- Nury, Fabien and Thierry Robin.
La Mort de Staline.
Paris: Dargaud, [2010, 2012] 2014.
ISBN 978-2-205-07351-5.
-
The 2017 film,
The
Death of Stalin, was based upon this French
bande dessinée
(BD, graphic novel, or comic). The story is based around
the death of Stalin and the events that ensued: the
scheming and struggle for power among the members of his
inner circle, the reactions and relationships of his
daughter Svetlana and wastrel son Vasily, the conflict
between the Red Army and NKVD, the maneuvering over the
arrangements for Stalin's funeral, and the all-encompassing
fear and suspicion that Stalin's paranoia had infused into
the Soviet society. This is a fictional account, grounded
in documented historical events, in which the major characters
were real people. But the authors are forthright in saying
they invented events and dialogue to tell a story which
is intended to give one a sense of the
«folie furieuse de Staline et
de son entourage» rather than provide a historical
narrative.
The film adaptation is listed as a comedy and,
particularly if you have a taste for black humour,
is quite funny. This BD is not explicitly funny, except
in an ironic sense, illustrating the pathological behaviour
of those surrounding Stalin. Many of the sequences
in this work could have been used as
storyboards for
the movie, but there are significant events here which
did make it into the screenplay. The pervasive strong
language which earned the film an R rating is little in
evidence here.
The principal characters and their positions are introduced
by boxes overlaying the graphics, much as was done in the
movie. Readers who aren't familiar with the players in
Stalin's Soviet Union such as Beria, Zhukov, Molotov,
Malenkov, Khrushchev, Mikoyan, and Bulganin, may miss
some of the nuances of their behaviour here, which is driven
by this back-story. Their names are given using the French
transliteration of Russian, which is somewhat different from
that used in English (for example,
“Krouchtchev”
instead of “Khrushchev”). The artwork is
intricately drawn in the realistic style, with only a
few comic idioms sparsely used to illustrate things
like gunshots.
I enjoyed both the movie (which I saw first, not knowing until
the end credits that it was based upon this work) and the BD.
They're different takes on the same story, and both work on
their own terms. This is not the kind of story for which
“spoilers” apply, so you'll lose nothing by
enjoying both in either order.
The album cited above contains both volumes of the original
print edition. The Kindle edition continues to be published in
two volumes (Vol. 1,
Vol. 2). An
English translation of the graphic
novel is available. I have not looked at it beyond the
few preview pages available on Amazon.
June 2018 