Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Stalin's Meteorologist: One Man’s Untold Story of Love, Life, and Death
    Unavailable
    Stalin's Meteorologist: One Man’s Untold Story of Love, Life, and Death
    Unavailable
    Stalin's Meteorologist: One Man’s Untold Story of Love, Life, and Death
    Ebook174 pages2 hours

    Stalin's Meteorologist: One Man’s Untold Story of Love, Life, and Death

    By Olivier Rolin

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Winner of the 2014 Prix du Style

    "Masterful . . . An eloquent addition to a violent episode in the history of science in the twentieth century." —Nature

    In 1934, the highly respected head of the Soviet Union’s meteorology department, Alexei Feodosievich Wangenheim, was suddenly arrested without cause and sentenced to a gulag. Less than a year after being hailed by Stalin as a national hero, he ended up with thousands of other "political prisoners" in a camp on Solovetsky Island, under vast northern skies and surrounded by water that was, for more than six months of the year, a sheet of motionless ice. He was violently executed in 1937—a fact kept from his family for nearly twenty years.

    Olivier Rolin masterfully weaves together Alexei's story and his eventual fate, drawing on an archive of letters and delicate drawings of the natural world that Wangenheim sent to his family from prison. Tragically, Wangenheim never stopped believing in the Revolution, maintaining that he'd been incarcerated by accident, that any day Stalin would find out and free him. His stubbornness suffuses the narrative with tension, and offers insight as to how he survived an impossible situation for so long.

    Stalin’s Meteorologist is a fascinating work that casts light on the devastating consequences of politically inspired paranoia and the mindlessness and trauma of totalitarianism—relevant revelations for our time.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCounterpoint
    Release dateDec 1, 2017
    ISBN9781619027824
    Unavailable
    Stalin's Meteorologist: One Man’s Untold Story of Love, Life, and Death
    Author

    Olivier Rolin

    OLIVIER ROLIN was born in Paris in 1947, and spent much of his childhood in Senegal. He is a freelance writer for Libération and Le Nouvel Observateur, and has written numerous essays and travel journals. His three books have all been critically acclaimed and hae won prizes in France: Port Sudan won the Prix Femina in 1994, Paper Tiger won the 2003 Prix France Culture, and The Meteorologist was awarded the Prix Du Style in 2014.

    Related to Stalin's Meteorologist

    Related ebooks

    Asian History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      A Grand Adventure

      Jan 21, 2021

      A Grand Adventure
      7 min read

    • Article

      From The Foreword To Debths

      Jun 27, 2017

      From The Foreword To Debths
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Grand Tour

      Feb 9, 2020

      The Grand Tour
      2 min read

    • Article

      “Where Poetry Comes From”

      Sep 1, 2020

      This is what power really is: the privilege of ignoring anything you might find distasteful. —Oksana Zabuzhko “Language, any language,” observed the young poet Oksana Zabuzhko, “is the capital love of my life” because “nothing else has the power to s

      11 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Il’ja Rákoš

      Dec 20, 2022

      Il'ja Rákoš reflects on 2022 through the books he read. The post A Year in Reading: Il’ja Rákoš appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Allure Of The East

      Jul 9, 2020

      Allure Of The East
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Inscrutable Landscape of ‘A Line in the World’

      Feb 15, 2023

      In her essay collection A Line in the World, Danish writer Dorthe Nors maps the personal, social, and geographical landscapes of Denmark’s western coast and takes the reader to the unforgiving landscape of Denmark’s western coast. Hers is an intimate

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Art of Poetry No. 115

      Dec 5, 2023

      The Art of Poetry No. 115
      27 min read

    • Article

      Curled Thyme

      Dec 6, 2019

      Curled Thyme
      4 min read

    • Article

      Charlotte Higgins

      Mar 1, 2024

      Charlotte Higgins
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Exuberant Diversity of Ukrainian Literature

      Feb 24, 2023

      When Russia invaded Ukraine one year ago, the region of Sumy, just northeast of Kyiv, came under intense bombardment, endangering the house where Anton Chekhov spent two halcyon summers working on his play The Wood Demon, as well as several short sto

      12 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Jun 1, 2021

      The night of the year is approaching. What have we done with our talent? All nature prompts and reproves us. How early in the year it begins to be late! —Henry David Thoreau, Journal, August 18, 1853 I thought of Carthage, Baalbek, Jerusalem, Rome,

      3 min read

    • Article

      Towards What?

      Mar 1, 2019

      Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft. Riverhead Books, 2018, $26.00 cloth. OF THE deep and manifold fascinations to be found in Chris Marker’s 1983 docu-essay Sans Soleil, one of the chief formal characteristics to which my mind r

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Shape Of The Mountain

      Mar 15, 2018

      The Shape Of The Mountain
      3 min read

    • Article

      A Walk with Fame

      Apr 22, 2019

      A Walk with Fame
      11 min read

    • Article

      The Poet of Kyrgyzstan

      Dec 1, 2020

      The Poet of Kyrgyzstan
      7 min read

    Reviews for Stalin's Meteorologist

    3.5/5

    13 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words