dovegreyreader scribbles

Team Tolstoy ~ " Still the cannon-balls whistled and flopped..."

здравствулте! и как вы Team Tolstoy, and can it really be that we have survived yet another battle having barely had time to regroup after the last one?
I must admit I wasn't expecting that quite so immediately, no sooner settled in the drawing room than off to fight at...was that the infamous Battle of Austerlitz?

Even I remember that from school history.

Here in the UK and down here in Devon, we've had the most perfect weather for reading War and Peace, not a lot of snow for us but the most magical Narnia-like scenes with day-long hoar frosts that edge every single leaf in ice. The hedgerows looking like a glorious confection but with a heaviness to the cold and a murky mist that made walking along the lane feel quite oppressive, so I settled down and read this month's W&P ration in an afternoon (inclusive of nap) huddled next to the woodburner yet again, and perhaps came some way to knowing a fraction of how cold the real place must have been.

So Pierre, seemingly ill-versed in the ways of the world is to be fleeced of his fortune, and what a spectacle that proved to be, enough to have me groaning as I read. Suddenly he is the most popular man about town, and how unaware the gullible and trusting Pierre seemed to be of his appeal as he is naively bounced into marriage with the beautiful but apparently empty-headed Helene. Poor Marya meanwhile (who I can't help but love) is not coping at all well with the mating game and plumps for fidelity to her family and her father rather than betrothal to Prince Anatole ... wise decision Marya, wise decision. I felt desperately sorry for her though, so out of place in that world of glamour and I definitely wanted to whisper in her ear...don't trust that duplicitous Bourienne woman whatever you do.

I think I'm gradually extracting a real sense of the virtues, or lack of them, attached to these various families...the Bolkonskys seem to verge on the eccentric but with true and sincere hearts beating in there, whilst if you found yourself married into the Kuragins, as is poor naive Pierre, you'd have to be concerned. The Rostovs on the other hand seem like all round cheery good eggs.

This battle, whilst still confusing, did seem to have its emphasis slightly less on complex flanking strategy and much more on character revelation. Basically I understood that the Russians rather complacently had marked Napoleon down as "over there" when in fact he was "BEHIND YOU", or at least not where he was expected as in on the doorstep ready to pounce, and the Russians took a trouncing.

I happened to read all that just after the UK had taken a bit of a trouncing from the Russians with the doomed 2018 World Cup bid.
Had we been a mite complacent about our chances?
Did we get our come uppance?
Did we as a nation slink off to lick our wounds?
Yes to all of those.
That little and seemingly minor national defeat, and inflicted by a nation we'd quite like to stand tall against at every opportunity, gave me the tiniest sense of how the Russians might have felt after Austerlitz. Obviously no one died in the World Cup debacle so it was only the tiniest comparable feeling of national humiliation in the face of overweening hubris, but it was enough.

What a contrast between the leaders, Napoleon expressionless and imperious as he surveyed the bungling Russian army from his superior hilltop position, the handsome and revered Tsar Alexander a dejected, broken and defeated man. Then of course we took a few hits on the field and I'm as concerned as the next person about Andrei, but what a magnificent moment as he lies injured on and gazes at the sky. Our boy is learning some harsh lessons

'Everything seemed so futile and insignificant in comparison with the stern and solemn train of thought that weakness from loss of blood, suffering and the nearness of death, aroused in him. Looking into Napoleon's eyes Prince Andrei thought of the insignificance of greatness, the unimportance of life which no one could understand, and still greater importance of death, the meaning of which no one alive could understand or explain.'

And I now have rather a ridiculous question about cannonballs... were they full of something like gunpowder that exploded on impact, or just great big round heavy lumps of something and it was your bad luck if you happened to be standing in the path of one when it landed?
Whatever they seem to do an awful lot of damage...

'Suddenly a cannon-ball hissed so low above the crowd that everyone ducked. It flopped into something moist, and the general fell from his horse in a pool of blood.'

