The Ransom of Russian Art

This is an odd book. John McPhee is a journalist. I read his book – Draft No. 4 – about writing (I didn’t love it).

This is essentially an expansion of a long article McPhee did for The New Yorker. It tells the story of Norton Dodge, who was an economist and professor. He wrote his thesis in the 50s about tractor manufacturing in the Soviet Union. To complete the work, he had to visit several times.

He became known as a “Sovietologist” (a real thing), and apparently spent the next 30 years traveling back and forth to the USSR. During this time, Dodge started smuggling Soviet art out of the country. As the book tells it, he wasn’t even very subtle about it. He eventually amassed 10,000 pieces of art.

He didn’t steal them – he paid for them all – but he had to smuggle them out because the Soviets were very uptight about the artistic community (but, again, the book goes out of its way to portray his methods as simplistic and even occasionally clumsy – I didn’t understand how he didn’t get caught).

Most artists in the USSR during The Cold War worked in secret. So, historically, Dodge is credited with saving this art and showing it to the world. The art was eventually donated to Rutgers University. Dodge died in 2011. It’s a short book – I read it in about 90 minutes (again, it’s just an expanded magazine article). It also includes pictures of much of art, which is interesting. Much of it is modern and impressionistic.

Again, an odd book. There’s no climax to it. And there’s no larger truth. It just tells the story of a guy who saved a bunch of art that would probably have been otherwise destroyed.

It’s not a bad story, but not life-changing either.