Book Reviews
I WANT TO LIVE, by Nina Lugovskaya
Times Literary Supplement – August, 2006
One of the most harrowing stories of Soviet hardship is that of the nine-year-old who kept a diary as, one by one, her relatives died of starvation during the Nazi siege of Leningrad. The last entry is displayed at a city museum. On the left, readers can make out the wobbly words, “Uncle Sasha is dead”; on the right, “Now I’m all alone.”
The anguish of a child alone in a frozen city where even the rats had all been eaten was briefly relieved by writing down her predicament, just as personal scribblings on old labels and tissue-thin scraps of paper occasionally survived the prison camps where 20 million people died. The worst that Soviet life could hand out couldn’t completely silence the human urge for self-expression. These private writings, with their sparks of hope or despair, are a revealing counterpoint to the age’s bombastic official histories.
Nina Lugovskaya’s diaries were written in the Moscow of the 1930s, during the Stalinist terror, when people disappeared on flimsy pretexts, to reappear, if at all, pleading guilty to fantastical crimes before vanishing into the gulag. In many ways Nina Lugovskaya was a typical teenager, alternately stormy and introspective, worried about her squint, worried about doing badly at school, worried about boys, dreaming of becoming a writer, squabbling with her sisters. But she was also the child of a dissident father who was arrested, rearrested and dispatched to the gulag while she was putting her thoughts to paper. And her extraordinarily frank and eloquent diary proved to be her undoing. Discovered when the secret police came back to her flat after her father’s second arrest, its existence resulted in her detention, along with her mother and twin sisters. The women were sent to Kolyma for four years’ hard labour, and Nina was exiled for several more years. Her notebooks, heavily underlined by policemen looking for anti-state activity, were recovered from KGB archives and published only after her death.
Modern readers will be struck not only by Nina’s perceptiveness and intelligence, the elegance with which she could write when her adolescent gloom lifted, her conflicted feelings for her father, her interest in current events and the well-informed hostility she nurtured for the Bolsheviks — but also by the sheer recklessness of her act of self-expression. While Ukraine starved during collectivisation, for instance, she wrote: “Ukraine … what has happened to it? It’s unrecognisable. Nothing but the lifeless, silent steppe … The Bolsheviks were prepared for this disaster. The insignificant little plots of land sown in the spring are harvested by the Red Army, sent there especially for the purpose.” This information was not available in Soviet newspapers. It was probably glossed from a Menshevik émigré publication. In an age when Soviet children were taught to revere Pavlik Morozov, the boy who denounced his parents to the authorities, and when the authorities took it as their right to penetrate as far as they could into the minds of their citizens, Nina’s thoughts were dangerous. It was still more dangerous to be writing them down. Yet her only reaction to being warned by her mother not to write anything incriminating was to cross out a few phrases and be embarrassed that her mother might have looked at her lovelorn descriptions of boys.
Yet the strangeness of Stalin’s Russia was less in its Pyongyang-style hyperbole — the sheer mad ambition of the Soviet project — and more in the persistent survival of the ordinary. However distressed Nina and her friend Ira were when their fathers were arrested, the people she described were, most of the time, much less scared than we think they must have been, or indeed than they should realistically have been given their precarious circumstances. Her writing powerfully conveys the way life went on regardless, describing parties, crushes, country summers and the beauty of the bird-cherry blossom on the table. The undercurrent of threat remains, for much of the diary, in the shadows.
The reader’s sympathy is engaged by the way Nina matures. In 1932, when she is 13, the diary – sympathetically edited by Michele Hutchison and elegantly translated by Andrew Bromfield – belies the title “I want to live” by dwelling on her depression and wish to kill herself. Twice, she takes opium drops stolen from her grandmother, even though the first suicide attempt only makes her sleep soundly and the second time she knows the drops aren’t pure opium. Five years later, she’s more capable of seeing the good in life. “When I drink a few glasses of wine, the first sensation is one of companionship with the people around me; the barriers come down. Perhaps it is drunken excitement, but it is beautiful and innocent,” she writes.
Her analysis of feelings and events is searingly, scarily honest. Poignantly, though, she fails to connect the way that her cycles of depression and rebellion – in 1932, then in 1935 – seem to coincide with her father’s arrests. At 13, she’s open about her anger with the authorities. But later she confesses to deliberately not focussing on the dark side of life, and doesn’t mention her father’s re-arrest at all.
The secret police of the day didn’t see Nina’s writings as proof of mixed-up filial feeling. They read the diary as proof they’d found an enemy of the state. Before being sentenced, she confessed to a clearly fabricated plot to kill Stalin.
Nina never achieved her ambition of becoming a writer, though she survived, married and outlived the Soviet Union. But the question that the teenage diarist addressed so fearlessly is one that has outlived her: how to lead your life sanely when you are caught up in collective madness?
This passionate, pitiless document sheds as clear a light on the experience of living under Stalin as Anne Frank’s writing did later on the Holocaust. Especially in Russia, where there has never been a deep examination of the crimes committed by the Soviet state, it deserves to be widely read.
ENDS