Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Nikolai Getman Remembered

An obituary of the Soviet painter and former Gulag prisoner, by Robert Conquest, in The Wall Street Journal:

"Mr. Getman's death comes soon after that of Czeslaw Milosz, with whom I had warm, though not close, relations. He too, though stressing that his own experiences in Communist Poland were not at the Kolyma level, was very concerned that the Westerners he encountered should understand, should really understand, the extreme negativity of the Communist phenomenon. The implication was that the Western vision was still blurred. Mr. Getman has added what one would hope to be a final touch to our understanding."