So Team Tolstoy I think you can see I'm really enjoying this a great deal but it's over to you for the more intelligent and serious analysis, and do excuse me because my aseptic technique is required in the field hospital... yes, yes I know, that's Flo and it's the wrong war.

 Next month's reading, if you're keeping to the schedule, is a slightly bigger chunk :: Book Two Parts 1 & 2 (about 120 pages in my edition) and the troika stops back here on January 9th 2011 to discuss.

 

 

 

 

On snowreading...

I'm wondering where this snow and enforced sitting by the fire might have taken your reading?
I've tried to look on it as a meteorological gift of time and not to be shovelled out of the way too fast and for me there's only been one reading place to go when it's officially colder than the South Pole outside and a troika would be just the ticket.

Russia...and it all began with Jim the Postie trudging through with a barrow-load of post including a registered parcel of books from Impress Books, a small Exeter-based publisher  which felt like a gift from the gods and I'm very grateful to Jim for delivering it and Impress for sending it.
All as welcome as the sight of our gas lorry would be too, anyone seen it?
In that Impress parcel a fine selection including The Russian Countess - Escaping Revolutionary Russia by Edith Sollohub, the only prompt I needed pending that thaw to head eastward.
Edith Natalie de Martens was born in 1886 in Pavlovsk, near St Petersburg and into the comfortable upper echelons of Imperial Russia, the daughter of a high-ranking diplomat and a girl whose destiny was to join the social and intellectual elite had not the 1917 Revolution put a swift end to that. By this time married to Count Alexander Sollohub and with three children these memoirs are an account of how Edith faced up to the loss of her husband and separation from her children as frontiers closed, surviving eventually to make a new life for herself and her sons in Western Europe.
I don't know how yet because I'm still reveling with young Edith in the summer holidays at the family's country home Waldensee.

'Summer was really on the threshold and when the huge suitcases and travelling baskets appeared in our nurseries and playroom - then no learning could penetrate my head anymore. The maid was packing, I was pushing my own treausures in between layers of clothing and only concerned myself with the packing of my violin, my gun, my tennis racquet and riding kit. Books went in large wooden boxes...'

Note the cover picture, Edith no slouch with a gun and perhaps a skill that was to be her salvation, we'll see.

The book which launched me on all things Russian a few years ago was also a memoir, The House by the Dvina A Russian Childhood by Eugenie Fraser. I moved swiftly on to Natasha's Dance by Orlando Figes and all things Romanov which has all made that return to reading Russia a real treat every so often.
Last weekend, happily thinking Russia here I come again, I also reached for Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy and only stopped myself in the nick of time.
What on earth was I thinking?
I was about thirty pages in and oblivious to anything else around me when I suddenly realised that another 800 page book, as well as the 800 page Mystery Trollope for The Reader magazine with a deadline of this Friday to submit my thoughts and my rating, and then the 732 pages of Ulysses in progress, well it was not a good idea this week.
I don't quite know how I tore myself away and perhaps I'll settle for some short stories from Chekhov or Pushkin instead, but Anna Karenina is still calling, I'm hankering after it, could someone please talk me out of it ...

White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov

'As is always the case in Russia, the legend is beautiful. History is terrible.'

The scour of the shelves for some new Russian reading unearthed a very nice copy of White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov published by Yale University Press, incidentally Mikhail Bulgakov's first and most autobiographical novel, and in this edition complete with an incredibly insightful introduction by Evgeny Dobrenko. I discover that he is a professor in the Department of Russian Studies at Sheffield University and therefore knows what he's talking about when he elaborates on the suggestion above and further that,

'To live in history is always disagreeable. In Russian history it is unbearable.'

