BOOK REVIEW: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

I just finished reading Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky for a class. I’m glad it was assigned or I likely never would have read it. Long, heavy, Russian literature in translation intimidates me. But this is a remarkably readable book, despite its length and depressing themes. 

Crime and Punishment is one of those classics where it is obvious why it is a classic. Even in translation, it is beautifully written, thematically complex, and surprisingly gripping. I was surprised to find it gripping because much of the book comprises interior and somewhat repetitive suffering. But the character’s suffering is distant from the reader. We can understand it without feeling it ourselves.

Raskolnikov, the main protagonist, commits a premeditated murder, compounded by an impulsive one. He was obsessed with the act before committing it, and he wallows in guilt and attempted self-justification afterward. He is surrounded by people who love him or don’t, who suspect him of the crime or don’t, and he scorns them all and tries to drive them away. He also seeks them out. He’s terrified of being caught, but also ruminates over turning himself in. He has grand theories, and delusions of grandeur. Is he insane? Or is that just an easy explanation for modern readers?

The author dives deeply into the viewpoints of several characters, not just Raskolnikov. Their motivations are as clear to the reader as they are to the characters themselves, which often means they are obscure. It’s a book to linger over, and to read more than once. It helped to read it in a class!

BOOK REVIEW: Let the Dead Bury the Dead by Allison Epstein

 I received this book for free from Netgalley. That did not influence this review.

Allison Epstein is now a must-read author for me. I loved her debut, A Tip for the Hangman, so I was eager to read her newest release, Let the Dead Bury the Dead.

Let the Dead Bury the Dead is an alternate history, so although the characters are all fictional, the story is placed in a historical context (Russia, 1812, just after Napoleon has been chased away) where it feels as if the events could be real. (Except, for the vila, the witch…) Slavic folklore is woven into the tale adding magical realism to the mix. I am not, in general, a fan of magical realism. And I admit that the first time Sofia turned into an owl, I was a bit put off. And yet, the characters were so compelling, the writing so beautiful, and the folk tales so perfectly adapted to fit in with the story, that it all worked to create a novel I couldn’t put down.

In the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat in Russia, the tsar wants to consolidate his power at home. If this means crushing the life out of his own people, the very people who supported his army and country, giving their all, so be it. The tsar and his family live in obscene luxury while the common people, pretty much everyone else, starve. The tsar’s second son, Felix, the Grand Duke, dared once to speak up for the people and found himself banished to a palace 15 miles from St. Petersburg where he has given himself over to idle hedonism.

Felix’s lover, the soldier Sasha, has now returned from the war. On his way to find Felix, he comes across a woman of unearthly beauty (Sofia) nearly dead from the cold, lying in the forest. He rescues her. This is something he quickly comes to regret. Sasha comes from the poor peasantry and was raised on the old stories. He recognizes a witch when he sees one.

Sofia plays on Felix’s ambition to convince him he is the leader the people need, setting things in motion and tearing the two lovers apart. 

At the same time, Marya, a young woman involved with a group of revolutionaries and the right hand of the group’s leader, Isaak, is busily helping to organize a general strike. It’s exceptionally dangerous as the tsar will certainly crack down at the merest hint of dissent. Nevertheless, Marya has faith that good can come out of a popular revolt. It’s necessary. Sofia works her magic on Marya also, convincing her that she has more to offer than simply following Isaak’s lead.

The novel works so well because of its moral ambiguity. Each of the main characters is partly right and very much wrong. The world is overwhelmingly against them and no simple solutions are available. Good can’t conquer evil when there is no pure good and no pure evil. (Although Sofia certainly comes close to pure evil, even she makes some good points. The tsar is evil, but evil in the commonplace cruel dictator way, and eliminating him will solve nothing.)

If you want to lose yourself in a beautiful historical fairy tale, I can’t recommend Let the Dead Bury the Dead highly enough.

BOOK REVIEW: An Unofficial Marriage: A Novel About Pauline Viardot and Ivan Turgenev by Joie Davidow

 I received this book for free from Netgalley. That did not influence my review.

An Unofficial Marriage: A Novel About Pauline Viardot and Ivan Turgenev by Joie Davidow is a fine new work of historical biographical fiction. I love stories about artists, particularly writers, and their significant others, so I was eager to read this even though I’ve never read Turgenev’s work.

