Reviews by Robert Blaisdell
Gregory J. Wallance St. Martin’s Press; $30; 304 pp.
Wallance recounts the adventures of the first of the two George Kennans who became famous for their analyses of the Russian or Soviet empires: “The George Kennan of this story [1845-1924] was an intrepid explorer, a leading American journalist, and after his Siberian exile investigation, a moral force whose writings and lectures about the inhumanity of the exile system compelled Russia to implement reforms.” The other George Kennan (1904-2005), a distant cousin, received an appreciative biography last year (see Russian Life, Spring 2023).
While that George Kennan’s life was interesting and important, this Kennan’s life is far more thrilling. Born and raised in Ohio, he wrote two books about Russia, both of which helped create America’s budding attitudes about the vast yet little-known country, Tent Life in Siberia, and Adventures among the Koraks, and Other Tribes in Kamchatka and Northern Asia (1870) and Siberia and the Exile System (1891).
Kennan’s experiences that informed those books and resulted from those books are masterfully retraced by Wallance. We learn how Kennan made himself an expert on Russia the hard way, entering Russian-Alaska and then sailing across the Pacific onto Siberia’s eastern edge. He was a member of a team working for Western Union to help build a telegraph line; their almost three years of harrowing work turned out to be a wasted effort in spanning the world’s communication system via cable, as a cross-Atlantic cable beat them to it. Kennan learned Russian from frontiersmen and the region’s native people. When he later met cultivated Russians in Irkutsk, “At one dance, young women eager to hear an American speak Russian, approached Kennan but they began to ‘show symptoms of shock’ after a few minutes of conversation. An official listening to the conversation later explained to Kennan that the Russian he had learned working on the telegraph line had a heavy dose of ill-mannered words.” Kennan journeyed to St. Petersburg before returning home to write his first book. He then worked for several years in Washington, DC, for the Associated Press.
His youthful experiences led him to admire Russian culture, and in American periodicals he became a prominent defender of the empire. When fellow Americans called attention to Russia’s barbaric penal system, Kennan set forth in 1885 to go see it for himself and report on it, with the tsar’s ministers’ approval, for a prominent American magazine. “Traveling in a horse-drawn carriage on a rutted, rock-strewn, mud-ridden ‘foul smallpox of a road,’ as Anton Chekhov called it after his own ordeal on the Post Road [in 1890], proved to be a different experience for Kennan than gliding along on a sleigh on a carpet of snow… The head-snapping, body-slamming, spine-crunching, bone-shaking sleep-depriving jolts during thousands of miles of carriage travel would debilitate Kennan and [the magazine’s illustrator George] Frost.” Wallance uses Frost’s pictures to good effect in his recounting of their journey.
Unlike the Soviet Union’s Gulag nightmare that was built upon it, “The Siberian exile system was not planned to be loathsome and vile. For much of its existence, little planning went into it. The system was the product of imperial ambitions, bureaucratic incompetence, corruption, and inadequate funding; Siberia’s vast size and harsh terrain and climate; and the extraordinary Russian capacity to inflict and endure suffering.”
To Kennan’s surprise and dismay, he discovered that Russia’s penal system was decidedly worse than any previous account of it. The political exiles, Kennan realized, were the good guys, the best Russians that he had ever encountered: attractive, idealistic, socially minded. Kennan wrote to his devoted wife: “It will be a never ending source of regret to me Sweetheart that you cannot know some of these people… With many of them I simply fall dead in love as if I were a girl of eighteen… I have met among the exiles in six months more people whom I could love, more people who would be dear friends, more people whose souls are akin to mine, than I had met in all the previous ten years of my life.”
Having concluded his investigation he went to Yasnaya Polyana to see Leo Tolstoy and tell him of these marvelous political revolutionaries. Tolstoy, committed to absolute pacifism and not having conceived yet of his sympathetic account of revolutionaries in Resurrection and “Divine and Human,” was less enthusiastic than he, but still, the two men got on well.
Kennan devoted several years after publishing his exposé to lecturing across America about the Russian penal system. He would, occasionally, dress up as a prisoner (having obtained the genuine articles from various contacts). His lectures were something like performance pieces rather than formal, dispassionate declarations. “From 1889 to 1898, he lectured eight hundred times… to as many as one million persons.”
