Spies and Artists

Cold Warriors

Duncan White (Custom House)

“In Russia,” Yevgeny Yevtushenko said in the 1960s, “a poet is more than a poet.”

In a similar fashion, during the Cold War, writers were far more than writers. The great ideological war that raged for much of the twentieth century required not just politicians to choose sides, but artists and intellectuals as well. Some stood on principle, others actually fought and died on battlefields for their principles, while some were blacklisted, exiled, or exterminated for having politically incorrect beliefs. Still others were bare opportunists, using the conflict as a tool to further their art, career, or reputation.

In this weighty (782 pages) tome, White sets himself a very broad-ranging goal: to tell the story of writers “who dealt with the consequences of having literature become a Cold War battleground.” And so the work begins in the late 1930s, with George Orwell and the Spanish Civil War, and ends in the early 1990s, with le Carré, Solzhenitsyn, and Graham Greene. In between there are countless illuminating episodes on everything from the Cambridge Five to Paul Robeson, from Kim Philby to Sinyavsky and Daniel, from Akhmatova to Hemingway.

It is a complicated, riveting story full of fascinating characters, and there are many surprising connections between them, and of course between politicians and writers, and spies and writers. The biographies of Orwell and Koestler are particularly well done, and one is sure to gain new insights even to writers one thought they “knew,” while also learning of writers who were famous a half century ago, yet all but forgotten now.

And because there is so much ground to cover, we jump from the complex and dangerous politics of the Spanish Civil War to the harrowing Moscow show trials, or from Solzhenitsyn’s “bomb drop” publication of the Gulag Archipelago to a dramatic car chase in Nicaragua, in which the poet (and Sandinista) Gioconda Belli is being pursued by a right wing death squad.

The drama of the Cold War seems so distant, yet White brings it back in excellent detail, reminding that the writer’s life is never easy, especially when one has to choose sides.

The Girl from the Hermitage

Molly Gartland (Lightning Books)

“You wouldn’t want to hear everything. But I will tell you enough.”

These words, spoken by a minor character (the long-lost, “enemy of the people” father of the protagonist’s best friend) summarize well Gartland’s novel. On one level, it is the tale of one woman’s life, spanning from the darkest days of the Siege of Leningrad to the disorienting post-perestroika melee. Yet by reflection it is also the story of Russia stuttering through those same decades. The story could be grim and almost dystopian, but Gartland knows how to hold back, telling enough to provide texture, while keeping the focus on what is most interesting: the journey of the characters.

Galina is a young girl teetering on the brink of death in the Siege. Her mother has just died and it seems as if her turn is next, until she, her father, and her best friend are given a reprieve, a chance to move into the basement of the Hermitage. In the Hermitage there is shelter, heat, and at least something to eat. But the near Faustian bargain is that her father must paint the portrait of a general’s two sons. It is turn of fate fraught with great opportunity and risk.

Without offering any spoilers, because this is a book any Russophile will enjoy, that painting, and indeed the painter’s life (Galina follows in her father’s footsteps) is a thread that weaves through the book in rather unexpected ways (see excerpt, page 14).

This plot point provides some interest, but where Gartland shines is in evoking the drama of everyday life, in which seemingly trivial decisions turn the wheels of fortune in unexpected ways. And Gartland touches, just enough, on everything from the purges to the war in Afghanistan, to post-Soviet disarray, deadly plots on rural grandmothers, and twenty-first century cyber enterprises.

A second painting, this one by Galina when she is at the height of her fame, also weaves its own thread through the novel. And, in fact, this painting has a parallel in the author’s life – an object that was the germ that gave birth to the novel. It is an interesting, unfinished story that lives both inside and outside the novel. Life imitates art. Just enough.