Mikhail Bulgakov another of those writers I'd read bits of but never quite completely immersed myself in. A Country Doctor's Notebook was about the extent of it plus the knowledge that he was a trained doctor. I hadn't realised that Bulgakov had given all that up in 1920 to devote himself to literature thus bringing with him that rare doctor's eye view of any given situation.
Increased and regular Russian reading is proving fruitful and very rewarding because I'm finally starting to get my bearings, albeit still a bit shaky, within the time frame of Russian history. I'm sure Miss Spencer didn't cover this at school back in the 1960s; with the Cold War at its height she probably thought it was safer to stick to the Egyptians and throw in some Tudors, which she did with gusto and which I loved.
Evgeny Dobrenko's introduction therefore became something of a frequent reference point for the reading of this book, because it provides both backdrop and explanation often not evident within the narrative of White Guard and without it I would surely have floundered. However the shaky grasp on who's who and what's what possibly forgiveable given Bulgakov's own experience of ten out of fourteen coups, but all the same Evgeny was a godsend.
So to Kiev and 'Great was the year and terrible the Year of Our Lord 1918,' and prepare to live through the turbulent days of revolution when it was virtually impossible to know which side was winning, and if you did discover who was in charge it was likely to have changed within days, often hours.
The life of the Turbin family is surrounded and infiltrated by this chaos and confusion, replete with misinformation and terror, and thanks to Mikhail Bulgakov's wonderfully immediate writing style it was akin to being at the epicentre of the earthquake with a very astute but chatty friend as events unfolded. As the leaden atmosphere starts to descend on the city, flagstones boom under footsteps, people are distraught and crushed and every so often a blanket of snow submerges all, but the fear and sense of doom are palpable,

'In the north, the blizzard kept howling, and here, under the their feet, the earth's belly, alarmed, rumbled forlornly and growled. The year 1918 was rushing to a close, and each day it was even more terrible and bristly...the city was noisy but in a muffled, evening way...'

Bulgakov adopts a matter-of-factness, almost a detached eye to the wider violence and I wonder whether that was a combination of the doctor's eye for black humour combined with the sheer quantity of heads leaving bodies neath rattling sabres, yet when it comes to delineating illness or injury to a member of the family I quite thought I was in the room too. The descriptions of pain defy description, if you see what I mean. Bulgakov clearly capable of bringing both a medical and a literary element to these moments thus creating something immensely powerful

'...it read 39.6...Great he said licking his dry lips from time to time...I hope the arm can be saved because without my arm...a dry stinging fever reached from his wound all the way to his armpit and spread through his body. Sometimes if filled his entire chest and muddled his head, while his feet turned numb with cold...the dense silver ball had climbed and reached the 40.2 mark...'

Hats off to the translator Marian Shwartz who helpfully explains the difficulties of preserving the language of a text that is something of a 'kaleidoscopic whirl' and one which,

'teems with imagist sights and sounds, which not only give the page an exciting experimental texture but form a web of connections.'

I for one picked up all of this and more as I read, so for me this translation was a huge success and I knew I'd read a classic when I turned the final page but talking of Mikhail Bulgakov's superlative imagery how about this,

'The world's best shelves of books, which smelt like mysterious old chocolate'

Go and sniff one now...he's right.

A trip to Russia

In planning my Christmas reading I had written in a tentative trip to Russia. I always find when I yearn for snow on the ground and that yearn remains unrequited I must go and read snow instead.
Often Canada does very well as snow-reading territory but I felt in need of an even bigger challenge and I have been to Canada a great deal in recent reading so it was Russia for me.
Many's the time I've made the Dostoevksy blunder; set out across the extreme wastes with huge enthusiasm wearing the literary equivalent of a pair of flip-flops and found myself stranded half way and completely out of reading stamina, so this time I settled for a book with pictures to set me on my way and then I'd see where that led.
I do find this approach never lets me down and so the arrival of Moscow and St. Petersburg in Russia's Silver Age by John E. Bowlt published by Thames & Hudson was clearly fortuitous.
I had bought another in this series a few years ago at the suggestion of someone here I'm sure, Berlin in the 20s by Rainer Metzger. This was to pave the way for all that mittel-European reading melancholy that lures me in from time to time ( I feel it calling again)

'In the brief period between the twentieth century's two cataclysmic world wars the modern city was invented in Berlin. It was a vibrant metropolis of night-people, visionaries, thinkers and bohemians - a place filled with intrigue and decadence, where vice and virtue abounded in equal measure. Like one huge salon, it became the comparable centre of European intellectual life where the arts and sciences met and flourished.'

