The Red Atlantis

"These essays, at once funny and heartbreaking, survey the work of Soviet and Eastern European artists, writers, and filmmakers. Hoberman is an expert gifted with high intellectual spirits, but he doesn't take cheap shots: he never lets us forget the pressures and dangers that affected even the most devoted Communists under Communism." --New Yorker "Zooming back and forth from Berlin to Moscow to the Lower East Side, J. Hoberman has compiled the best evocation of the lost world of Jewish communism since the historian Raphael Samuel's memoir of working-class East London in New Left Review." --The Lingua Franca Book Review "In J. Hoberman, the ruins of communist culture have found a passionate and erudite archeologist. A collection of essays on communist art, film, and literature, The Red Atlantis is an elegy for the 'Communist utopia which, in fact, never existed.'" --Dissent "This is a superb collection of essays--deft, penetrating, erudite, witty and altogether a pleasure to read." --Washington Post "Provocative, insightful, funny, J. Hoberman's The Red Atlantis explains how--with Philistines generally in charge--Communism, in contrast always to anti-Communism, managed to encourage some of the most interesting, most Jewish, and silliest art of the century." --Paul Buhle, co-author of Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist "Intelligently stitched together from Hoberman's many reviews, this volume introduces readers to the lost continent of communist culture...Well documented and written with enviable verve, this provocative book should reopen old debates and spark useful reevaluations of the countless compromised masterpieces produced by well-meaning but ultimately misguided intellectuals over more than 70 turbulent years." --Choice