Our review table has been groaning under an abundance of fascinating new titles this winter, necessitating briefer notes than usual (for links to purchase the titles, please visit our website).
Heading the list is a new work of fiction by Edward Docx, Pravda (Houghton Mifflin, $13.95). Set in St. Petersburg, Docx’s novel offers a Dostoyevskian mix of rich prose, haunting scenery, well-buried secrets and engrossing characters. This is a great bedtime read, but beware, his is a gritty, dark St. Petersburg – not the one you’d want to visit, except through fiction.
Just as rich in characters is Laura Williams’ memoir, The Stork’s Nest (Fulcrum, $16.95, available through Russian Life). Admittedly, we are biased, as Laura is a longtime contributor and columnist for Russian Life. Yet this book is quite different from what Laura writes for us, but is equally engaging. The lengthier format gives her time to tell us the whole story of her love affair with Chukhrai, Igor, and Russian nature. And it is a tale that draws you in and does not let go. The only way to better understand Russian provincial life would be to move there oneself.
On the musical front, Tocatta Classics of London has a CD up for a Grammy this year, Balakirev and Russian Folksong. It is a thoroughly enjoyable mix of 30 instrumental and vocal pieces (many first-ever recordings) that pairs up the original folksongs with the work they inspired Balakirev to write.
Roberta Reeder’s monumental biography, Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet, is back in print with Figueroa Press ($30). Much more than the biography of a great poet, it is a looking glass into intellectual life in Russia during one of its most prolific and tragic eras. Invaluable.
A new work by Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing up in Russia 1890-1991 (Yale, $45), expands on this era and shifts the focus with a powerful thoroughness and thoughtfulness. As an undertone, Kelly highlights a fundamental hypocrisy of the Soviet state, which celebrated a “glorious childhood” but often neglected children’s real needs, hid inconvenient orphans in impersonal institutions, and slaughtered children wholesale in famines and civil war. But that theme is not overbearing. For this massive tome is rich in detail about everything from child authors to orphanages, from folklore to television. If it impacted children’s lives during the Soviet era, it is in here.
Meanwhile, Alexander Rabinowitch, in The Bolsheviks in Power (Indiana, $34.95), examines the pivotal first year of Bolshevik rule. Using newly released Russian sources, he unravels the roots of Soviet authoritarianism, demonstrating that the Bolsheviks did not come to power with a plan to institute dictatorship. Instead, the Red Terror and the oppressive political system that developed was largely the result of ad hoc reactions to escalating crises – in particular the continuing war with Germany and the developing Civil War. An important lesson indeed. And it is certainly far from the only instance when isolating and bombarding a nascent regime has served to harden its resolve and bring out the darkest of human inclinations.
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