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Recent Reviews
Johannes Lichtman
Positive The New York Times Book Review A journey of self-discovery, some mild criticism of global capitalism and a cross-cultural collision, all in a single book ... Lichtman’s light touch is a welcome reminder of the humor and wit that, as he points out in a preface written after Russia’s invasion last year, pervades Ukrainian culture even now ... But his brief reflections on Ukrainian history and politics are as dutiful as asides in a Lonely Planet guide. A pivotal scene depends on an implausible confusion of two Ukrainian phrases... and a lurid turn in the second half of the novel has a clear satirical logic but heightens the sense that the Ukrainian characters are only plot devices, though they’re drawn with sympathy. For me, the most engaging chapters were the two written from their perspectives.
Yevgenia Belorusets, trans. Greg Nissan
Rave The New York Review Rigorous in its focus on interior life ... Belorusets is the antithesis of the hardened war reporter or the boastful tourist. Her diary is animated by a simple and sincere disbelief that anything as cruel and senseless as war can exist anywhere. At the same time, the book is full of her struggles with herself.
Konstantin Paustovsky, trans. by Douglas Smith
Rave The Washington Post A fine new translation ... With The Story of a Life, Paustovsky imbued Soviet literature with tender curiosity about ordinary people and loving care for the natural world. He captured all the beauty, turbulence and injustice of his youth, and the strange blend of horrific violence and intoxicating hope that arrived with the revolution ... Part of the charm of this book is Paustovsky’s inveterate lyricism in the face of cataclysm. He was so in love with nature, with beauty, with the small joys and tragedies of ordinary life that he was distractible even during the most momentous events.
Yevgenia Belorusets, tr. Eugene Ostashevsky
Positive The Baffler ... [an] excellent translation ... By emphasizing the fact of division while occluding the proper names and political positions that are usually taken to form the substance of such division, Belorusets draws our bitter attention to the way that war can give lost societies and people a sense of relief, self-love, purpose. In this reading, war is not a manifestation of some specific conflict but rather a way of life—an end rather than a means ... there is an element of ethnography in Belorusets’s approach, but it is intentionally undermined by the trappings of fiction. This distinguishes her work from that of Svetlana Alexievich, despite some superficial similarities; Alexievich’s work, especially as presented in translation, relies heavily on the claim of factuality, despite her extensive interventions in the material she collects during interviews. Belorusets rejects the idea that an authoritative, objective ethnographer can arrive at some empirical truth about the objects of her study ... Lucky Breaks was originally published in 2018, but it is still excruciatingly topical.
Lea Ypi
Rave The New Republic ... a brilliant hybrid of memoir and political theory ... original, a badly needed corrective to the usual script. Where many tales of state socialism are somber, even maudlin, Ypi is witty and acute ... Gracefully and irrefutably, Ypi uses her family story to show that even for a society as repressive and immiserated as socialist Albania, the transition was not a happy ending, as the standard narrative teaches. Liberal capitalism brings its own brand of unfreedom ... a riveting memoir, written with the skill of a novelist. But it is also a struggle against the political void that followed 1989, the supposed \'end of history\'.
Maria Stepanova tr. Sasha Dugdale
Positive Harpers While Stepanova’s poetry is crafted from the intangible relics and rubbish of language, In Memory of Memory curates physical remnants of the past, using them as the raw material for a family history. Here family is not only a matter of biology; it also encompasses writers and artists from the past, as well as relatively unknown historical characters such as Lyubov Shaporina, an artist who kept a Leningrad siege diary in which surprising lyrical moments appear ... The story of this influx of Russian women, many of them Jewish, into French medical schools, which began accepting women in the 1860s, is one of the book’s numerous fascinating asides ... The story of Lyodik...killed outside Leningrad...is one of the most moving in the book, as Stepanova uses other sources to piece together what Lyodik must have been experiencing on the front, and the horrors taking place in the besieged Leningrad for which he died ... By insisting on the value of idiosyncratic family remembrance, Stepanova refuses the dissolution of self that characterizes militarism and nationalism. For her, private commemoration, along with the contemplation of art, is a way of developing the kind of self-reflective, generous-minded citizenship necessary for a functional democracy. For American readers, Stepanova’s work is not a glimpse into an alien culture but a reminder that we have more in common with Russia than we’d like to admit.
Sophy Roberts
Mixed The New York Times Book Review Much of The Lost Pianos of Siberia consists of neat summaries of major events in Russian history ... This is not a book for readers already familiar with Russian history. Nor is it a book for music buffs. There are many pianos, but there is remarkably little about music. Roberts’s descriptions of landscapes are as lovely as fine embroidery, but when she searches for words to describe music she comes up empty ... Like Lenin’s corpse, a very old piano will have to be reconstituted from new materials if it is to persevere. But Roberts loves a relic ... This is the magical approach to objects that prevails in house museums, which rely on possessions as a kind of spirit medium. But a reader cannot finger the keys of these instruments or peep inside at the strings and hammers, touching the piano and communing with its former owner. A reader is reading, and words will have to do.
Vivian Gornick
Mixed The New Republic With its concentric rings of self-scrutiny, Unfinished Business shows that Gornick’s commitment to altering consciousness—above all, her own—has only intensified with time ... Against the backdrop of a cascade of national and global emergencies, Gornick’s dedicated decades of self-scrutiny seem an almost impossible luxury. The American romance with communism was a failure. But today, the rift in the self seems less consequential than the rift between rich and poor, and our economic, political, and ecological crises cannot be confronted in solitude.
