She’s a Cambridge University law professor, and that’s the title of one of her articles up there: Private Libel and Public Accountability.
Scholarship, Karl Marx tells us, repeats itself first as something or other and second as farce. (That’s not the exact quotation.) And as Palmer’s private trashing of historians whose work touches on the same subjects as her husband’s work becomes public, she and her husband (Orlando Figes) definitively enter the farce era.
A prominent British historian has found a new way to get in trouble: Orlando Figes, a historian of Stalin’s Russia at Birkbeck College, London, and a contributor to the New York Review, has admitted that his wife has been publishing hostile comments about rival historians at Amazon.co.uk under a pseudonym.
… According to The Guardian, Figes’s attorney conceded that Figes’s wife, Stephanie Palmer, a lawyer and lecturer at Cambridge University, had posted reviews at Amazon describing Rachel Polonsky’s book “Molotov’s Magic Lantern” as “dense,” “pretentious” and “the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published.” Robert Service’s book about Trotsky was called a “dull read,” and his history of communism was dismissed as “rubbish” and “an awful book.”
Figes’s book “The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia,” on the other hand, was described by the same reviewer – posting under the psuedonym “Historian” — as a “beautiful and necessary” account of Soviet history, the work of a writer with “superb storytelling skills.” The reviewer concluded, “I hope he writes forever.” …
The wife of the writer Orlando
Adores him as if he were Brando.
If only Ms Palmer
Had been a bit calmer
She might have avoided a scando.
April 20th, 2010 at 1:05PM
Oh, that is so tacky. There are plenty of ideological feuds and personal grudges among E. European and Soviet Historians, but sock-puppetry on amazon.com – thats just really lame.
April 20th, 2010 at 2:07PM
There’s another angle to this story that the Nation account omits, though it is mentioned in the original Guardian story that the Nation cites. Polonsky reviewed Figes’ earlier book Natasha’s Dance and found, shall we say, unattributed borrowings in it. This sounds like payback.
Richard Pipes had earlier had much the same reaction that Polonsky did when he reviewed Figes’ People’s Tragedy for the New Republic.
I myself have had moments of deja vu (deja lu?) when reading Figes.
April 20th, 2010 at 2:11PM
I’m surprised that posting bad reviews could be legally actionable. Did Stephanie Palmer libel somebody? She just said some works were low quality. As far as I understand, she did not do anything that book critics do not normally do.
(Perhaps in the UK this could allow legal action, though: the UK is always cited as the European country with the strictest libel laws.)
Now, posting such criticism may be legal, but it is surely not much ethical.
To be fair, many authors and artists promote themselves on sites such as Wikipedia, so I suppose it’s the same for Amazon… it’s no wonder that some of them would also choose to diss their competition!
Probable bad ideas:
* Using a pseudonym alluding to her husband.
* Doing that from home, work or other identifiable address.
April 20th, 2010 at 2:12PM
I don’t think, DM, there’s anything illegal about it at all. It’s just very embarrassing.
April 20th, 2010 at 2:13PM
Dave: I didn’t know abou that angle. Thanks.
April 20th, 2010 at 6:40PM
I’ve never finished any of Orlando Figes’s books. His mother, though, wrote a couple of very good books: Sex and Subterfuge and Tragedy and Social Evolution.
April 23rd, 2010 at 8:23AM
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