Song Without Words
The Photographs and Diaries of Countess Sophia Tolstoy
Leah Bendavid-Val, ed.
National Geography Books, $35
It would be a vast understatement to say that Sophia (Sonya) Tolstoy was a remarkable woman.
Not only did she bear 13 children, lead her financially inept husband back from the brink of ruin, copy and recopy Tolstoy’s literary works, defend the interests of the large family in the face of Tolstoy’s continual impassioned desires to renounce his worldly wealth... Sonya was also an astoundingly artistic and proficient photographer.
Between 1887 and her death in 1919, Sonya Tolstoy took over 1000 photographs (using 13 x 18 cm glass plates), developing many herself, including portraits, vignettes of family life, the Yasnaya Polyana estate and surrounding countryside. This new volume unites some 180 of these pictures with fascinating biographic notes and extracts from Sonya’s, Lev’s and their children’s diaries to present a rich and invaluable portrait of this woman’s and this family’s life.
A large preponderance of the photos are portraits of her husband, and in few of them does Lev offer more than a sage pose with furrowed brow and hand wedged behind his belt. But look closer and there are plenty of satisfying glimpses of spontaneity: a child’s bored glare, a room in disarray, a subject caught chatting with a neighbor, a nurse caught in the corner of the frame.
This is an important contribution to our understanding of the life and times of one of Russia’s greatest writers. And of his remarkable, multifaceted wife.
Ivan the Fool
Russian Folk Belief, A Cultural History
By Andrei Sinyavsky
Glas (Northwestern), $15.95
It is common to say that “we are the stories we tell ourselves.” This principle is the thread that connects the many themes in this astoundingly rich and useful survey of Russian folk belief, religious symbolism and practice.
Sinyavsky, one of the original Soviet dissidents and an extraordinarily gifted author and critic, describes here the intricately intersecting layers of the Russian psyche, as they developed and morphed through history and custom: ancient and invisible, pagan and Christian, faith and fantasy, symbol and society.
Beginning with a penetrating analysis of Russian fairy tales – their purpose and genesis (“people remember and pass on only what is precious to them”), Sinyavsky examines the uniquely Russian views toward Beauty, Fate and Heroism, and the role of magic and the supernatural behind all things.
This leads to concise and entertaining descriptions of Russia’s pagan gods, demons, spirits and symbols. Which naturally segues into a history of how these all were supplanted with the adoption of Christianity. Well, perhaps not simply supplanted so much as coopted and overlaid. Pagan holidays took on Christian meaning, phonetic similarities inclined patron saints to certain “assignments,” and age-old sprites were given new jobs as modern devils.
Finally, Sinyavsky closes with succinct summaries that are essential reading for anyone interested in Russia but unfamiliar with Orthodoxy: elements of the Russian faith, the role of icons, the major sects, the reforms and schisms that have rocked that faith.
What truly makes this an invaluable book (and part of the Russophile’s Essential Library) is Sinyavsky’s easy, storytelling style. Adapted from lectures he gave at the Sorbonne and fluidly rendered into English by Joanne Turnbull’s superb translation, this book is never dry or encyclopedic. Rich with examples and constantly reflecting historical and social context, this is a lively history of the Russian worldview.
Brothers on the Bashkaus
A Siberian Paddling Adventure
By Eugene Buchanan
Fulcrum, $15.95
It has been a long dry spell for armchair travel books on Russia. Certainly many such works have been published over the past decade. The problem is that most have been eminently missable.
This book breaks that drought.
You do not have to have an interest in kayaking, rafting or Class V rivers to enjoy Buchanan’s account of four Americans’ and ten Latvians’ trip down one of Siberia’s wildest rivers. You simply have to love a good travel story: plans gone awry, hilarious characters met on the road, the clash of cultures, nail-biting adventure and the thrill of new experiences.
When the Americans are told to leave behind their custom-crafted raft (instead, they will build rafts from scratch at their drop-in point, with pontoons made from repurposed germ warfare suits – reuse is the Latvian team’s specialty)... when they compare their smoothly stylish life jackets with the grotesque but eminently more effective homemade ones of their Latvian hosts (including one made with soccer balls)... when the hapless Americans bristle under the authoritarian food rationing of the mighty Olga... you almost wish you were along for the ride.
Almost. For this crew of 14 will descend from high in the Altai mountains through some of the world’s most treacherous rapids, on rafts made from trees they cut themselves, living off the land for over a month, paddling with homemade oars and eating all too much salo (pig fat).
This journey is assuredly more enjoyable from an armchair and surely one of the best travel stories out of Russia in many many years.
King of Odessa
By Robert A. Rosenstone
Northwestern, $17.95
The conceit of this new novel is that it is a recently discovered and long-alluded-to lost work of Isaac Babel, written in the summer of 1936, during his last visit to his hometown of Odessa. It is a daring undertaking, and Rosenstone largely pulls it off (only at times giving his narrator a bit much knowledge of contemporary events), delivering a romping and imaginative first-hand (and, yes, Babel-esque) view of life in the brutal chaos that was Russia of the 1930s.
The Unknown Gulag
By Lynne Viola
Oxford, $30
We well know that, before the Gulag, there was Solovki. But, as Viola shows, between Solovki and the Gulag there were the -spets-poselki (special villages) built by two million peasant kulaks in 1930 and 1931, after they were forcibly removed from their villages and dropped in remotest Siberia without food or shelter. Some half-a-million souls died in these deadly precursors to the Gulag, whose existence was defended as a State Secret until recently – long after the crimes of the Gulag had been well chronicled by Solzhenitsyn and others. Thank-fully, there are tenacious researchers like Viola bringing such things to light, honoring the victims in a society that seems determined to forget.
Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.
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