I couldn't get enough of it all. Beautiful illustrations alongside an accessible, highly readable and informative commentary and I read it cover to cover emerging energised and informed for more Joseph Roth et al . Not a book to read once and never open again, I pick it up and dip in frequently so I was intrigued to see if this new arrival would have the same effect.

'This book focuses on the visual and material culture of St Petersburg and Moscow at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.The twilight of Imperial Russia witnessed a sudden renaissance that left a profound imprint on the visual, literary and performing arts : here was a Silver Age as luminous perhaps as the Golden Age of Russian literature many decades before.'

This sounded like a good knowledge gap to fill, always easy to get stuck on the whole Romanov bandwagon and ignore the rest and it was several years since I'd read Natasha's Dance by Orlando Figes (one of those must-have books on Russia).
These are weighty, sumptuously illustrated books, 400 glossy pages and it only took about twenty before I could feel that old reading trail unfurling ahead of me because this truly is a

'dazzling array of artists, writers, composers, actors, singers, dancers and designers...presented in context'

Some were familiar names Tolstoy, Pasternak, Rachmaninov, Akhmatova, others I knew of but not much about, Nijinsky, Scriabin, Diaghilev and others I'd never heard of, but blessed as this book is with such a rich array of illustrations it all mattered not once I got my teeth around the Russian names. I was rapidly gripped and glorying in the visual references to the whole Russian World of Art movement which in some ways mirrored our own Arts and Crafts movement alongside French Art Nouveau, and quite fascinating to see the essence of those filtered through the lens of Russian artistic interpretation.
It all had me galloping round the shelves gathering in some inspired Russian reading.
Then that strange thing happened, completely unplanned and in that way books have of arcing across to each other quite unexpectedly, because no sooner had I made a flying start on White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov when Father Christmas gave me The Courilof Affair by Irene Nemirovsky.
Now I'd also had in mind a serious return to Irene with a second attempt at Suite Francaise given that all the fuss has died down, and I'd got over my tantrum about the cover, but I had somehow pigeon-holed her up in occupied France quite forgetting Irene's Russian origins. So it was all a bit of a pleasant eureka-like surprise to find myself reading Mikhail's account of the fall of Kiev in 1918 alongside Kiev-born Irene's account of the planned assassination of a government minister by Russian revolutionaries during the last years of the Tsar.
More on all that reading as soon as it's all settled in my mind (especially my dramatic and long-awaited, born-again Suite Francaise conversion) and the dovegreyreader-like flotsam has drifted into view. But all that reading about Russia's Silver Age was enough to light the blue touch paper and has also reminded me that I have a book on my shelves by one of the classiest of Silver Age writers, Andrei Belyi , The Silver Dove...so suitably clad as I am now in my literary furs and snowshoes, well I have to tackle that don't I?

Ekaterinburg - Helen Rappaport

Welcome to Romanov Day and  приветствия и спасибо (with any luck that's greetings and thanks) to Helen Rappaport who will be our guest in comments throughout the day. Sparing no expense I have also brought in outside caterers.
Cornflower is very kindly providing us with Russian-themed refreshments, isn't that brilliant? So you can all nip over there when you get peckish and my grateful thanks to Karen for taking up the eleventh hour challenge.