The novel sensitively portrays a love triangle in a way that is poignant without seeming tragic.

Pauline Viardot is a famous nineteenth century European opera star. She marries young, to Louis Viardot, who collects art, translates literature, and hunts obsessively. He’s old enough to be her father. They were introduced by George Sand, who is pleased that Pauline will have a spouse who will support and protect her. Louis acts as Pauline’s agent, shepherding her career. Pauline is fond of him but not in love with him, while he loves her with all his heart.

Her operatic touring brings her to St. Petersburg, where she is an enormous success. Ivan Turgenev attends one of her performances and is smitten. A handsome, young Russian aristocrat, Ivan lives the idle useless life he despises. At first, I found him a bit annoying—complaining that his mother is not quick enough with his allowance while criticizing her for living off the serfs they own. (Eventually though, he will become an advocate for serfs and free his own.)  He hangs around Pauline, inserting himself into her circle, fawning. She tries to treat him as merely a friend. However, before long, she can’t do without his devoted presence.

Ivan’s passion for Pauline is all-consuming. Yet he understands that she’s married and pursues her with an almost chivalric idealized love. He’s such a pleasant fellow, and so caring a friend to Pauline, that her husband realizes the best way to defuse the situation is to befriend him as well. 

The platonic phase of their relationship can only last so long. Eventually, Pauline and Ivan give into their desire for one another.

For the rest of their lives, the Viardots and Ivan form an odd threesome. They are inseparable in spirit, but not in fact. Pauline goes off alone at times for her career. And Ivan returns to Russia to claim his inheritance when his mother dies. There, he’s arrested for his radical positions. He’s placed under house arrest, unable to leave Russia. He and Pauline (and, at times, Louis) write to one another, though their letters are constrained by the knowledge that censors are reading them.

The politics, epidemics, and upheavals of the mid-nineteenth century influence the progress of their lives, but don’t change the way they feel. Eventually, the three are reunited. Louis, for the most part, swallows his jealousy and possessiveness to smooth the way for Pauline. In turn, Ivan never presses his luck by trying to separate husband and wife. The author manages to make all the characters sympathetic. The triangle succeeds because they all carefully play their roles.

Pauline is the artistic star of the novel. Ivan’s writing career is alluded to but is not central. By the end of his life, he is successful and acclaimed, but we never see him suffering for his art the way Pauline is shown suffering for hers. 

The writing is beautiful and I learned a good deal about the life and times of Pauline Viardot. Now I have to read Fathers and Sons.

BOOK REVIEW: Woe from Wit by Alexander Griboedov

I received this book for free from Netgalley. This did not influence my review.

Woe from Wit by Alexander Griboedov (translated by Betsy Hulick) is a short, fascinating book. The text taken by itself would be a cute and mildly amusing play in verse. But taken together with the introduction, it is much more.

I had never heard of the author, an early nineteenth century Russian playwright and poet who remains a very influential writer in Russia. Apparently lines from his plays, this one in particular, are quoted even today and it’s social commentary is still relevant after a fashion.

The play itself centers on Alexander Adreevich Chatsky, a young man who returns to Moscow after three years abroad, to court the young woman he left behind. The woman, Sophie, has moved on, falling in love with her father’s secretary, Molchalin. She has other suitors as well.  The father wants someone wealthier and higher in rank for his lovely daughter but her mind is made up.

The father throws a party to which numerous friends and acquaintances are invited. Chatsky is there. He has a sharp wit and is quick to criticize what Moscow was and what it has become. Sophie has no patience for his cynicism, especially when he turns it on Molchalin. She starts a rumor that Chatsky has gone mad.

The entertainment picks up as the guests make wilder and wilder claims about Chatsky’s loss of sanity. Eventually the news gets back to him. Shortly, Sophie overhears Molchalin hitting on her maid. She breaks off their affair. Chatsky, furious and disillusioned that she would make up a tale about him, no longer wants anything to do with her. He stomps off after a blistering tirade against everyone of the guests, leaving the father to conclude the rumor must be true.

Like most plays, I imagine this would be much more enjoyable to watch than to read. However, it did leave me wishing I could see it performed. 

