Volume 45, Number 1 · January 15, 1998
Missing Persons
By Tatyana Tolstaya
The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia
by David King
Metropolitan Books, 192 pp., $35.00
Eyewitness to History: The Photographs of Yevgeny Khaldei
with a biographical essay by Alexander Nakhimovsky, by Alice Nakhimovsky
Aperture, 96 pp., $40.00
At one time or another every kid draws a mustache or eyeglasses on a portrait in a history textbook. Men are usually decorated with beads, earrings, fluffy curls, bow-tie lips, a deep, ample décolletage, and, space permitting, a crinoline. Women are provided with a five-day beard, scars, a pirate eyepatch, and a burning cigarette stuck between their teeth. My history book looked more like an illustration of the Venetian carnival than a text. This long-forgotten, thirty-year-old pleasure held nothing insidious: as I see it now, awakening sexual curiosity and awareness of the difference between the sexes drew a thirteen-year-old child into a creative game. It was all dressing up, theater, carnivalizing, the testing of borders, changing social roles.
Review, 3320 words
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