Starred review from September 15, 2008
Lauded historian Montefiore (Young Stalin
) ventures successfully into fiction with the epic story of Sashenka Zeitlin, a privileged Russian Jew caught up in the romance of the Russian revolution and then destroyed by the Stalinist secret police. The novel’s first section, set in 1916, describes how, under the tutelage of her Bolshevik uncle, Sashenka becomes a naïve, idealistic revolutionary charmed by her role as a courier for the underground and rejecting her own bourgeois background. Skip forward to 1939, when Sashenka and her party apparatchik husband are at the zenith of success until Sashenka’s affair with a disgraced writer leads to arrests and accusations; in vivid scenes of psychological and physical torture, Sashenka is forced to choose between her family, her lover and her cause. But as this section ends, many questions remain, and it is up to historian Katinka Vinsky in 1994 to find the answers to what really happened to Sashenka and her family. Montefiore’s prose is unexciting, but the tale is thick and complex, and the characters’ lives take on a palpable urgency against a wonderfully realized backdrop. Readers with an interest in Russian history will particularly delight in Sashenka’s story.
March 2, 2009
In this sweeping historical novel, a Russian girl from a wealthy Jewish family turns revolutionary and marries a high-level Bolshevik. She embarks on a disastrous affair years later that endangers her two children and twists her from a loyal Communist into yet another of Stalin’s victims. The history and characters are fascinating, but the narration is marred by Anne Flosnik’s flat characterization and implausible Russian accent, which evokes a bad Bela Lugosi imitation. Furthermore, her self-conscious diction prevents listeners from relaxing into the flow of the story. A Simon & Schuster hardcover (Reviews, Sept. 15).