BOOK REVIEW: The People's Act of Love by James Meek

I recently skimmed a review of James Meek’s new novel, To Calais, In Ordinary Time.  It sounded intriguing, but daunting, reminding me a bit of The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth, which I loved. However, it isn’t released yet in the U.S.  So, while looking up the author in my library, I saw The People’s Act of Love. The superlatives used to describe it on the jacket blurb made it impossible to bypass. (They were so over the top I doubted the book could possibly live up to them.)

Set in Siberia during the Russian Revolution, I expected the book to be gritty and bleak, so I was prepared. Nonetheless, it was a hard book to read.

Told from many viewpoints, the anti-hero of the story is a young radical, intellectual, prison-camp survivor named Samarin. It’s clear from the start that he’s an unreliable narrator, but no one, including the reader, is able to quite put a finger on what parts of his narrative are true and which are false.

He comes upon a small town that is being ruled by the remnant of a Czech Army that knows whatever role it played in the war is no longer significant. The soldiers vary in their loyalties but all want mainly to go home. The leader, a man named Matula, is a sociopath. His lieutenant, a Jewish Czech who mourns the lost German civilization where he felt at home, is a good man, the one truly sympathetic character in the book. He is smart, good to his fellows, and in love with the wrong woman.

The woman, Anna, is a Russian widow who has moved to the town with her son. She’s a photographer, an artist, who claims she needed to get away from the city, but no one knows why she ended up there.

Also within the town is a sect of Christian mystics, castrate, who believe themselves to be angels. They hold all their goods in common, and so are better at being communists than the communists. They just want to be left alone.

Two more strangers have arrived simultaneously with Samarin. One is a local shaman who has lost his ability to “see” and is being held captive by the superstitious Matula. The other, a man no one has yet seen in the town but whose arrival is heralded by Samarin, is the Mohican. This fellow escapee from prison is a brutal thief who helped Samarin escape only so that he could use him as food on the long trek from camp to civilization.

Over the course of the next few days, with the threat of the Red Army about to descend upon the town, the various inhabitants try to come to grips with internal and external threats.

It is a powerful book, difficult to put down, but ultimately disappointing. Most of the people are awful in large or small ways. There is good, but it’s not rewarded. And the themes are muddied by the sense that nothing really matters in the end.

Even so, I will be reading To Calais, In Ordinary Time.

BOOK REVIEW: Novel with Cocaine by M. Ageyev

Novel with Cocaine by M. Ageyev (translated from the Russian by Michael Henry Heim) was a Christmas gift, so it didn’t sit long on my TBR pile.

M. Ageyev is a pseudonym. The author is suspected to be Mark Levi, a Russian emigre in Paris. The novel was first published in 1934. It was rediscovered and translated into English in 1984.

The narrator/protagonist, Vadim Maslennikov, is a disturbed, disturbing adolescent from an impoverished Russian household. His father is dead. Vadim is ashamed of his dreary mother who sacrifices everything for him. His cruelty to her is horrifying. Despite his laziness and aimlessness, Vadim believes himself to be exceptionally smart and on the path to becoming a wealthy lawyer.

The first part of the book covers his school days. The school is filled with awful people. Vadim fits right in.

After graduation, he settles into a life of bumming around, borrowing money, and looking for women to sleep with. He has an affair with a married woman who eventually dumps him for being an awful person.

Surprisingly, the novel is compelling, despite the repulsive narrator. He’s full of self-justification and impressed by his own psychological insights. The author does a superb job of creating a fictional character that I could not care less about, but in a world that drew me in.

With nothing to do and no one to do it with, Vadim is bored. When an acquaintance calls and invites him out to join a small group who are hoping to snort cocaine one evening, Vadim joins them. He is invited only because they are out of money and need whatever pittance he can provide. That is his first experience with cocaine and he is instantly hooked.

After the first night, he goes to the home of a wealthy school friend, who fortuitously is going away to visit a girlfriend. He tells Vadim he can housesit, and gives Vadim a wad of money to entertain himself. Vadim spends it all on cocaine.

It is an interesting, personalized narrative of cocaine’s effects, physical and psychological. Vadim eventually succumbs to his addiction.

It’s not a cheery story. It’s not one where I could feel any empathy for the characters. But it is powerfully written.

BOOK REVIEW: Cilka's Journey by Heather Morris

I received this book for free from Netgalley. This did not influence my review.

