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Sashenka: A Novel, by Simon Sebag Montefiore
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In the bestselling tradition of Doctor Zhivago and Sophie's Choice, a sweeping epic of Russia from the last days of the Tsars to today's age of oligarchs -- by the prizewinning author of Young Stalin.
Winter 1916: St. Petersburg, Russia, is on the brink of revolution. Outside the Smolny Institute for Noble Girls, an English governess is waiting for her young charge to be released from school. But so are the Tsar's secret police...
Beautiful and headstrong, Sashenka Zeitlin is just sixteen. As her mother parties with Rasputin and their dissolute friends, Sashenka slips into the frozen night to play her part in a dangerous game of conspiracy and seduction.
Twenty years on, Sashenka is married to a powerful, rising Red leader with whom she has two children. Around her people are disappearing, while in the secret world of the elite her own family is safe. But she's about to embark on a forbidden love affair that will have devastating consequences.
Sashenka's story lies hidden for half a century, until a young historian goes deep into Stalin's private archives and uncovers a heartbreaking tale of betrayal and redemption, savage cruelty and unexpected heroism -- and one woman forced to make an unbearable choice.
- Sales Rank: #181239 in Books
- Published on: 2009-11-17
- Released on: 2009-11-17
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.25" h x 1.50" w x 6.12" l, 1.21 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 544 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Lauded historian Montefiore (Young Stalin) ventures successfully into fiction with the epic story of Sashenka Zeitlin, a privileged Russian Jew caught up in the romance of the Russian revolution and then destroyed by the Stalinist secret police. The novel's first section, set in 1916, describes how, under the tutelage of her Bolshevik uncle, Sashenka becomes a naive, idealistic revolutionary charmed by her role as a courier for the underground and rejecting her own bourgeois background. Skip forward to 1939, when Sashenka and her party apparatchik husband are at the zenith of success until Sashenka's affair with a disgraced writer leads to arrests and accusations; in vivid scenes of psychological and physical torture, Sashenka is forced to choose between her family, her lover and her cause. But as this section ends, many questions remain, and it is up to historian Katinka Vinsky in 1994 to find the answers to what really happened to Sashenka and her family. Montefiore's prose is unexciting, but the tale is thick and complex, and the characters' lives take on a palpable urgency against a wonderfully realized backdrop. Readers with an interest in Russian history will particularly delight in Sashenka's story. (Nov.)
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From Booklist
An adolescent schoolgirl from a privileged family of Jewish lineage, whose ideas of politics and revolution come from novels, Sashenka Zeitlin comes face-to-face with reality when she is arrested by czarist secret police in 1916 St. Petersburg. Undeterred by this and encouraged by her uncle, an associate of Lenin, she throws herself into the Bolshevik movement, becoming a double agent and hastening the dawn of the Soviet Union. By 1939, Sashenka has become a mother, married to a Communist official. Living in relative ease, they host parties of such repute that even Stalin attends. Despite the couple’s surviving unscathed Stalin’s purges of 1937 and 1938, the revolution’s need to devour its children eventually overtakes even true believers made especially vulnerable by indiscreet love affairs. In 1994 the Soviet Union has collapsed, but Sashenka’s legacy cannot so easily be put to rest. Montefiore’s command of Russian history makes the novel’s details especially vibrant. --Mark Knoblauch
Review
"Furiously readable. A brilliantly plotted novel that brings home with unique intimacy the joys and hopes of Russian families, the Revolution, the horror of the thirties." -- Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler's List
"A dramatic, gripping tale. Sashenka's story, set against richly textured backgrounds -- some lavish, some grim -- makes this novel extraordinarily difficult to put down." -- Robert K. Massie, author of Nicholas and Alexandra
"The world of the Russian Revolution and of Stalin's Terror comes vividly to life in this deeply intimate novel, full of Russian atmosphere and color. I felt as if I'd lived through an epic movie." -- Edward Rutherfurd, author of Sarum
"Intensely moving, with an unforgettable climax that will touch the hardest heart." -- Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans and Mao
"The perfect mixture of history and clever storytelling, with wonderful female characters and a seriousness of purpose that stands out. Gripping from start to finish." -- Kate Mosse, author of Labyrinth
"He writes beautifully, vividly, and passionately." -- Fay Weldon, author of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
Most helpful customer reviews
68 of 71 people found the following review helpful.
Stunning
By Vlad G
What British historian could ever tell me, the former USSR citizen, about Russia and its history, especially Soviet history?
This is what I thought before opening the book. I do not quite like historical novels in the first place. And after reading all range of Russian authors from Tolstoy to Shalamov I thought to have a right to be skeptical.
I was wrong.
Montefiore's book sucked me in like a giant black hole. Frankly, I have never read any "foreign" book about Russia that is so true in events, details, characters and language.
When I read the first chapter I was almost shocked by incredible style of Simon's writing. I could not believe I was reading an *English* text. I do not understand the magic, I do not know how it is done, but if you want to get an impression how original Tolstoy's text would *feel* in Russian - just read the first chapter of Sashenka.
Interestingly, Simon keep changing the writing style as story progress in time eventually making it more and more "soviet", but original chapter's style is unbeatable.
Another moment I want to mention - Simon mixes real and fictional heroes in this novel. Some heroes are 100% real and under their real names, some others (like Sashenka herself) are mix of several people, many of which are easily recognizable if you know this historical period and finally some characters are completely fictional. I ended up Googling some of fictional characters to make sure they were fictional, because Simon made them so incredibly realistic.