But now to Ekaterinburg and firstly we'd better brush up the pronounciation as we'll have a Russian speaker in our midst,
Ye-ka-tyer-in-boorg.
I knew from reading No Place for Ladies The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War that Helen writes my sort of history books; eminently readable but still fastidiously researched, no compromising on scholarly or evidence-based investigation and one look at the references confirms this.
Helen travelled to Ekaterinburg whilst researching the book and it shows.There is a very powerful sense that you are reading the words of someone who is witnessing the sights and sounds of the place first hand, is returning to primary sources and conjuring up the atmosphere with an accomplished writer's eye.
The trouble with reading any book about the Romanovs is the sure and certain knowledge of how it will end, yet despite this the book feels fresh and spell-binding.The background fascinated me as Helen set out the geographical location and the political turmoil surrounding the final imprisonment of the Romanovs in the Ipatiev House of Special Purpose. The suffocatingly claustrophobic Ekaterinburg July heat will send you off to fling open your windows in a way that the family were forbidden to do. But what made this book most special for me were the beautifully detailed character studies of each member of the family.
Tsar Nicholas, the man never equipped to lead his country, inadequate in authority, happiest when pottering around at his country estate Tsarskoe Selo, and married to the beautiful but domineering Tsaritsa Alexandra. Alix, Queen Victoria's granddaughter, largely misunderstood by the Russian people and the carrier of the haemophilia gene that would blight the family's life, her body wrecked and wracked with pain after giving birth to five large babies.
The four stunningly beautiful and serene-looking daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia who have lived a life trapped within the parameters of their mother's continual poor health, yearning for her attention, seeking constantly to win her approbation, serving and helping her wherever they could and all in the shadow of the much-wanted youngest son, the Tsarevitch Alexey and his debilitating illness.
Who can know the agonising pain of the Tsarina's medical conditions mitigated to some extent by regular and strong pain-killers and then we can only begin to imagine the excruciating agony endured by Alexey without them. Denied morphine presumably for fear of addiction, Alexey at every exacerbation of his haemophilia suffering swollen bleeding joints for weeks and months on end and no pain relief.
Yet no hint of jealousy emerges, this was a loving and devoted family and for that I was grateful as I read Helen's day by day account as their fate drew near. In their final days, hours and moments they would only have each other and a sickening feeling started to rise in my throat as July 17th 1918 approached.
The trouble was I liked the family in a way that no book about them had ever made me feel before. It became impossible to remain detached, I warmed to them all, felt I knew them, sensed I was in the Ipatiev House alongside them.
For all Nicholas and Alexandra's faults they were good parents and by the time I approached the final pages I did indeed want to cover my eyes and ears in order not to witness what I knew must happen, but by this stage I also knew I had to see it through with them.
It's truly gut-wrenching but utterly compelling reading and you desperately don't want it to happen; if ever there was a moment when you'd like history to be rewritten it's on page 184 of Ekaterinburg. The full horror when the family are gathered together as if to have their picture taken is writ large on the page. I could feel and smell the fear, it was tangible and the whole episode so movingly written I was choking back the tears and had to go out for a walk when I'd read it.
In the end Helen left me with the heady scent of the lilies which flower each year at the family's burial site (with grateful thanks to Helen for this photograph) and I closed this book with an overwhelming sense of grief and loss. I railed against the circumstances, the ineptitudes, the brutality and the humiliations meted out everywhere along the way and nothing convinced me that anyone, no matter the misdemeanour, could ever be deserving of the awful fate that befell the Romanovs.

Fire up the samovar...Russian day is coming.

I've just wept my way to the final page of Ekaterinburg by Helen Rappaport such a good read and there was me thinking I'd read all there could possibly be to read on the subject.
My thoughts on the book will be up here this Thursday and Helen has very kindly accepted my invitation to be a blog guest for the day and chat with you via comments about Ekaterinburg, the Romanovs, Russia, the research, her visit to Ekaterinburg and plenty more.
I hope you won't be offended if I keep the Faberge eggs in the glass display cabinet, but I will be firing up the samovar and cooking some whatever it is that Russians eat for tea and we can have a repetition of the Daphne party we enjoyed with Justine Picardie.
Just what we all need on a chilly June Thursday.
We have to let Helen out briefly at lunchtime to do a live radio interview but I've booked a troika to transport (feels like it might snow) so she'll be out and back in a trice.
Here's to a fascinating Russian day and my grateful thanks to Helen for agreeing to visit.