Joshua Yaffa
Mixed The New York Review of Books Yaffa understands compromise under state pressure as the defining experience of life under Putin ... Yaffa provides a gripping, cinematic description of a series of trips she took in an old ambulance ... Yaffa’s definition of the \'political\' is also overly narrow. War and authoritarianism are undoubtedly political, but so are homelessness, poverty, and lack of medical care...especially in a country flush with oil money ... Yaffa is good at using himself as a comic character, and I wished he’d done it more often ... It’s easy to write about other people’s compromises; it’s much harder to write about your own. Between Two Fires would have benefited from a reflection on the compromises made by an American journalist covering Russia at a time of rapidly escalating tensions between the two countries.
Bathsheba Demuth
Positive The New York Review of Books Though Floating Coast is billed as an environmental history, it could also be described as a meditation on a biosphere. Demuth includes lavish descriptions of the landscape she has been admiring since she first visited as a teenager, but relatively little in the way of straightforward political or economic history ... Demuth organizes her book thematically...which leads to chronological jumps that can be confusing, especially given the leaps between the American and Russian/Soviet cases and among different industries. Her prose is often portentous, and her frequent use of wordplay and inversion quickly becomes irritating ... But Demuth’s passion for her subject shines through on every page, and her account is enriched by her extensive personal experience in Beringia. Rather than treating the Arctic as a plein-air museum, she shows how death and destruction are essential aspects of life.
Vasily Grossman, Trans. by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler
Positive The New Republic Stalingrad shows a writer who was a less adamant critic of the Soviet project than a reader of Life and Fate might think. It also presents some of the finest examples of Grossman’s prose, an argument to read him not only as a fervent critic of totalitarianism, but as a deeply compassionate writer with an extraordinary gift for portraying psychological complexity and sensory detail ... like Tolstoy, he can paint a vivid picture of almost any sort of person ... Stalingrad is an extreme case of a \'loose baggy monster,\' but the lesser sections—for example, chapters on a wartime coal mine, added at the behest of editors—fade from memory quickly, while Grossman’s exquisite sensory details linger ... Stalingrad is, among other things, a testament to the human capacity to rally the bravery, altruism, and resilience needed to bring the world back from the brink of destruction.
Kate Brown
Positive The New York Review of Books Kate Brown is interested in the aftermath of Chernobyl, not the disaster itself. Her heroes are not first responders but brave citizen-scientists, independent-minded doctors and health officials, journalists, and activists who fought doggedly to uncover the truth about the long-term damage caused by Chernobyl. Her villains include not only the lying, negligent Soviet authorities, but also the Western governments and international agencies that, in her account, have worked for decades to downplay or actually conceal the human and ecological cost of nuclear war, nuclear tests, and nuclear accidents ... asks a larger question about how humans will coexist with the ever-increasing quantities of toxins and pollutants that we introduce into our air, water, and soil. Brown’s careful mapping of the path isotopes take is highly relevant to other industrial toxins, and to plastic waste.
Timothy Snyder
Pan The Nation Snyder’s latest book, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, marks the next phase in his transformation from academic historian to political commentator; it is also the apotheosis of a certain paranoid style that has emerged among liberals in Trump’s wake ... But Snyder’s picture of Putin’s campaign to destroy America is unconvincing. Rather than building an argument based on evidence, he often cherry-picks news items to make a tendentious case, relying heavily on the kinds of leading phrases endemic to conspiratorial thinking ... Snyder is unwilling to make the slightest effort to imagine that Russia might have any strategic concerns that go beyond its plot against freedom ... The Road to Unfreedom offers a bleak vision of politics for future activists: one in which all change comes from above, and ordinary people cannot be trusted
Anne Applebaum
Pan The Nation Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, a new history of the famine, illustrates the perils of using the past in the service of today’s politics. Drawing on archives opened after the fall of the Soviet Union, newly available oral histories, and recent scholarship, Applebaum provides an accessible, up-to-date account of this nightmarish but still relatively unknown episode of the 20th century. Her historical account is distorted, however, by her loathing of communism and by her eagerness to shape the complicated story of the famine into one more useful for the present: about a malevolent Russia and a heroic, martyred, unified Ukraine.
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
Rave Bookforum Like many memoirs of the Stalinist period, Petrushevskaya's stresses the redemptive power of art. One of her brightest memories is of being allowed into the warm technician's booth at the Kuibyshev opera house and watching Rossini's The Barber of Seville, performed by the evacuated Bolshoi Theater ... Her memoir has the fairy-tale ending its plucky heroine deserves. She graduates from journalism school, specializing in humor writing, and joins other students on a trip to northern Kazakhstan to work as a laborer and learn about the lives of "the people." There, she meets the Moscow journalists who launch her literary career. We already know she'll become a famous writer, but may not have guessed that, in her sixties, Petrushevskaya will start a second career as a cabaret singer. Writers of fiction can afford not to draw too sharp a line between the realistic and the fantastical—not every memoirist is so lucky, or so deft. Petrushevskaya is blessed with good material, but it also helps that she was teaching herself how to reinvent it before she could walk.
Anna Pasternak
Pan The New York Times Book Review ...the 'untold' in the subtitle simply isn’t true. The story of Pasternak’s affair with Olga has been told repeatedly — for instance, in Olga’s own memoirs, which serve as a central source for Lara and are available in English, as are memoirs by several of Pasternak’s family members and friends ... In Lara, Anna Pasternak treats Doctor Zhivago as a romance, more or less interchangeable with the hit movie, and she displays minimal understanding of Pasternak’s literary achievement. (Though he is best known outside Russia for Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak’s most innovative and influential work was poetry.) Lara is poorly organized and larded with romantic clichés. Evgeny Pasternak, the poet’s eldest son, provides more insight in a few quoted lines than Lara manages to do in a chapter. Pasternak fans and incurable romantics will be better off sticking to Doctor Zhivago, or searching out the earlier memoirs that serve as this new book’s central sources.