Black Russians and Dark Years

Twilight of the Romanovs

A Photographic Odyssey Across Imperial Russia

The title of this captivating photo book is a bit misleading. The Romanovs are little seen beyond the first few dozen pages of this 250-page gallery. And that is as it should be. For this is a book more about the waning days of empire, about the millions of subjects who lived in medieval conditions and in abject poverty, about the far flung outposts of a sprawling assemblage of nations and peoples, about the clash between modernity and tradition, urban and rural. Indeed, the title of the book’s introduction, “Images of a Vanished World,” might have been more appropriate. But the use of “Romanovs” will surely sell more books.

Which is good. Because the more people who see this remarkable collection, the more will understand both the roots of the Russian Revolution and the devastation it wrought.

Blom and Buckley have mined the rich archives of Prokudin-Gorsky, Bulla, Howe, Kirchner and others to present over 300 incredible snapshots of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Russian life. The images are not presented chronologically, but geographically, beginning in St. Petersburg, looping through Central Asia and Siberia, and ending up back in Moscow – a bit like a modern photographic retrospective led by Alexander Radishchev.

Many of the images are haunting – like battlefield images from 1905 and a famous image of a road in the Crimean War, littered with cannonballs; but others are filled with detail and life – like a crisp shot of Lubyanskaya Square in 1902, or the images of street merchants. It is often difficult to tear yourself away.

The text is sparse, just introductions to various regions and a long historical preface, plus quotes from literature throughout, and of course very informative captions. But that is as it should be, because these pictures do a superb job of telling the story all by themselves.

Lina & Serge

The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev

Prepare yourself for a Holly­wood sequel to The Last Station. Yet one that is infinitely more contemporary, heart-wrenching and unequivocal.

Simon Morrison, thanks to unfettered access to secret archives of family letters, memoirs and materials, has reconstructed the fascinating and tragic life of the woman who was Serge Prokofiev’s love and muse.

Lina Prokofiev gave up a promising stage career to help the iconoclastic performer and composer ascend the heights of fame, returning to Soviet Russia with him in 1936 against her own better judgment, only to be cast aside on the eve of WWII when he fell in love with a younger woman. Her subsequent attempts to escape from the USSR came to naught, and her foreign roots and interaction with foreigners led to eight crushing years in the gulag.

To some, a central question of this tale will be how much you forgive a self-obsessed genius. Yet the fact is, as Morrison writes, Prokofiev “had no respect for tradition” – not in music, not in his personal life. And when he and his wife grew apart, he did nothing to stop her persecution, arrest or exile. Another fact is this: upon separating from Lina, Serge’s music suffered. His audacious, anti-traditionalist creative output of the 1930s fizzled in the 1940s, around the time he deserted Lina. Yet it cannot all be chalked up to the loss of his muse. For in parallel with the deterioration of the couple’s relationship was a decline in Prokofiev’s official favor. He only clawed his way back to the top through composition of increasingly traditional, Soviet-friendly works.

Morrison tells this tale with great compassion and detail (the anecdotes and side notes about the intersection of the couple’s lives with other notables throughout the 1930s and 1940s alone makes this book worth reading). While one comes to sympathize with Lina’s and Serge’s predicament – caught in a trap that is largely of their own devising, it is hard not to come away with a diminished respect for the celebrated composer, as something far less than an honorable man.

The Black Russian

The biography of Fyodor Fyodorovich Tomas, born Frederick Bruce Thomas in Hopson Bayou in Mississippi to former slaves, is one of repeated escape and reinvention, of the seemingly boundless ability of a man to create his own world out of nothing but hard work and imagination.

The outlines of the tale are simple enough: born into a farming family, Frederick is forced to flee Mississippi after his father’s murder, he works for a time as a waiter in the North, then escapes to Europe in search of greater freedom. There he eventually (in 1899) decides to seek his fortune in tsarist Russia (which was then notably less racist than Europe and certainly America). His success is astounding: he establishes a chain of theaters and restaurants and becomes a Russian citizen and a millionaire. In fact, by the time he and his family flee Bolshevik Russia in 1919, he is worth over $10 million (in current dollars), but, tragically, he has only $25 in his pocket.

Thomas proceeds to rebuild his life in Turkey. But it does not end well, as xenophobia and racism catch up with him in the end.

Just as with Lina Prokofiev, Thomas’s life is one of cinematic proportions, and Alexandrov tells it brilliantly, and in exquisite detail. Mining interviews, family memoirs and contemporaneous accounts, he reconstructs the truly extraordinary, colorful life of a man who defied all convention.

Moscow 1937

This monumental, thorough study considers what Schlögel calls a “fault line of European civilization.” The casualties involved are now more or less known: in 1937 alone, Moscow saw 2 million arrests, 700,000 murders, 1.3 million deported to camps. “Language fails to do justice to the monstrous events of the age,” Schlögel writes. Yet nonetheless one must try.

And so he begins with a literary overture, a superb discussion of the relevance and significance of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita to understanding this horrific place and time.

It was a time of show trials, expansive economic growth, cultural and artistic revolution, murky foreign threats and mortal political rivalries. Life was almost phantasmagorical: anything could happen; people disappeared without warning. And Bulgakov showed it all: “the utter confusion, the blurring of clear distinctions, the shockwaves created by the irruption of unknown, anonymous forces into the lives of ordinary people, the fear and the despair.”

Approaching the subject from multiple angles, with macroscopic accounts of everything from jazz to architecture to the Spanish Civil War, Schlögel places the reader inside the swirling maelstrom of this other age, one all the more horrific, as the author puts it in his epilogue, because we know that just three years later, this tragedy will disappear “in the shadow of an even greater tragedy,” WWII.