Cilka’s Journey is a new historical novel by Heather Morris, author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz. It tells the story of one of the characters from The Tattooist: Cecelia Klein, known as Cilka. At the age of sixteen, Cilka was sent to Auschwitz with her mother and sister. Young and pretty, she was singled out by men in charge at the camps and repeatedly raped. If that wasn’t traumatic enough, she was then put in charge of the female prisoners who were sent to the gas chambers.

Cilka survived the experience riddled with guilt and shame.

After the concentration camp was liberated by Russian soldiers, Cilka was accused of collaboration--sleeping with the enemy--and sent to Vorkuta Gulag in Siberia.

Once again, Cilka was sexually abused. She was chosen by one of the soldiers to be his exclusive “mistress,” and was housed in a hut full of women who were visited regularly by guards who assaulted them.

Cilka was a survivor. She developed bonds with other women in her hut. She found her way into the camp hospital where she was trained as a nurse, working in the medical ward, then in the obstetric ward, and finally accompanying ambulances to accident sites. This was a privileged position. She worked in relative warmth and had access to better food which she shared with the women in her hut. Yet she lived in constant fear that her friends would discover why she had been sentenced to the Gulag–that she had been in charge of the “death block” at Auschwitz–and that her friends would shun her.

Cilka’s suffering and struggle to survive makes for difficult reading. (Perhaps not the best choice for Christmas season.) Yet, like all books in the WWII/Holocaust genre, it’s important. What makes this story unique is its focus on the war’s aftermath--the prison camps in Siberia. A caveat is that the prose is a bit plodding at times and the dialogues are sometimes stilted. Nevertheless, like The Tattooist, Cilka’s Journey is based on a real person. It’s a compelling story that should be heard.

BOOK REVIEW: The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes

My historical fiction/history book group’s last choice (mine) was The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes. I love his writing and had bought this book a while ago but it’s been sitting on my shelf. Choosing it for the book group ensured I would get to it.

I loved it, though it wasn’t a favorite of the group. Almost aggressively literary in style, it has a disjointed, fragmentary rhythm. It’s a deeply psychological book, so that there is not a lot of action. Rather, the angst-filled protagonist spends a lot of time ruminating. Still, it is so intense and so beautifully written that I was hooked from the beginning. (Not the very beginning. The prologue had me concerned it would be a difficult read.)

The Noise of Time is a fictional "biography" of Dmitri Shostakovich, a brilliant Soviet-era composer whose strained relationship to "Power" defines the book as it no doubt defined his life. Was he a communist? A collaborator? Or simply a man determined to make music despite the misfortune of circumstance?

Shostakovich is not an attractive hero, but he is a realistic one. One by one, he sacrifices his ideals in order to survive and to protect his family and his artistic integrity. (His family survives, but he wonders about his artistic integrity.)

The book is a marvelous study of Soviet oppression and psychological terror. The violence is not overt, but it is unsettling all the same. Read this one to compare and contrast with A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. While I enjoyed the Towles’ story much more, maybe it’s better to be unsettled by the story of a real survivor of the Russian revolution than charmed by a fictional survivor’s story.

BOOK REVIEW: After Anatevka. A Novel Inspired by Fiddler on the Roof by Alexandra Silber

After seeing this favorable review in the Historical Novels Review, I had to read After Anatevka. A Novel Inspired by Fiddler on the Roof by Alexandra Silber.

I’ve seen the musical, of course, on stage and the movie version. Of the three daughters’ love stories, the romance between the middle daughter, Hodel, and her scholar/revolutionary suitor, Perchik, captivated me most. So I was intrigued by the idea of a novel that filled out the back stories of these two and followed them into exile in Siberia.

Hodel tries to find Perchik, but is imprisoned for over a year, kept away from him by those who hope she can shed light on his work. A political prisoner, Perchik has been sentenced to labor in the salt mines in Nerchinsk. Hodel is aware of his socialist ideals but knows no particulars. She can name no names. Her ignorance frustrates her captors, but likely it is that ignorance/innocence that saves her from a worse fate. Eventually, she is allowed to join Perchik as one of the "voluntary wives," women who have chosen to share their husbands’ exiles. As you would imagine, life is brutally hard in Siberia.

