Comrade Huppert

A Poet in Stalin's World

George Huppert

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780253019783
• eBook ISBN: 9780253019844
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

This biography of a twentieth-century poet "deftly trac[es] Hugo Huppert's improbable path from Jewish Galicia to Soviet Moscow to postwar Vienna" ( Choice ). After discovering the autobiography of the Austrian communist and writer Hugo Huppert (1902–1982), historian George Huppert became absorbed in the life and work of this man, a Jew, perhaps a relative, who was born a few months after George's father and grew up just miles away. Hugo seemed to embody a distinctly central European experience of his time, of people trapped between Hitler and Stalin. Using the unvarnished account found in Hugo's notebooks, George Huppert takes the reader on a tour of the writer's life from his provincial youth to his education and radicalization in Vienna; to Moscow, where he meets Mayakovski and is imprisoned during Stalin's purges; through the difficult war years and return to Vienna; to his further struggles with the communist party and his blossoming as a writer in the 1950s. Through all the twists and turns of this story, George remains a faithful presence, guiding the way and placing Hugo's remarkable life in context. Comrade Huppert is a story of displacement and exile, the price of party loyalty, and the toll of war and terror on the mind of this emblematic figure.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Translation
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• References
• Index