The worldwide publicity of Kennan’s work (banned by censors but read as well in Russia) did affect Russian policy, which made slight concessions to lessen the brutality and injustices. But no one dreamed that the Soviet leadership, most of whom had been prisoners in Siberia, would devise a radically worse system, one that would eventually touch the lives of every Soviet citizen, and cost the lives of tens of millions of innocents.
An unintended moral: Things can always get worse! But Into Siberia is a first-rate piece of history and biography.
Witold Szablowski Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones Penguin Books; $20; 380 pp.
This entertaining book by the Polish journalist Witold Szablowski is much in the mode of his Dancing Bears, where he dives in, documentary style, to various places, and records the tales and memories of a wide variety of individuals. He is a steady listener to the cooks (and descendants of cooks) who have been in the midst of or on the cusp of world-famous events, from Tsar Nicholas II’s family’s last meals to the last meal before the signing of the agreement dissolving the USSR, and finally to the debunking of the legend that Putin’s grandpa Spiridon cooked for Rasputin, Lenin and Stalin.
Before he was blocked by the pandemic and then by Russia’s war on Ukraine, Szablowski “managed to complete the work only because it never occurred to any of Putin’s state agencies that it’s possible to show the mechanisms of power – Putin’s and his predecessors’ – through the kitchen.”
Szablowski takes different tacks into the material, including a comical monologue by a guide at Gorki-Leninskiye, where Lenin “spent the final days of his life”: “I’ll tell you a curious fact, Lenin was never interested in food – whatever they served him, he ate. He wasn’t a man of taste – he was more like a man with no taste buds.”
When Szablowski visits a survivor of the Stalin-induced Ukrainian famine, we learn from her that “it wasn’t as if one fine day it began and you could name a precise date. Gradually, day by day, there was less and less food. I was very small at the time, but I can remember constantly running after my mom and asking her to give me something to eat. And I remember her crying. Six children. All on her own. And less and less to eat.” Szablowski’s intermediary to this woman tells him, after the huge impromptu meal she has served them, “People who survived the famine never let you leave the house on an empty stomach.”
Szablowski provides recipes for some of the dishes that the cooks mention, among them “Blockade Bread,” the make-do loaves that the starving population of Leningrad substituted for real bread during the siege. The first ingredient? “Pinch of yeast made from timber waste.”
We meet the women who tested and prepared the food for the cosmonauts. How proud they are of the variety and taste they managed to create for the space crews. We learn, for example: “‘Almost everyone likes the taste of onions in outer space. We can’t explain that either,’ says Ludmila Vasilyevna. ‘… So we’ve been working to develop onions that won’t give off odors. The first attempts have already flown into orbit.’”
Where Szablowski gets most serious is on the subject of Chernobyl, where, in a less intense fashion than the great Belarusian Nobel-prizewinner Svetlana Alexievich, he records the recollections of a handful of the surviving cooks who as young women in 1986 were pressured into preparing meals for the first-responders after the power-plant disaster. One remarks that she had never “seen such an abundance of good food as at Chernobyl. As if the state wanted to reward people for sending them to such a dreadful place. Go and die, but eat well first.” Most of the cooks, who were young women at the time, have died of or been damaged by their exposure to radiation. Another survivor grimly observes: “These days, whenever I pass a vehicle on the road that’s taking cows to be slaughtered, I think about us driving there that day in exactly the same way. At those moments I always think to myself: you poor creatures, you have no idea where they’re taking you.”
Another affecting story is told by Nina Karpovna, who cooked in Afghanistan for Soviet soldiers. She recalls the difference that loving, motherly embellishments can make. She says the soldiers “found their way into my heart. And I began to take care of them. We’re to serve salad? Then let each man have a tomato with a smiley face made out of a radish. Let him feel like someone cares about him, like someone took the trouble, like someone’s making an effort for him. That’s what cooking is all about, isn’t it?”
We glean the dining habits of Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev from their cooks, who were invariably devoted not to politics but to cooking. While they were serving those in power, they were usually neither seen nor heard; but they had good eyes and ears and have good memories.
Jonathan Cole Bloomsbury; $26.95; 240 pp.
