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Translated from the German by David Le Vay
The Silent Prophet is the result of Joseph Roth’s
visit to Moscow in 1926 when speculation about the fate of
Trotsky was rife. Roth refered to this work as his ‘Trotsky
novel’, but the experiences of the book’s hero,
the Trotsky-like Friederich Kargan, are as recognisably those
of a less well-known Jewish outsider, a perpetual exile searching
for a place in the new Europe and a set of values to counter
his own scepticism and growing disallusionment — Joseph
Roth himself.
Because he is born illegitimate, Friederich Kargan lacks even
a social identity. Moving to Vienna he becomes involved both
in revolutionary agitation and a love affair. Caught by the
authorities on his first trip to Russia, he endures a Siberian
interlude before escaping. Moving among various plotters and
underground cabals across Europe, he eventually returns to
Russia after the February Revolution. He becomes leader of
the Red Army, but comes to realise during the civil war that
the revolution seems to be over before it has begun; the cause
has been betrayed, yesterday’s proletariat has become
today’s bourgeoise; exile might offer the only choice.
The Silent Prophet is a beautifully descriptive journey
from loneliness into an illusory worldliness and back into
loneliness. It is a haunting study in alienation by a master
of realistic imagination.
‘A novel one should not wish to be without . . . Roth
is a very fine writer indeed.’ — Angela Carter, Guardian
‘With his [Roth’s] strikingly elliptical style which
can evoke despair through real wit, it would be only mildly
flattering to view him as a compassionate, laconic Conrad.’
— Time Out
‘No one since Pasternak has captured so well the dreadful
benevolence of the Tsarist tyranny . . . But Roth also conveys
the quiet despair of the rebel who knows that the instinct
to revolt is already the instinct to rule.’ — Independent
on Sunday
‘Deeply impressive.’ — Tribune
JOSEPH ROTH was born in Brody, Galicia — then
part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now in the Ukraine
— in 1894. He served in the Austrian army between 1916
and 1918 and worked as a journalist from 1923 to 1932 in Berlin
and Vienna. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 he emigrated
to Paris, where he drank himself into an early grave in 1939.
Roth also wrote Weights and Measures, Flight
Without End, The Radetzky March, String of Pearls
and The Legend of the Holy Drinker. |