The story intersperses scenes from their struggles in Nerchinsk with vignettes from their pasts. Particularly sweet and thought-provoking are Hodel’s memories. They are imbued with tradition and familial love, linking this novel beautifully with the enduring message of the play. The author also weaves a back story for Perchik, the brilliant revolutionary who grew from an unloved, unwanted orphan, to a disillusioned wastrel of a scholar, to an impassioned leader, and above all, a man deeply, passionately, devotedly in love with Hodel. While his story is convincing and interesting, it was less emotionally moving than Hodel’s.

After Anatevka is a heart-wrenching re-imagining of Fiddler on the Roof. This is the early 1900s in Russia and these are Jews and Revolutionaries. Impending doom hangs over the lovers; yet the novel is not oppressive. Perchik is an idealist who truly believes a better world is coming. Hodel has a deep religious faith. And the love they feel for one another not only allows them to endure hardship, it inspires others to endure.

BOOK REVIEW: A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

I received this book free from Netgalley. This did not influence my review.

I just finished a beautiful book, A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. This is even better than Rules of Civility, Towles’ first well-received novel.

The gentleman is Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, who found himself in Moscow, living in the famed luxury hotel, The Metropol, just after the revolution. As the novel opens, in 1922, Alexander is called before "The Emergency Committee of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs." He is tried and found guilty of being an aristocrat, a traitor to the revolutionary ideals. Most of Russia’s aristocrats either died during the revolution, were executed afterward, were banished to Siberia, or are living as unobtrusively as possible so as not to attract the attention of the Party. Alexander, at one time a revered poet, is too well known to fade away. Fortunately for the count, his poetry was seen as inspirational to the budding revolutionary movement. Therefore, his judges don’t sentence him to death or exile. Instead, they sentence him to house arrest.

Alexander lives in a suite of rooms at the Metropol. Although its glory fades somewhat due to the wars, it’s still a pretty posh place. As part of his punishment, he is removed from his suite and sent to the hotel attic to live in a single tiny room–he has to climb a few flights of stairs to reach it. He can only take a few of his possessions. The rest are confiscated by "the people." If he leaves the hotel, he will be shot on sight.

Accepting his fate, he commences his new life. The beauty of the book is what he makes of it.

I found this book engrossing. Still, when I tried telling my husband how wonderful it was, I couldn’t convey how it could be so interesting given the limited geography. This is a fascinating time in Russian history, but we learn about it from the perspective of a man in Moscow who must experience it all secondhand. The count spends his days performing rather routine functions. He passes his time wandering about the hotel, eating splendid meals, visiting his barber weekly, meeting various guests, and talking with his friends: the concierge, the head chef, the hotel seamstress. He meets a young girl, a guest at the hotel, whose curiosity and intelligence inspire him to broaden his own horizons by looking around. He even conducts a love affair with an unlikely guest.

Naturally, some of his time is spent reminiscing, either aloud to friends or alone. His past life was glamorous in some ways, but he doesn’t wallow in self pity at being denied the life he expected to live. Alexander makes the best of what he’s given.

Towles’ writing is so superb and the protagonist is so engaging that it all works.

Alexander is a hero to truly admire. He’s kind, friendly, a master of self-control, and able throughout to maintain the well-bred manners of a perfect gentleman. At each setback, he considers the viewpoint of his adversaries, and he adapts. At one point, a well-connected member of the Party who has asked a favor of Alexander compliments him on how well he has reconciled himself to his situation. Alexander responds that being resigned is not the same as being reconciled, giving the reader a deeper insight into his internal struggles. Yet what makes Alexander a truly empathetic hero is that he recognizes how fortunate he actually is. It’s a delight to spend time with a character so steady and so charming. His dry wit lights up the pages, and his ability to see the humor in dark situations clues the reader in to how this imprisoned count is able to enjoy life in spite of its trials.

This book is highly recommended.

BOOK REVIEW: Nikolai Gogol. The Collected Stories

I’m getting nervous about my last two challenges. Time is growing short. Some of the back-to-the-classics challenge books are optional, but I still have to read my required pre-18th century or 18^th century choice-The Odyssey. Unfortunately, my son has to read it for school, so he has first dibs on the book. Why didn’t I read that one first?

