Stalin's Son

Summer 1941. A soldier is captured during the advancing of the Nazi army in Soviet Union, together with a comrade-in-arms. He is an infantry captain. He was assigned to a camp in East Prussia where Slav, Tartar, Mongol and, above all, Russian soldiers are imprisoned. 

When a German officer questions him, he states his name: Jacob Giugashvili. A name to include in the meticulous reports of internment and deaths. He doesn’t want to add anything more but a little photo of his mother reveals him. There is a wording behind it, and the signature of his father: no less than Stalin himself. 

On the basis of uncertain resources (false war rumor or truth?), in 1953 Riccardo Bacchelli tried to give new order in a novel to the pieces of this unusual story, like in a puzzle. Among differences and suspects, mocked investigative services, doctors who practice scientific experiments on human subjects and even a baroness willing to seduce a mysterious prisoner to convert him to Nazism, the story of a man who would have liked to be forgotten, to go out from history in the same way in which he has gone out from Kremlin. A desperate, anarchic, maybe nihilist, attempt to distinguish himself from any link to power, his family and his identity.