the last moment, but the idea, fortunately, was picked up by another publishing house, Vremya, which released this book.

The World Could Have Been Different is not Bullitt’s first biography. But Etkind uses Bullitt mainly to draw his conception of the first half of the 1919th century. The concept is fascinating and, as always, controversial. Firstly, this is a book about a grandiose personality, and secondly, an exciting, dense and intense narrative in which the main role belongs to ideas, not people. Etkind is convinced that if the proposals of the Bolsheviks, with whom Bullitt came to America in 30 after negotiations with Lenin, had been accepted, the world would have been different. But he was not heard either then or later, when he spoke about the danger of Hitlerism, about the “Nikolaev” regime in Russia in the 20s. And what is especially important to me is that this book exudes the spirit of the 30s and XNUMXs with their passion, pragmatism, and vigorous activity; the spirit is not only Soviet, but mainly American. Etkind explains the reasons for the very short but extremely fruitful Russian “Americanophilia”.

When reading the book, you are guaranteed to meet at least two outstanding people. This is the rare case when a biographer is worth a hero. It can be seen that the author wrote the book with the same pleasure with which Bullitt gathered the intelligentsia to the famous night receptions. In a sense, readers of the book will feel like they are at Satan’s ball, and I think Etkind’s merit in this is no less than Bullitt’s.