The Soviet Image
100 Years of Photographs from Inside the TASS Archives
Peter Radetsky, ed.
Chronicle Books • $50
The Mark of Cain
By Alix Lambert
Pink Ghetto Productions pinkghettoproductions.com
Sacred Sea
A Journey to Lake Baikal
By Peter Thomson
Oxford University Press • $29.95
The Whisperers
Private Life in Stalin’s Russia
By Orlando Figes
Penguin • $35
There are myriad lenses through which to view Russia. Each of these four new works offers its own snapshot. Taken together, however, they offer an incredibly rich panorama.
The Soviet Image is the wide-angle lens. Framing a century of Russian history in photos, it is a gorgeous coffee table album, cross pollinated with history. The rarer photos of the 1930s and forward are the most fascinating – of a pogrom’s aftermath in Kishinev, of workers in a tavern in 1900, of 21-year-old Ivan Sikorsky next to his second failed attempt at a helicopter. But the later color shots – particularly of Brezhnev and his retinue – are also revealing.
Each of the chronological periods is introduced by a concise yet readable essay, to provide context and background for the photos to come. Leafing through the pages (and recognizing many photos from the pages of Russian Life over the last 15 years) one is struck by how much of the century was black and white, how little of it in color. But throughout, the telling details, the frozen expressions, the candid moments, create a portrait of Soviet life that is as vivid as if it had all been shot in color.
The Mark of Cain is the macro lens. On the surface, this incredible documentary by Alix Lambert is an excruciatingly tight close-up of tattoos and their role in Russia’s criminal world. Yet it turns out this is only a device to look at larger issues, at the role of prisons and crime in Russia. Amazingly, Lambert and her film crew gained access to Russian prisons and – even more remarkably – got prisoners to talk openly about their lives (and tattoos). As a result, this is one of the most important documentaries on Russia to emerge in the last 15 years. Honest, revealing, heart-breaking, it is a superb work of journalism.
Sacred Sea provides the telephoto view. Focused on a lifelong goal to visit Lake Baikal, eco-journalist Peter Thompson uses this Siberian gem as the centerpiece of a round-the-world trip taken at a time of “personal transition.”
Written in an easy style that is part journalism, part kitchen table storytelling over vodka and kolbasa, Sacred Sea is a humorous explorer’s tale just rich enough in back story to help the casual reader understand the forces surrounding and threatening Lake Baikal. Thompson engagingly weaves the travelogue with his personal journey (notably with the Red Sox’s failures and triumphs), offering a look at modern Russia through the prism of this great lake.
Finally, The Whisperers is history as seen across the kitchen table through a standard, 50 mm lens. Whereas much of the history of the Stalin era is writ large, swimming in the Gulag’s sea of death and destruction, defined by war, purges and diplomacy, here Figes writes about Russian life on a smaller, more human scale.
Tracing the lives of seven or so families from the 1917 revolution forward, this is not unlike a Ken Burns documentary in prose. Mined from memoirs and personal interviews, The Whisperers is intimate and deeply textured, particularly in its biography of the main character, the writer Konstantin Simonov, whose life was Molotov-esque in its reflection of the warped Russian reality of the 20th century.
Literary St. Petersburg
A Guide to the City and its Writers
By Elaine Blair
The Little Bookroom • $21.95
If you are going to St. Petersburg, pick up this book before you go, along with a favorite work by one of the 15 authors profiled. Blair offers a quick thumbnail sketch of each author’s work, followed by an annotated listing of important St. Petersburg places in their life and work, from museums to residences and byways and squares. Thin and compact, this is an easy tote-along that will provide a necessary cultural layer to your travels. After all, as the introduction notes, “Russian literature began in St. Petersburg.”
About Chekhov
The Unfinished Symphony
By Ivan Bunin
Northwestern • $24.95
Bunin knew Chekhov quite well, and this unfinished biography is filled with fascinating, intimate details from the interludes when the two authors’ lives intersected, when they talked about Russia and its future, about writing and writers (Gorky is a recurrent theme). And Bunin is particularly good at thrusting us back to the turn of the 20th century, when Tolstoy, Stanislavsky, Balmont, Gilyarovsky and others walked the Earth. As revealing about the biographer as it is about the subject (thanks to copious footnotes and an extremely informative introduction), this is a must read for anyone with any interest in Russian literature.
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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