And, of course not only characters are alive, the every page of the book is. Simon managed to take tons of dusty yellow pages from almost (and up to date) inaccessible KGB archives and resurrected them to tell us their stories. Well, this is all merged into one story, the story that is just not possible to characterize in a short review. Just read the book, it's brilliant.
24 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
Fiction set against a terrifyingly real historical backdrop
By S. McGee
Simon Sebag Montefiore's grasp of the Stalinist era is masterful, and it's that historical detail that makes this book work. Alas, he is less adept at the art of fiction.
Still, this novel, as the author himself notes in his conclusion/afterword, admirably fulfills his goal of making the horrors of the Stalinist Terror live for the contemporary reader, particularly those who aren't likely to pick up Sebag Montefiore's superb books about Stalin himself, Young Stalin or Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. For those who have read the superb book about the impact of these years on ordinary Soviet citizens, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, this provides a fictional counterpart, one where imagination takes over and the reader following Sebag Montefiore's plot can transport themselves into the world his lead character, Sashenka, inhabited. Fortunately the reader, unlike Sashenka, can also escape this closed and paranoid world.
Sebag Montefiore's strength is portraying that world, from the corrupt decadence of the final years of Tsarist rule (which takes the reader from palaces to prisons) and the claustrophobic paranoia of the 1930s, which Sashenka herself displays almost without realizing it when she discovers that Stalin and his leaders, including Lavrenti Beria, have honored her dacha with a visit on the eve of May Day -- a visit that, on the surface a triumph, will hold unexpected and disastrous consequences for Sashenka and everyone around her.
Unfortunately, it's not until that point that the narrative really picks up and starts moving. While the characters and dramas of the first part do prove necessary to the plot (in ways that aren't apparent until much later), at the time they simply feel annoying and superfluous. And however necessary they ultimately become, the initial section is far too long, and many of the characters are too wooden and the dialogue stilted or unbelievable. Had this section been shorter and more tightly written, it would have contributed to the drama without serving as a drag.
Leaping forward from 1916, when Sashenka, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish industrialist, is first arrested as she leaves her boarding school and imprisoned for her Bolsheik views, the second part of the book deals with 1939, when she and her Bolshevik husband their two young children appear to have reached the pinnacle of success in Stalinist Russia.
This is where the plot and characters alike suddenly grip the reader and don't let go. I read the final 40% of this book in a single sitting, late into the night/early morning. Only days after the May Day party at her dacha, Sashenka's world starts crumbling around her and she can't understand why. Is it her fledgling affair with a Jewish writers who doesn't toe the Party line -- an unprecedented deviation from being the perfect Party loyalist and exemplar of Soviet womanhood? Or is there something in her family's or husband's past that is returning to haunt her?
The third section -- told through the eyes of a young historical researcher -- is perhaps the best of the three, however. There are few surprises in what is discovered -- except for the true, relatively mundane cause of the downfall of Sashenka and her husband. It is here that Sebag Montefiore finally wraps up the narrative in one neat package. Had he approached the story from the same persepctive throughout and used flashbacks to explore the historical dimensions, this would have been a far stronger novel, I believe.
Still, as it stands, this is an excellent plot that is written adequately, despite Sebag Montefiore's difficulties with character. (Shifting points of view are distracting, and even Sashenka doesn't emerge as a real character until quite late in the 1939 section -- the reader can identify with her intellectually or generally, but the real test -- could you imagine how she looked or how her voice sounded, how she would react in a situation not described in the book? -- of whether a character "lives" isn't one she could pass. (Just apply that standard to Scarlett O'Hara, for instance, and you'll see what I mean.)
Very much worth reading, especially for anyone who is interested in the emergence of modern Russia, how and why Communism took root there for 70 years, and the lives of Russians during and after that period, and who would rather read an impeccably-researched novel than a non-fiction work.
23 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
Russian History and Mystery
By Someone Else
This is an outstanding work from a serious scholar of Russian history. I'll be interested to try one of his nonfiction books. The author's knowledge of period details, mindsets, and customs really makes this novel stand out. There are so many fascinating little extras.
My summaries of the sections are deliberately vague, as I think it's essential to be in the dark about where the story is going for best enjoyment. All three of the parts are very nicely tied in with each other by the end of the novel.
Part I: 1916--Sashenka Zeitlin is a willful and reckless 16-year-old. Her father is wealthy and influential, so the family is allowed to live in St. Petersburg rather than in the Pale of Settlement with the other Jews. Sashenka rejects the excesses and debauchery of her Tsarist parents and becomes a Bolshevik spy.
Part II: 1939 Moscow--Sashenka is now married to a Party leader and has two small children. She has remained a loyal Party member for over 20 years and still supports Stalin and the Soviet system. Just when they think the purging and "The Terror" is over, the arrests and disappearances start up again. This time, Sashenka fears that she and her husband may be targeted.
Part III: 1994 Moscow and London--Katinka, a young historian, is hired in London by Roza Getman to find out what happened to Roza's family in Russia during the years of Stalin's Terror. In the course of her research, Katinka stumbles upon Sashenka's story. This part of the book was what sealed the deal for me on the five-star rating. I could not stop reading. It's a great mystery with the clock running down and old-timers trying to keep their secrets safe.
Overall very well written and engaging. There is some awkwardness here and there where it's clear the author hasn't quite made that transition from nonfiction writer to novelist, but nothing glaring. Mostly just places where the thoughts or dialogue don't sound true to the way normal people think and speak. It doesn't detract from the story. It just stands out now and then.
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