In the meantime, I decided to read my choice for classic short stories: Nikolai Gogol- The Collected Stories. I bought this collection about four years ago (after reading The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri which mentioned Gogol’s The Overcoat prominently). But it’s been collecting dust. I’m not much one for short stories.

Gogol is a Ukranian-born Russian writer who lived in the early 1800s. I’m no student of Russian literature, so all I’ve learned about him is taken from the book’s introduction. His earlier stories are influenced by Ukranian folklore and the later stories are more sophisticated but absurd. He had a great deal of influence over other Russian writers. None of this intro prepared me to love this book as much as I did.

What are these stories? Possibly the best known are The Nose; The Overcoat; and maybe The Madman’s Diary, which were included in this collection. His earlier books were Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, Vols I and II, and included in this collection from those books were St. John’s Eve and Christmas Eve. There were a total of thirteen stories in the collection, a mixture of earlier and later stories. And they were all captivating. There were similarities in them, but there was a difference in tone between the earlier stories and the later ones. Actually, I enjoyed the earlier ones more.

The "folklore-ish" tales were conversational in style. And even though the narrator wandered around in tangents, he was a fantastic storyteller, always drawing me in with the wild details. There were witches and devils galore, so maybe it was a kind of magical realism, but it was like nothing I’ve read before. Not so much scary as matter-of-fact, as though how do you live with these things if these things are real, and they scare you, but you go on with your life because they are part of life.

The middle portion of the book had stories that were vignettes of Russian countryfolk’s lives, humorously and sadly portrayed. One story that I thought was brilliantly done started with a chatty narrator complaining about his memory being like a sieve. He heard a wonderful story from a great storyteller, so he insisted the man write the story down. Awhile later, he noticed that his wife had used some of the pages to wrap cakes. So- if you want to know the ending of the story, you have to find the storyteller. The narrator gives great detail on where to locate the storyteller and how to recognize him. Then he launches into the story. It’s a detailed and increasingly interesting little family drama. I KNOW that the ending of the story is going to be lopped off. Nevertheless, I continue reading. I get sucked in to the dilemma. I want to know how the conflict is going to be resolved. And when the tale ends abruptly, leaving me hanging, I have no one to blame but myself. Who would DO that to a reader?

The Overcoat is the last story in the collection. It’s a sad story about a downtrodden clerk, content-even happy- in his job, but poor. It comes to pass that he needs a new coat. He scrimps and saves and plots with a tailor friend to have a new coat made. The thrill of the new coat becomes the focus of his life and when it is finally finished, it opens a whole new world of possibilities for him. Except that the first evening he wears it, the coat is stolen. When he attempts to seek help from the authorities, he is ignored and ridiculed. He sickens and dies. His ghost takes a sort of muted revenge. The bare bones outline doesn’t do the story justice. Gogol’s writing is able to wring every last bit of feeling from it.

I’d love to read the stories again in an annotated version to help extract more of the meaning from them, because I was reading quickly just to enjoy the stories and the beauty of the words on the page. But I’m sure there are layers upon layers in there. One of these days, when I’m not running in so many different directions, I’m going to pull Gogol back down from my shelf.

You can check out all the classics being read by many different bloggers at the back-to-the-classics challenge hosted by Sarah Reads Too Much.

BOOK REVIEW: Catherine the Great. Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie

Our next historical fiction/history book club meeting is coming up this weekend, and the book we read was The Winter Palace by Eva Stachniak. Although I enjoyed the novel, it wasn’t quite the "novel of Catherine the Great" that I expected based on the subtitle. I’d hoped to be exposed to more of the reign of the extraordinary Russian empress.

And so, because I did want to learn about Catherine the Great and eighteenth century Russia, I decided to read Robert Massie’s biography: Catherine the Great. Portrait of a Woman. (Massie is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Peter the Great and Nicholas and Alexandra, and this biography has also been a bestseller, so I expected good things.) I borrowed it from my local library in order to add it to my library challenge (hosted by Book Dragon’s Lair.)

Catherine the Great is a straightforward, very readable biography. Massie is fortunate to have such a fascinating character as a centerpiece and he does a wonderful job synthesizing a wealth of material. He begins with Catherine’s childhood (as does The Winter Palace) when she arrives in Russia as Sophia, a fifteen-year-old German princess, Empress Elizabeth’s favored choice as bride for Grand Duke Peter. Much of the same material is covered as in the novel, although with different emphasis. There is extensive exploration of Russian politics and international relations, setting the stage for Catherine’s turn as empress.

