The Great Prince Died: A Novel about the Assassination of Trotsky

By Bernard Wolfe and William T. Vollmann

On August 20, 1940, Marxist philosopher, politician, and revolutionary Leon Trotsky was attacked with an ice axe in his home in Coyoacán, Mexico. He died the next day.

In The Great Prince Died, Bernard Wolfe offers his lyrical, fictionalized account of Trotsky’s assassination as witnessed through the eyes of an array of characters: the young American student helping to translate the exiled Trotsky’s work (and to guard him), the Mexican police chief, a Rumanian revolutionary, the assassin and his handlers, a poor Mexican “peón,” and Trotsky himself. Drawing on his own experiences working as the exiled Trotsky’s secretary and bodyguard and mixing in digressions on Mexican culture, Stalinist tactics, and Bolshevik history, Wolfe interweaves fantasy and fact, delusion and journalistic reporting to create one of the great political novels of the past century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Sep 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9780226260785

Reviews for The Great Prince Died

[antao-3 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It seems the border between fact and fiction has become blurred, for some publishers’ promotions at least. Am I right to understand a ‘non fiction novel’ to just be a piece of non fiction with imagined dialogue?I think IT is just ‘based on actual events’. But in this case, only loosely. Some of my favourite books are examples, but in a slightly different way. In Thompson’s “This Thing of Darkness” (about the Fitzroy voyages) the author uses imaginary conversations, but also fictionalises parts when history doesn’t tell us what actually happened. He includes a lengthy afterword in which he makes the fictional parts clear. Another is Simmons’s “The Terror”, which I read at the same time as Lambert’s “Franklin”. Lambert of course has no answers as to what finally happened, whereas Simmons sticks his neck out and entertains us.I'm all for those explanatory afterwords, and wouldn't have much to complain about if they were generally included in works of historical fiction. Bernard Wolfe did an excellent job in this area in “The Great Prince Died: A Novel about the Assassination of Trotsky”; I thought this was an excellent novel, but it contained the kind of free-wheeling fictionalization of the facts (changing Trotsky’s name, moving the date of the assassination) that usually raises my hackles. Wolfe’s afterword, or “Author’s Notes”, was thorough in accounting for these changes and giving his reasons for them; his thoughtfulness and the sense of respect he showed toward the real-life figures in the story in this postscript completely lowered the aforesaid hackles.The problem is not always with authors. I understand that Josef Škvorecký provided a similar afterword to "Dvořák in Love" but that the publisher refused to include it, which I feel was treating the book’s potential readers as if they were incurious morons (an impression reinforced by the same publisher's failure to use the novel's brilliant original title, "Scherzo Capriccioso").