Goodbye to Berlin

9 hrs. 7 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Christopher Isherwood

Narrator Margarita Ivanova

Description

A novel under this title (1939) is an unknown page of English literature’s classics for Russian readers—one that made quite a commotion in the 1930s and 1940s thanks to the author’s creative innovations and the frankness with which one of the representatives of the “lost generation” wrote about the manners of Berlin’s (and, more broadly, Western European) artistic bohemia. Close to the form of a film script, C. Isherwood’s impressionistic prose captured the thunderous reality of the era when Hitler came to power: the bewilderment of the intelligentsia, anti-Jewish pogroms, shocking freedom of morals—including same-sex romantic relationships—with a boldness unheard of in either English or American literature of that time. The narrative’s backbone is the life of a young Englishman who earns his living by teaching English; the most vivid and memorable character is Sally Bowles, a singer and girl with no hang-ups about sin and vice—an archetype of the heroine of Bob Fosse’s famous film “Cabaret” (1972).