Eventually, Elizabeth dies, Peter takes up the reins of government, and then Catherine, with the help of the army (and her lover), stages a coup. This is where Catherine’s genius truly becomes evident. The challenges she faced were enormous. In a more or less chronological march, Massie gives a well-organized, thorough account of Catherine’s attempted reforms, her wars, her varied political alliances, her friendships with philosophers, her patronage of the arts, her attempts to modernize and upgrade the health and education of the populace as well as addressing those rumors about Catherine’s scandalous personal life. Yes, Catherine the Great took a succession of young men as "favorites," the male equivalent of mistresses. But no one at court saw anything scandalous about it at the time.

The book is long but the material is consistently interesting. Near the end, Massie digresses a bit to give what seemed to be more detail than was needed on the French Revolution. It was a major event and it did horrify Catherine and influence her behavior, but coming at the end of the book, when things were otherwise wrapping up, I found myself wondering why we were suddenly on such a lengthy journey to France. (Still interesting, just a bit off track.)

Overall, if you’re interested in Catherine the Great, this excellent biography puts her life in historical context and demonstrates what a truly remarkable woman she was.

ESCAPE TO THE PAST WITH: The Winter Palace by Eva Stachniak

The Winter Palace by Eva Stachniak is a fascinating book about Russian court intrigue and bedroom politics set during the reign of Empress Elizabeth. (The book opens in 1743.) The narrator is Varvara Nikolayevna, a spy or "tongue," in the empress’s court. Although originally noticed, then trained and partially seduced by the Russian chancellor, she is presented by him to Empress Elizabeth as a tongue of exceptional talent. The chancellor expects Elizabeth to make use of Varvara, but he expects his protégée’s first loyalty will always be to him.

At first, Varvara is placed in a position to spy on the empress’s nephew and heir, the grand duke, Peter. Things become more interesting when a newcomer arrives at Elizabeth’s summons–a bride for Peter. A princess from Zerbst, named Sophie, has been chosen to be the new grand duchess. Elizabeth instructs Varvara to "befriend" her. Varvara finds herself drawn to the charismatic Sophie and her loyalties shift. (Sophie has to convert to Orthodox Christianity and is given the name Catherine. In the future, this girl will become Catherine the Great.)

But that’s in the future. This is Varvara’s story. She is a compelling character in her own right. As a spy, a champion eavesdropper who has the empress’s permission to snoop, Varvara is able to provide all sorts of information to the reader that most first person narrators cannot reasonably access. If done clumsily, the book wouldn’t have worked, but Stachniak is able to make Varvara a convincing "tongue," one that the reader can empathize with, and all her information is smoothly—though certainly not effortlessly—obtained.

Through Varvara’s eyes, we watch as Empress Elizabeth becomes disenchanted with the bride she has chosen for Peter. The two youths are not suited. As they grow into young adults, they choose their own friends and lovers at court. Catherine is tasked with producing an heir, something she must achieve despite her husband’s disinterest. Everyone at court is involved in everyone else’s business. Important figures rise and fall, and Varvara takes note of them all, passing on whatever information she thinks is most useful to her goal, which has become protecting Catherine.

This is our historical fiction/history book club’s selection for our next meeting. I was pleased with the choice because it’s billed as "a novel of Catherine the Great." I know very little about this famous historical person, and thought the book might be a nice fictional introduction. It isn’t what I expected. It is a very nice introduction to Russian dynastic history–what happened before Catherine the Great came to power (although it focuses very much on what is going on inside the palace. There is very little "big picture" history.) It’s a good set-up for Catherine’s reign. And I enjoyed the book very much for all its strengths and for the glimpse of Russian history that it did show me. But I think I’d prefer to have known going in that I wasn’t really going to be learning about Catherine the Great–what made her great. This does make a good prequel to the next novel which will surely deal with Catherine the Great’s reign. However, the ending of this book was satisfying as it stands. As much as I enjoyed this novel, I think I might move on to Massie’s biography to read about Catherine.

This is my 9th book for the historical fiction challenge hosted by Historical Tapestry.