Jonathan Cole is a British neurologist who has modeled his writing on that of his friend and mentor Oliver Sacks. As with Sacks, the focus wanders and drifts into different modes, but his primary point, summed up in the subtitle of his new book, is effective. Trying to follow in Chekhov’s footsteps through the available literature of Chekhov’s and our time, and taking two visits to Sakhalin himself, Cole reminds us that when Chekhov ventured to Sakhalin in 1890, “he documents all that he can, as a scientist, as an ecologist, agronomist, and climatologist and hence as a doctor and a humanitarian, since the last two were, for him, inseparable.”
In his book Sakhalin Island, Chekhov occasionally mused in the mode of the narrators of his short stories; on the Pacific coast-side of the island, he observed: “the cold currents and ice floes which drift by the east coast even in June testify with merciless clarity that when Nature created Sakhalin, the last thing she had in mind was mankind.”
This personal and biographical testimonial to Chekhov and to Sakhalin Island, the book, concludes with what might better have been its beginning, an account of his (Cole’s) second visit to the island in the dead of winter when he was accompanied by a film crew and they received private tours of a Sakhalin museum dedicated to Chekhov’s book (a museum that receives upwards of forty visitors a year) and to another museum there dedicated to Chekhov himself (one of eight in the world). The writing is looser, journal-like, and revealing, and for me the highlight and most original part: “Lydia showed us around. She was in her forties, hair in a bun, tortoiseshell glasses, pink twin set and shawl but above all quietly, deeply passionate about Chekhov and the museum. The first room had a collection of letters from Kleopatra Katyrgina, an elaborate triple screen of photos and letters, a photo of Chekhov behind another screen and in the far corner, behind another screen, a reproduction of Chekhov’s rubberized raincoat.” Cole knows no Russian, but that is highlighted in the odd transcripts of the candid and canned remarks by the tour-guides, some of whom sensibly revere Chekhov and others of whom fault him for criticizing the tsarist-era abuses.
Cole has read almost all the relevant material in English on Chekhov’s life and has received great help and background information from the scholar Donald Rayfield; less useful or necessary are his summaries of the varying twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarly and critical opinions. The best book available in English on Chekhov’s medical career remains Dr. John Coope’s Doctor Chekhov: A Study in Literature and Medicine, which Cole occasionally cites. Indeed, “perhaps there is something about medical practitioners wanting to reclaim Chekhov as their own.”
Chekhov’s Sakhalin Journey may inspire readers to take up Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island and also prepare them for the surprisingly dense and unfortunately tedious sections of it. I love Chekhov, but having read Sakhalin Island twice, I concur with those biographers who find it his least successful writing project, indeed a “dissertation” based on his three months of grueling research. It was not, to Chekhov’s disappointment after having worked for years on it, accepted as his doctorate, which would have granted him the privilege to teach medicine.
Taras Prokhasko and Marjana Prokhasko Translated from the Ukrainian by Boris Dralyuk and Jennifer Croft Evergreen Editions; $22; 84 pp.
This Ukrainian Children’s Book of the Year (when it was published in 2013 in Kyiv as Хто зробить сніг) is about a family of moles living under a beech tree in a village of rabbits, squirrels, beavers, ravens, owls and hawks. The thirteen children, born in the last two springs, experience life under- and over-ground during the play-filled course of the coming year, culminating in, of course, winter.
Marjana Prokhasko’s illustrations of her husband’s and her story are simple, fine and comical; they will interest and satisfy any child, even ones who can’t read the clever text (translated by another talented couple, Boris Dralyuk and Jennifer Croft): “It is a Beech Forest tradition that on the first day of snowfall all the children gather on the Hill. Having barely finished their breakfast, the pups rushed headlong to the sled tunnel. It was called the sled tunnel because sleds hung there on special hooks hammered into the wall. Everyone had their own sled. Back in the summer, Papa Mole had made sleds even for the youngest pups.” And so on.
The parents encourage not only independence but helpfulness and cooperation. There are, even so, as in all happy families, moments of exasperated confusion and a couple of stretches of parental anxiety, but nowhere is there any suggestion of anger or hostility; though who the creators of all that snow are is a matter of good-natured dispute amongst the various species.
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