Tsars, War and Komiks

The End of Tsarist Russia

Dominic Lieven (Viking, $35)

If it is a maxim that generals prepare to fight the last war, then perhaps it is also true that nations fight new wars chiefly to redress outcomes of the last war. Certainly, as Lieven shows in this new history of the lead up to World War I, over a century later we still are far from fixing the problems of 1914.

Lieven starts with the salient claim that “as much as anything, World War I turned on the fate of Ukraine,” and shows how empires’ battle against the rising tide of nationalism within Europe led not just to WWI (and then to the collapse of all those empires), but to a whole range of conflicts we have yet to resolve. Today’s conflicts in the Balkans, Ukraine and Turkey are rooted in WWI and the issues it (and WWII or the Cold War) failed to resolve.

But Lieven also seeks to show that WWI was “the source and origin of most of the catastrophes that subsequently afflicted twentieth century Russia” – not just that it opened the road to revolution, famine, civil war and dictatorship, but that the course of the war and its aftermath deprived Russia of a hand in shaping post-war Europe, helping set the stage for 1939.

Previous WWI histories, Lieven says, have given short shrift to the Russian perspective, mainly for lack of access to historical resources. And so he gained considerable access to previously closed archives for his research, access that subsequently was shut off for all scholars. The fruits of that research, plus Lieven’s incisive writing style – from vivid portraits of some of the key actors to concise narratives that put events in context and perspective – makes this a superb read.

The Tsar of Love and Techno

Anthony Marra (Hogarth, $25, October 2015)

Marra’s novel is a spider web stretched across one hundred years of Russian history, where a twinge on one filament resounds to some distant corner. Constructed as a group of loosely interwoven stories, The Tsar of Love and Techno is a profound musing on the Russian condition, and on the power of images, place, memory and character. It is by turns funny and sad, deep and profane, touching and disturbing. And everywhere you look there are beautiful turns of phrase:

"The poor child had inherited his father’s forehead. His future lay under a hat…. Yellow fog enshrouded the city like a varnish aged upon the air…. All that was admirable in her lay between her neck and her ankles…. The phantoms of two hundred thousand cigarettes and a street pirozhki haunted his breath."

Among many other things, in the novel there is an artist who has a gift for airbrushing out enemies of the people from photographs, who then starts inserting images of his purged brother in everything he edits. There is a ballerina sent to the Gulag and her beauty queen daughter, whose first love ends up a prisoner in the Caucasus; a former museum head who now runs the Grozny Tourist Bureau while caring for a blind restorationist; a woman who becomes a hero after betraying her parents to the revolution; and a couple of modern punk hackers. At the center of the vast web is the Arctic town of Kirovsk and a mediocre painting, edited by the airbrush master, of a Chechen landscape.

We know we are in the realm of fiction, but Marra makes it all feel viscerally real. He has mined modern Russian history for all it is worth to create a masterful novel.

Bondarchuk’s
War and Peace

Denise J. Youngblood (UP of Kansas, $29.95)

A behind the curtain look at the epic (7-hour) film based on Tolstoy’s novel. Youngblood (on RL’s Advisory Board) uncovers the fascinating history behind the making of the film, and examines the work from all angles: how it was a tool of “soft power” in the Cold War, what it tells us about Soviet views of themselves and their history, and why it is a great adaptation of the novel – one so good that it went on to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. And it cost “just” $700 million in current dollars! Great for anyone with an interest in the novel, in Soviet film, or in the history of the War of 1812, which is well-woven into the narrative.

Komiks: Comic Art in Russia

Jose Alaniz (UP of Mississippi, $38)

A detailed look at an artistic subculture that can trace its roots back to lubok and icon painting. Comics (sequential narratives combining text and images) were on the outs in the Soviet era – seen to be a bourgeois diversion, and overshadowed by the art of film. But they survived underground and thrived whenever there was a loosening of controls. Alaniz looks at the form’s full history, from its tsarist legacy through post-war liberalizations and the boom of the post-Soviet era. Loaded with great examples, in both black and white and color.