Darling Doves.

Prince Felix Yusupov.

Midnight in St  Petersburg by Vanora Bennett

I never stop being fascinated by the inexhaustible appetite of Western writers — and readers — for Russia's Northern capital. When asking my friends why there is so much interest in Leningrad/St.Petersburg and not, say, Moscow, I get all sorts of answers. One friend, a writer and a big fan of Russian literature, said, ‘Obviously, it’s first of all a window on Russia that is more or less comprehensible. There is fatalism but there is also a sense of infinity. Like nowhere else.’

Vanora Bennett’s new novel Midnight in St Petersburg (link to Amazon) is a story of a young Jewish Russian girl Inna Feldman whose relatives flee to Palestine and abandon her in the South of Russia, within the Pale of Settlement. It is 1911, the Russian tsardom feels it has re-established its authority over the Empire after the turmoil and hope of the first revolution of 1905-1907. And it smells of pogrom everywhere. 

Inna steals a passport to go to Petersburg and find distant relatives to start a new life. On the train a roaming monk with piercing blue eyes stops anti-Semitic banter by berating the passengers for being un-Christian hate mongers. The monk asks a gypsy woman in the carriage to read his and Inna’s hands. They both have lifelines that peter out too quickly. 

The monk, who turns out to be Rasputin, befriends Inna and, in Petersburg, escorts her to her relatives. He wanders off to rise to become the tsar’s family ‘holy man’, and die in a brutal assasination. Inna finds a new life with the help of the family of violin makers and an Englishman, Horace Wallick, who works for Fabergé painting miniatures for rich customers. But not before cutting the lifeline on her hands in a desperate attempt to change her fate.

From here Bennett takes us on a whirlwind tour of Russia in 1911, jumping then to 1916-1917 with the murder of Rasputin, the fall of the Romanovs and the revolution, and then jumping again to 1918-1919 with aristocracy and intelligentsia fleeing the bolshevik regime at the height of the civil war.

It’s not just Rasputin we meet but his assassin Felix Yusupov; Karl Fabergé; the great poet Anna Akhmatova, and, in fleeting episodes, Bryusov, Mayakovsky, Shaliapin; the top aristocrats and the top revolutionaries, including a glimpse of Lenin and the founder of Cheka Dzerzhinsky. The gallery includes Maxim, the thinly disguised writer Gorky, who helps the desperate intellectuals to survive or escape. I started rolling my eyes when I realised the span of ‘things Russian’ in the book, but as I read along I warmed up to Bennett’s knack for making it all credible. It’s not a matryoshka nesting doll with laquered curiosities jumping one out of another. Historic and cultural details are very well-researched and as reliable as an academic work. Then the bits all fall into place to form a convincing mosaic of Russian life at the time.

The main story line of Inna’s tug of love between the pensive selfless Horace Wallick and the passionate Yasha Kagan, I thought, is captivating in that it is free from moralising, it is just, well, as love is: you never know where it will take you without you even knowing. 

There is a wonderful ‘sex scene’ between Inna and Yasha, when they play their violins each in their own rooms separated by a thin partition. (see excerpt below) Even if you don’t know much about violins, violin making or music, you’d love Bennett’s guiding the reader from a chunk of wood to a semi-finished shape, to a varnished piece, and then to the first sound of a new-born instrument. And, the wonder of wonders, the Stradivarius. 

In a hilarious scene, Prince Felix Yusupov, the richest man in pre-revolutionary Russia, asks Horace Wallick to find someone to restore his broken Stradivarius. Yusupov admits nonchalantly that, when boys, he and his brother got bored with violin lessons and used their instruments for fencing instead. Now, that the bolsheviks are strengthening their grip on Russia, he needs to take all the valuables he can and run. Here the story twists and turns in a dramatic way, with the priceless Stradivarius playing a crucial part.  

One obstacle when writing about foreign countries is how to deal with strange foreign words. Vanora Bennet lived in Russia for a long time and discovered a charming way of translating Russian names and phrases into English without explaining too much, and no footnotes. The Lemans, the violin makers’ family, for example, are busy preparing their favourite dish, ‘darling doves’ — cabbage leaf parcels with mincemeat inside, similar to dolma. But why darling doves? Because it’s the literal translation of the Russian word for the dish — ‘golubtsy’. I thought it’s brilliant. Readers may want to find out more about the doves or they may not, the writer is free not to burden them. 

The same technique works with placenames. I didn’t know there was Haymarket or Merchant’s Yard in St.Petersburg. Then I realised they were Sennaya and Gostiny Dvor! 

And don’t skip the Afterword, there is a very romantic surprise disclosure there.

Picture: Felix Yusupov in 1903, o/c by Valentin Serov. 
Yasha and Inna's love competition:

Scrambled Eggs, or Why the Russian Revolution Happened.

Fried eggs - яичница-глазунья.
Design by ©A.Anichkin.

I wrote about Maugham's Christmas Holiday here. Another of his Russian novels is Ashenden.

In a series of novellas Maugham recalls, through his alter-ego Ashenden, how while in the service of the British foreign intelligence he was tasked with preventing the bolshevik takeover in 1917.

Ashenden sets everything in motion to stop the revolution but in the end fails, as we know from history.

It turns out that scrambled eggs were, at least partly, to blame. The passage below describes the falling out between Ashenden and Anastasia, the Russian woman, on whom he later had to rely in St.Petersburg.

There is an awkward translation point here. The Russian translator Victor Veber (see the passage on my Russian blog post here) uses the word омлет  — omelette — for scrambled eggs.