Anna Akhmatova

I had no idea until my daily Bloomsbury Day in Literary History e mail arrived in my inbox, that today was the anniversary of the death of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Requiem would rate in my top ten poetry choices if ever required, some previous thoughts on Anna Akhmatova here.
Here's a transcript of that e mail and suddenly perhaps it adds a yet another perspective to my choice of book today  

Anna Akhmatova dies 1966 in Leningrad

Born in 1889, Akhmatova was a founder member of the Acmeist movement in Russia with her husband, the poet Gumilev, and Osip Mandelstam. Gumilev was executed in 1921 on a charge of anti-Soviet activity, and the years of terror which followed under Stalin led to the banning of Akhmatova's work in 1925 and to what became known as her 'years of silence'. Although unable to publish, Akhmatova was writing what would become her major works: the cycle Requiem for Stalin's victims and Poem Without a Hero, started after Mandelstam's death in 1938 and worked upon for twenty years.
Her other close contemporary Marina Tsvetayeva committed suicide in 1941.
Akmatova ensured her own survival, and that of her work during these years, by committing her poems to memory and writing nothing down. Respect for the Word was a Acmeist principle and Akhmatova is seen as a true keeper of the Word:

'we will preserve you our Russian Language,
the great Russian word.
Pure and free we will uphold you
and hand you on to our children's children,
and save you from captivity
forever!'

(from 'Courage').

Angel Classics

I'm having more reading pleasure than can be good for a blogger right now and I'm going to stay with the theme of literature in translation because suddenly my cup runneth over.
I hadn't heard of Angel Classics until I fell into a book evening up at Chagford back on a lovely summer's evening being held to celebrate the 15th edition of Slightly Foxed, the literary magazine with a difference but one that is doing what I love to do.
Flagging up the books we may have missed but which deserve an audience.
It was a perfectly bookish evening and I had a lovely chat with Slightly Foxed editor Hazel Wood and finally the word 'blogging' was uttered. Hazel blanched a fraction but coped well with the onslaught and up came the subject of reading preferences.
Give me some good, solid mittel European melancholy with a bit of crumbling Habsburg, some fin-de-siecle Vienna thrown in and it will keep me quiet for hours.
Literature in translation, yes more more, bring it on.
So I was all ears as Hazel told me about Mr Hazel's (Anthony) independent publishing company Angel Classics who specialize in just that, Russian, German, Czech, Polish, Serbo-Croat, it's all in there.I pleaded for details which Hazel (having taken this long to recover I suspect ) sent last week and I was onto Anthony Wood in a flash.
I'd read Fraulein Else by Arthur Schnitzler in the Pushkin Press edition but hadn't found any more so I'm delighted to have his Selected Short Fiction lined up, "some of the most subtle and haunting twentieth-century explorations of inner lives."
Being incorrigibly nosey I want background on the man too. How could he write such a chillingly revealing little book about a woman as Fraulein Else?
There is a great introduction to Selected Short Fiction by the translator J.M.Q.Davies which will capably inform my reading and hopefully my thinking here when I've read them.
I've dipped in and out of The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek over the years and how can you not love the only loyal Czech in the Austrian army of 1914, the little man versus the bureaucracy?
'Fighting officialdom with the only weapons available to him - passive resistance, subterfuge, native wit and dumb insolence.'
The Bachura Scandal & other stories and sketches by Jaroslav Hasek a selection of pre-Svejk writing showing quite what a 'humorist and satirist of a rare order' Hasek was.These stories of pre-1914 Czech life look set to impress.
Hugo Hofmannsthal, not only Richard Strauss's librettist but also turning his eye to the restless spirit of fin-de-siecle Vienna and surrounded by a veritable Who's Who host of contemporaries, Mahler, Klimt, Freud et al.Selected Tales a slim volume that I suspect contains a powerful horde of lesser-known writing.
Finally I probably had to give The Silver Dove, by Andrey Bely a whirl, just because.
But also because, published in 1910, it is considered to be the first modern Russian novel and that sounds intriguing. A disillusioned Moscow poet joins a rural mystic set The Silver Doves, led by a bit of a Rasputin-esque figure. This is a culture on the brink and one that knows that to survive it must heed the 'formless strivings and undisciplined imaginings of the common people.' Of course we all know what happened next.
I am intrigued and will be back with early thoughts very soon.
I'm also going to have a foray into the land of Pushkin where I've never been before so all offers of hand-holding welcome, any Pushkin-ites out there?

