SOURCE: “The Fire Next Time,” in New York Review of Books, Vol. 37, No. 4, March 15, 1990, pp. 26–27.

In the following review, Bayley contrasts the aesthetics of The Fur Hat with Valentin Rasputin's Siberia on Fire.

Walter Benjamin made a once famous claim that the Nazis had “aestheticized” politics. Their emblems, uniforms, and parades were not just the sign of their beliefs and policies but identical with them. The Nazis were an obvious case, but it could be argued that the French revolutionaries saw themselves, and have subsequently been seen, in the same light: persons and styles of life that embodied, as well as expressed, the New Order and the New Man. Lenin was not in this sense an aesthete but the system he founded rapidly acquired the same characteristics, grafted on to more ancient Russian reflexes; it became obsessed with the onward and visible signs of being Soviet Man, perpetually...