It may be a mistake but could also be a deliberate choice to avoid readers' confusion. Fried eggs in Russian is яичница, or to be more precise, яичница-глазунья — fried eggs with eyes, as in my photo above. Scrambled eggs is also called яичница but with a different extension, яичница-болтушка — whipped, stirred or scrambled fried eggs. To build the growing antagonism between Ashenden and Anastasia on the differences between глазунья and болтушка could distract the reader from the humour of the original, the translator may have thought.

On the other hand he may have missed an opportunity to introduce a play on words: болтушка has another meaning — chatter-box, which is exactly what is Anastasia. See for yourself and enjoy the passage. It's tickling when you think what the world could have been in the past Century had it not been for Maugham-Ashenden's dislike for scrambled eggs.

I also recommend a short review of Ashenden on Tolstoy is My Cat blog.

(English text quoted from here)

Ashenden asked Anastasia Alexandrovna what she would have for breakfast.

'Scrambled eggs,' she said.

She ate heartily. Ashenden had already noticed that she had a healthy appetite. He supposed it was a Russian trait; you could not picture Anna Karenina making her midday meal off a bath-bun and a cup of coffee, could you?

After breakfast they went to the Louvre and in the afternoon they went to the Luxembourg. They dined early in order to go to the Comedie Francaise; then they went to a Russian cabaret where they danced. When next morning at eight-thirty they took their places in the dining-room and Ashenden asked Anastasia Alexandrovna what she fancied, her reply was:

'Scrambled eggs.'

'But we had scrambled eggs yesterday,' he expostulated.

'Let's have them again today,' she smiled.

'All right.'

They spent the day in the same manner except that they went to the Carnavalet instead of the Louvre and the Musee Guimet instead of the Luxembourg. But when the morning after in answer to Ashenden's inquiry Anastasia Alexandrovna again asked for scrambled eggs, his heart sank.

'But we had scrambled eggs yesterday and the day before,' he said.

'Don't you think that's a very good reason to have them again today?'

'No, I don't.'

'Is it possible that your sense of humour is a little deficient this morning?' she asked. 'I eat scrambled eggs every day. It's the only way I like them.'

'Oh, very well. In that case of course we'll have scrambled eggs.'

But the following morning he could not face them.

'Will you have scrambled eggs as usual?' he asked her.

'Of course,' she smiled affectionately, showing him two rows of large square teeth.

'All right, I'll order them for you; I shall have mine fried.’

The smile vanished from her lips.

'Oh?' She paused a moment. 'Don't you think that's rather inconsiderate? Do you think it's fair to give the cook unnecessary work? You English, you're all the same, you look upon servants as machines. Does it occur to you that they have hearts like yours, the same feelings and the same emotions? How can you be surprised that the proletariat are seething with discontent when the bourgeoisie like you are so monstrously selfish?'

'Do you really think that there'll be a revolution in England if I have my eggs in Paris fried rather than scrambled?'

She tossed her pretty head in indignation.

'You don't understand. It's the principle of the thing. You think it's a jest, of course I know you're being funny, I can laugh at a joke as well as anyone, Chekhov was well-known in Russia as a humorist; but don't you see what is involved? Your whole attitude is wrong. It's a lack of feeling. You wouldn't talk like that if you had been through the events of 1905 in Petersburg. When I think of the crowds in front of the Winter Palace kneeling in the snow while the Cossacks charged them, women and children! No, no, no.'

Her eyes filled with tears and her face was all twisted with pain. She took Ashenden's hand.

'I know you have a good heart. It was just thoughtless on your part and we won't say anything more about it. You have imagination. You're very sensitive. I know. You'll have your eggs done in the same way as mine, won't you?'

'Of course," said Ashenden.

He ate scrambled eggs for breakfast every morning after that. The waiter said:' Monsieur aime les oeufs brouillés.' At the end of the week they returned to London. He held Anastasia Alexandrovna in his arms, her head resting on his shoulder, from Paris to Calais and again from Dover to London. He reflected that the journey from New York to San Francisco took five days. When they arrived at Victoria and stood on the platform waiting for a cab she looked at him with her round, shining, and slightly protuberant eyes.

'We've had a wonderful time, haven't we?' she said.

‘Wonderful.’

'I've quite made up my mind. The experiment has justified itself. I'm willing to marry you whenever you like.'

But Ashenden saw himself eating scrambled eggs every morning for the rest of his life. When he had put her in a cab, he called another for himself, went to the Cunard office, and took a berth on the first ship that was going to America. No immigrant, eager for freedom and a new life, ever looked upon the statue of Liberty with more heartfelt thankfulness than did Ashenden, when on that bright and sunny morning his ship steamed into the harbour of New York.

Lenin and the Gardeners.

BBC Radio 4 today broadcasts an investigation into the alleged secret trip Lenin made to Letchworth Garden City in England, the first of its kind town, inhabited by juice-drinking sandal-wearing hippy-socialists.

The episode is semi-legendary. It's supposed to have taken place in 1907, when Russian socialists met for a crucial conference in London. The conference was taking place in the wake of the first, unsuccessful, Russian revolution of 1905. The tsar was rolling back the limited reforms and repressing any protest. Revolutionaries were in panic and despair. The atmosphere was brilliantly captured by Maxim Gorky, who was present at the conference, in the essay 'V.I. Lenin' (text here).

The Radio 4 team of investigators includes the author Dame Antonia Byatt; the leading authority on Edwardian socialism, Professor Sheila Rowbotham; and the science fiction writer and socialist, Ken MacLeod.

Details of the programme are on the BBC website here.