Moura Ignatievna Budberg (born Zakrevskaya) was, above all things, a survivor. Born to nobility, she survived the Revolution, dispossession, Lubyanka imprisonment, accessory involvement in a plot to bring down the Bolsheviks, and a long period of exile.
She survived largely thanks to her astoundingly magnetic, charismatic character, apparently working as a double agent for the Soviets and the British, falling in love with the flamboyant spy Bruce Lockhart, living as Maxim Gorky’s common law wife for over a decade, and then as mistress to H.G. Wells. She finally died in 1974, in England. He great-great grandnephew, Nick Clegg, is currently deputy prime minister of England.
It is an astoundingly unbelievable life well retold in this gripping new biography. Well-written too. The book’s account of the Lockhart Affair is particularly fascinating, recreating the paranoid, anti-Western world that was Soviet Russia in the late 19-teens and early 1920s.
While at times the authors wander into the realms of speculative fiction, somehow fathoming what this or that individual might have been thinking at the time, or offer far more detail of a scene than archives could have coughed up, the end result is convincing. As Moura herself said of Gorky’s work at one point: “artistic truth is more convincing than the empiric brand, the truth of a dry fact.”
This is but the first volume in a monumental compendium of Afanasyev’s Russian folktales. And, as Haney explains, Afanasyev’s is not only the largest single collection of Russian tales, it may be “the largest collection of any one people’s folktales by a single editor and collector.”
The tales, being translated here in their entirety to English for the first time, benefit from the voice of a single translator, and Haney relates them in that quirky, matter-of-fact tone that gives them a special edge or humor. Like any folktales, the story lines are often bizarre and grotesque, building exaggeration upon unbelievable incidents, and, unlike with Aesop, the reader is left to draw their own conclusions about heroism, beauty, honesty and “great feats.”
The price may put this book out of reach for many, but it will surely be snapped up by university libraries, and perhaps the curious reader can visit a copy there.
There is something to be said for seeing the world through the eyes of a child, and Kozlov (who happens to author an article in this issue of Russian Life) shows in this novel a gift for recreating a juvenile worldview – in particular the world as seen from Mogilev, Belorussia, as the Soviet Empire heads into its tailspin.
Briskly told through short, interconnected episodes, this is a work of autobiographical fiction that is full of rich, real (yes, sometimes obscene) dialogue and memorable scenes of a hardscrabble life on the periphery of empire. It evokes the sights and smells, sounds and language of that era when the Soviet Union was just cracking open, when a new world was dawning, and when the novel’s protagonist is coming of age.
A great read. Recommended.
It has been eight years since Nordbye last updated her guide to traveling in and between the two Russian capitals. This edition sees a slightly slimmed-down version (yet still 788 pages), but one that is no less invaluable for its excellent city maps, compendia of sites to see, suggested sightseeing itineraries, tips for travel, and historical essays, to say nothing of the useful pages of sidebars on everything from banyas to Fabergé to foreign travelers’ impressions of Russia.
Nordbye (who has written for Russian Life) has been traveling to and working in Russia for over three decades, so getting this guidebook is a bit like receiving her distilled version of the most important things to do and take away from a trip to Russia. That alone makes the book worth several times its purchase price.
One caveat is that this new edition has rather poor print reproduction of the guide’s excellent photos. But that can be overlooked: it is the text that makes this book essential; the pictures you will create yourself, in your mind’s eye when you are there.
There are many ways to resurrect the past, to understand how people lived. One way is through memoirs and biographies. Another, is through photography or paintings. Yet another would be to look at what people ate, and how. We are, after all, what we eat. And how.
Taking this approach, re-nowned Russian cultural historian Yuri Lotman analyzed the menu book of a prominent St. Petersburg family from 1857 and 1858, interspersing his fascinating, if often tangential, commentary with other historical artifacts, from foreign and domestic newspaper reports to letters and contemporaneous tidbits about life in the Romanov court.
As a result, the book is a vivid demonstration of how food and the meals they comprise can inform the wider cultural context of events. And it offers a rich insight into the social history – culinary and otherwise – of the nineteenth century Russian gentry and the world they inhabited.
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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