The Whisperers

Once I'd got into the swing of Russian reading with War & Peace it was only a short hop into just about every other unspellable Russian novelist on my shelves, but at the same time a glaring gap in my knowledge was exposed. It became apparent that, as a child of the 1950's, Russia only meant spies and the Cold War, I had no real depth of understanding about Russia the country or the people, beyond James Bond.
To the rescue Orlando Figes and his measured and fascinating guided walk through Russian history and culture, Natasha's Dance and huge thanks to Daphne who stops by here for the recommendation.
Orlando Figes must know all there is to know about Russia but doesn't rub your nose in it with extraneous and irrelevant detailed analysis.
I sometimes sense with non-fiction (and with fiction come to that) that I am being treated to a blow by blow account of an authors's arduous and expensive research trip and will be told every last detail whether I want it or not.
Mostly I don't and the book starts to wilt around the edges and sink in the middle for me.
Not so Orlando Figes, so when The Whisperers, Private Life in Stalin's Russia published by Penguin, arrived, despite weighing in as a good sized newborn and being 740 pages long, I was not in the least deterred.
It's good to pick up a readable non-fiction book and go cover to cover and Orlando Figes is eminently readable, but others are disappointed, one critical reviewer of The Whisperers seeing fit to tell us,

' With such a rich vein of material, it is a shame that the author has not mustered greater intellectual ambition...this is a decent book written in a companionable style.'

Goodness, aren't people grudging and rude? Or is that what LitCrit is?
Hip hip hussar for decent companionable style I say, that means it's fine for us lesser mortals, put it on your Christmas list, at least it won't just sit unread on the shelf for the next ten years.
The Whisperers draws on hundreds of secret family archives from private homes across Russia, detailing life for millions of Russians under the tyranny of Stalin.Life lived at a whisper because you couldn't be sure who to trust, or life whispered as a treacherous betrayal of friends and family to the powers that be.
It's an unimaginable degree of fear and mistrust and I have barely scratched the surface of this book, but it's one I'll return to time and again.The insidious spread of terror, everyone suspecting everyone else of being a spy or a traitor and gradually people retreating into,

'a private world of truth...keeping a diary was a way to carve out a private realm free of dissembling, to voice ones doubts and fears at a time when it was dangerous to speak.'

The dialogue with the self, a safe place to voice inner thoughts, safe as long as no one found it of course.
Finally those diaries now see the light of day.
The sheer stomach-churning-ness (new word alert) can only be guessed at until you start to read this book and the bleak reality is gradually revealed. Standing by a husband who had been arrested placed an enormous strain on  the family, anything, literally anything could and did happen; eviction from homes, dismissed from employment, deprived of rations or wives dispatched to a labour camp minus the children.
The whole subject always returns me to the words and life of Anna Akhmatova and her magnificent poem Requiem.
The story is well known.Having lost her husband to a firing squad and then enduring the lengthy imprisonment of her son, Anna Akhmatova chose to stay in Russia and bear witness to the horrors and I don't even need a hint of a tint of an excuse to quote from Requiem in my favoured translation by Stanley Kunitz.

'The stars of death stood over us.
And Russia, guiltless, beloved, writhed
under the crunch of bloodstained boots'

True to Brodsky's maxim that "at certain periods of history it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with the reality", Akhmatova was a good sort of whisperer too. Her unsayable words, too dangerous to be written, whispered amongst a select group of trusted friends who would commit them to memory, still capable of sending shivers down the spine,

'Quietly flows the quiet Don;
into the house slips the yellow moon.

It leaps the sill with its cap askew,
and balks at a shadow that yellow moon.

This woman is sick to her marrow-bone,
this woman is utterly alone,

with husband dead, with son away
in jail. Pray for me. Pray.'

So much to absorb from The Whisperers I think it'll keep me going for years, or at least until Orlando Figes has written his next one.