Stephen Koch's 'Adieu à l'amitié' Examines Hemingway, Dos Passos and the Spanish Civil War

In a review published by artpress, J.H. discusses Stephen Koch's book 'Adieu à l'amitié: Hemingway, Dos Passos et la guerre d'Espagne' (Grasset, 2006). The book recounts how the friendship between American novelists Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos fractured during the Spanish Civil War due to their divergent responses to Soviet manipulation. Koch details the role of the NKVD and the Comintern in infiltrating the International Brigades and manipulating intellectuals. He highlights the cases of José Roblès Pazos, a friend of Dos Passos executed by Stalin's agents, and Andrés Nin, leader of the POUM, also killed by the NKVD. The review notes that while Hemingway eventually saw through Soviet propaganda and wrote 'For Whom the Bell Tolls', Dos Passos broke earlier, leading to a permanent rift. The book also examines filmmaker Joris Ivens, who acted as a Comintern apparatchik and manipulated both writers into collaborating on the propaganda film 'Spanish Earth'. The review reflects on the moral complexity of the Republican side, where the 'good' camp was divided between communists and anarcho-syndicalists, leading to fratricidal violence. It concludes that history is not binary, and that the Spanish Civil War remains a subject of ongoing historical revision.