Memoirs and History

Russian Tattoo

Elena Gorokhova (Simon and Schuster, $26, Jan. 2015)

This new memoir more or less picks up where Gorokhova’s bestselling first memoir, A Mountain of Crumbs, left off, with her leaving the Soviet Union in 1980 to enter into an “open” marriage with an American man she did not love.

“Why are there no smells?” in America, she wonders early on, recalling the odors of sour milk and dusky sweat that pervaded her homeland. This is the least of her worries, of course, as she navigates all the difficulties of joining a new culture, from working as a waitress (with no idea what dressing “on the side” means) to teaching English, from divorcing her difficult first husband, to raising a child in a land she barely understands.

Gorokhova’s engaging style draws you in. Self-effacing and candid, yet also deeply observant and as powerfully descriptive as a novel, Russian Tattoo is that rare book written by an immigrant that helps a native understand their country better, seeing it from the peeled-back perspective of a newcomer. Yet her perspective on Russia (“everyone was a guard of what they could access, and everyone used what they guarded to their advantage”) is as trenchant as her observations on being a mother and a daughter, while being sucked back into the orbit of the mother she fled Leningrad to escape.

The Devil’s Alliance: Hitler’s Pact with Stalin

Roger Moorhouse (Basic Books, $29.99)

Seven paragraphs. That’s all it took for Hitler and Stalin to redraw the map of Europe, to set the continent on the path to war, to murder millions in the pursuit of their Grand Designs.

The Soviet line was that Stalin was forced by circumstances into signing the pact. In August 1939 he determined that Britain and France could not be trusted to stand up to Hitler (remember Munich?), and that the Soviet state needed to buy time to prepare for war against the Nazis (and demolish the Soviet officer corps).

Yet, as Moorhouse shows, this self-serving Soviet interpretation (still heard today from some historians) does not sync with the facts or with Stalin’s later actions. In fact, he argues in this excellent history, replete with first-hand accounts, Stalin saw the pact as a way to undermine capitalism, to set the Nazis and Allied powers at each other’s throats, while the Soviet Union sat on the sidelines. And Stalin’s own distraught reaction at the June 1941 Nazi invasion, his ignoring crucial advance intelligence from Richard Sorge, shows that he clearly did not expect the betrayal and was invested in the alliance.

More than this, the 22-month alliance led to sharing in technology, training and resources in a way that made the war more costly and lengthy. As Moorhouse argues, we ought to study and understand the history of this pact, too often mentioned only in passing by histories. For not only did it alter the course of the war, it shaped the postwar landscape of Europe – the realities of which we are still grappling with today, from Ukraine to Bessarabia.

The Kreutzer Sonata Variations

Michael R. Katz,* transl. and ed. (Yale, $40)

After the 1877 publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’s writing became increasingly polemical and evangelical. It is likely that, had his later works been written by anyone other than Tolstoy, they would have not received nearly the attention they did. Because, as literature, they pale in comparison to his earlier works.

The Kreutzer Sonata, a short story completed over a decade after Karenina, has long been singled out as unique among these later works for the controversy it evoked, for its searing and uncompromising diagnosis of the misogyny and hypocrisy upon which one of society’s most fundamental institutions, marriage, was based. As a result, it is one of the most written about of the great writer’s works.

Yet this new volume introduces an entirely new perspective. It places a new translation of Kreutzer alongside some fascinating literary counterpoints – stories and commentaries written by Tolstoy’s family members in response to the controversy that the Sonata evoked. There is Sonia Tolstaya attempting through fiction to show what women mean by love. There is son Lev’s story arguing that his father got the diagnosis right, but the prescription wrong. And there are letters and diaries that throw the story into stark relief, showing that the content, intent and tone of the story changed completely in the process of editing and rewrites.

Through these powerful juxtapositions, Katz shows how this controversial, important story was not a single, independent work of literature, but an artistic reflection of this entire, complex, amazing family.

Nota Bene: Yale is also releasing a new translation of Anna Karenina, by Marian Schwartz, on November 25.

Soviet Ghosts

Rebecca Litchfield ($39.95)

There is something strangely attractive about ruin and decay. It is tantalizing to imagine empty, crumbling spaces as they once may have been, to be reminded in a very graphic way that all things pass to dust, that even empires fall.

This engrossing, oversized photo book is a journey through decayed institutions and structures left behind by the Soviet empire. As one of the contributing writers notes, “the decay shown in this work is caught in a limbo of temporalities, a Purgatory of discredited ideology; too obsolete to be of use, yet not quite old enough to be historical.”

It is difficult to describe the power in these photos. A doll and a gas mask propped on a chair in Pripyat, the town Chernobyl depopulated; a majestic monument to Soviet-Bulgarian friendship, snow-strewn and windblown above the clouds; a hospital room in a Russian sanitorium, with black mold crawling up the walls; a deserted Pioneer camp and its stacks of limp mattresses, sprinkled with fall leaves. Absent from the images are any signs of people. We must use our imaginations to see the able bodies who once manned a satellite monitoring station, who once cared for the sick in a hospital, who once did time in an Estonian prison.

Needless to say, Litchfield photographed these places in 15 countries at some personal risk, being arrested for trespass more than once. The resulting collection was well worth the effort and worth the time and attention of anyone with more than a passing interest in the Soviet world as it once was.

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* Michael Katz is a member of Russian Life’s Editorial Advisory Board.