Book Reviews
SASHENKA, by Simon Sebag Montefiore
The Times, 2008
It’s harder than you’d think for a Westerner to write a good novel set in twentieth-century Russia. Russia’s history of war, revolution, civil war, famine, terror, secret police, gulags and multiple betrayals, both political and personal, is simply beyond our ken – too bleak by far for people raised on cheery notions of fair play and Hollywood happy endings to get their heads round.
So I came to Simon Sebag Montefiore’s first novel, Sashenka, with low expectations. It spans the whole of Soviet history with its story of three generations of a Russian-Jewish family caught up in a revolution that devoured itself. It has cameo roles for all of the era’s most notorious real-life strongmen and psychopaths – from Rasputin, the rank, stringy-bearded, lecherous seer who gained ascendancy over the royal family at the decadent end of the Tsarist era, to Stalin and his sinister henchmen in the Terror of the Thirties, to a free-spending modern Jewish oligarch of the type Russians nowadays love to hate. Packing so much in seemed over-ambitious. I reacted badly to the romantic-movie cover, too: a pretty girl in furs in the snows, looking wistful.
We meet Montefiore’s heroine, Sashenka, on the eve of the 1917 Revolution, when she is sixteen, pretty (but not too pretty) and posh (but not too posh) – the only child of a well-off Jewish family with a bought title, an English nanny, Aspreys luggage and lashings of Huntley and Palmers biscuits. Mum’s always out at opium parties with Rasputin; Dad’s worrying about his health, making moves on the nanny, and fretting about the antiquated Jewish in-laws from the shtetl in the rooms upstairs. With all that going on, no one notices Sashenka’s revolution-minded uncle giving her a crash course in banned literature and sending her out to deliver guns and speeches and leaflets to the masses. On the side, she’s flirting with a Tsarist secret policeman with literary aspirations. Meanwhile, back home, she’s enjoying English Pears pine-essence baths and riding around in the Packard, suffering precious little angsty inner conflict as she plans the destruction of her family and all their kind.
I spent the first fifty pages of the book shouting at it: too much brand-name dropping; too schmaltzy by half; and whatever happened to the horror, had the author forgotten the horror?
But as the novel fast-forwarded to Sashenka’s own come-uppance – twenty years later, when she and the rest of the Stalin aristocracy created by the revolution find themselves at the mercy of a secret police going mad on absolute power – my scepticism evaporated. The author hadn’t, after all, forgotten the horror. Without giving away too much of the novel’s intricate, fast-moving, and well-made plot, Sashenka’s brief affair with a Jewish writer brings disaster on herself and on her high-ranking husband and children. The younger Sashenka might not have cared about her parents in a complex enough way to have won my sympathy, but her agonising adult dilemma, her attempts to save the children she loves – and, two generations on, the discoveries her various descendants make about this buried past – are so powerfully and persuasively set out that, by the time I finally put the book down, long after midnight, I was in tears.
Montefiore worked in Russia in the 1990s and has used its sprawl of archives, which even since the Soviet Union died have never quite become accessible enough to be satisfying, to tease out enough information for several gripping books on Russian and Soviet history.
The historical and geographical knowledge he brings to this book is impeccable (and he’s been wise enough to get his forays into the Russian language fact-checked too – so, unusually for a foreign book set in this closed, inward-looking land, this one’s admirably howler-free).
More importantly, one of the most interesting bits of his novel turned out to be its very realistic account of the difficulties Katinka, a modern Russian researcher, meets on her hunt through the KGB archives for Sashenka’s past. Even today, years after the Soviet collapse, mystification and secretiveness are everywhere. “You shouldn’t think of these Bolsheviks as modern politicians. They were religious fanatics. Their Marxism was fanatical; their fervour was semi-Islamic…You’d find it easier charting the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt than the labyrinth of Stalin’s Kremlin,” Katinka is told, as she sets off, and so it proves: she brushes with flirty liberal researchers and velvet-glove-over-iron-fist KGB librarians who talk as camply as Mexican soap stars; she has to duck and dive, charm and cheat, bring presents for cats and pay huge bribes before she finally unearths the truth.
There’s a moral of dogged hope in every true story from the gulag. If even a few of your words survived, the state didn’t obliterate all of you; if anyone bothers to bring your memory back to life by reading your file, you weren’t altogether wiped out. These faint flickers of light from the edge of the abyss don’t add up to the kind of neat and upbeat ending that Western storytelling favours. But, impressively, Montefiore pulls off a denouement that combines just enough hope, and happiness, to satisfy Western readers, without losing sight of the tragedy he’s invoked along the way. The note of quiet doubt on which his story ends should satisfy the gloomiest of Russian pessimists too.
Vanora Bennett’s latest novel, Figures In Silk, was published by HarperCollins in May 2008.