New books about foreigners in Russia – Weekend – Kommersant
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Alexander Chudinov “French tutors in Russia”
Publisher ROSSPEN
In the mid-1990s, Alexander Chudinov, an expert on the French Revolution, came across in the archives letters from a certain Jam to Gilbert Romm, whose biography the historian was working on at the time. Romm was an important figure in the revolutionary era, who had previously served in Russia as a tutor for Count Alexander Stroganov, while Zham was an absolutely unknown character. Nevertheless, almost 30 years later, Chudinov also wrote his biography. Jam turned out to be Pierre-Ignace Jones-Sponville, who remained in history as a co-author of the utopian treatise “Philosophy of the Land of True Happiness” (to which, as Chudinov proves, he actually had a rather indirect relationship). Sponville was a figure extremely characteristic of the Enlightenment. Like his friend Romm, he served as a tutor in one of the most noble Russian families – Count Alexei Kirillovich Razumovsky, developed his own pedagogical system, and was also fond of philosophy and aeronautics. It cannot be said that his biography is replete with amazing events. What makes The French Tutors interesting is that the hero’s life is intertwined with the author’s life – a chronicle of search, an attempt to reconstruct bit by bit the biography of a small man, a figure from the margins of big history.
Julia L. Mickenberg “American Women in Red Russia”
publishing house UFO
Translation Tatyana Azarkovich
In the 1920s and early 1930s, the Soviet Union was a magnet for many intellectuals, activists, adventurers, and people in search of a better life. We know many of them, mostly men. Historian Julia Mickenberg shifts the focus to women, more specifically to American women. Among her characters there are a couple of celebrities: dancer Isadora Duncan, anarchist Emma Goldman, but mostly these characters are not very famous. They were attracted by the social guarantees and sexual freedoms proclaimed by the new system, gender and racial equality, the opportunity to participate in a grandiose experiment (an attempt to build local communism was the American colony in Kuzbass, to which one of the chapters is devoted), to become preachers of the new faith and tell the West the truth about ” red Jerusalem” (as journalists Ruth Kennell and Millie Bennet dubbed Moscow). Many of them were disappointed, others tried to remain loyal to communism to the very end. In the preface, Mickenberg speaks of the relationship between American women and the USSR as a dramatic love story. That’s how – as a series of slightly sentimental documentary novels – she writes her book. At the same time, American Women in Red Russia is an emphatically biased study. Mickenberg explains that the Russian novel of American women is important as part of the history of the Western women’s movement, a source of inspiration and frustration without which modern feminism would be different.
Zinaida Bonami “Herwart Walden – curator of new art”
publishing house MSI “Garage”
Herwart Walden is a critic, writer, composer, theorist and preacher of expressionism, a bit of a businessman, and a bit of an ascetic, creator of the famous Der Sturm magazine and the Berlin gallery of the same name, who made great efforts to combine modernist art, literature, music, cinema, philosophy in one movement, and Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Russia – into a single field for the exchange of images and ideas, as well as pictures and money. Walden’s stellar era was the early 1910s. After the First World War, his gallery fell into decay, relations with artists began to deteriorate, and a new source of inspiration was needed. Around the same time, Walden became interested in leftist ideas and joined the Communist Party. In 1927, the year of the mass pilgrimage of Western intellectuals to the USSR, he first came to the Soviet Union, in 1930 he published a book about his journey and a special issue of Sturm (which opened with an admiring report from a correctional camp), and a year later he decided to move there finally. He did not find a place in Soviet culture, taught German in Inyaz and wrote textbooks, lived relatively inconspicuously, observed the gradual destruction of the avant-garde, until on the eve of the war he himself was arrested on charges of espionage. In October 1941, he died of starvation in a Saratov prison. The first Russian-language biography of Walden was written by the famous museologist Zinaida Bonami. Walden interests her in many ways as a pioneer of modern curating. Her entire book is a kind of hymn to curatorial work.
Simon Cooper “Happy Traitor”
publishing house corpus
Translation Polina Zhernovskaya
The hero of this book, double agent George Blake, got less fame than his colleague and at one time friend Kim Philby. Partly because he was less chasing after her. Its history is no less fascinating. A cosmopolitan intellectual, adventurer and devout believer at the same time, he wanted to become a priest in his youth, but instead became a secret agent – first British, and then Soviet. This transition was not a cynical change of master, but something like a religious conversion. It happened to Blake in 1951 – in Korean captivity, under the influence of not torture, as his enemies believed, but the books of Marx and Lenin that ended up in the cell. Returning to England, he launched an active espionage activity, contributing to the capture of dozens of Western agents in the east, until he himself was discovered in 1961. The court sentenced Blake to an unprecedented term of 42 years, but five years later he masterfully escaped from prison and soon reached the Soviet Union. There he lived peacefully for more than half a century, working as a specialist in the Middle East at the Institute of International Relations, communicating with other former spies, gradually becoming disillusioned with real socialism, but retaining a return to communist ideals. Journalist Simon Cooper visited him in Moscow in 2012, but decided to release his book only a year ago – after the death of the hero. Cooper’s main specialization is sports. Knowing this, “The Happy Traitor” willy-nilly read as the story of, say, a brilliant runner. Some of the ethical and political considerations in this book seem naive, but it is a very worthy and sober biography.
Soren Urbanski “Beyond the steppe frontier”
publishing house UFO
Translation Mil Zakirova
This book is not so much about foreigners, but about the border itself – what turns people living in one territory into foreigners for each other. The American historian Soren Urbansky describes the metamorphoses of the Russian-Chinese border from the 17th century, when the Cossacks first arrived in Transbaikalia, and the Qin dynasty almost simultaneously established control over neighboring territories, and up to the present day. Now it is a typical border between two nation-states, whose inhabitants live in their own cultures (some eat potatoes, others eat rice) and do not know too much about each other. But it was not always so. Back in the 19th century, this border zone, inhabited by Russians and Chinese, Buryats and Tungus, Solons and Chipchins, was a kind of frontier – a mobile territory of ethnic and cultural mixing, exchanges, conflicts, migrations, rapprochements and distances. Urbanski reconstructs this process in detail. Despite its fascinating subject matter (the frontier always breeds western-style romance) and a wealth of unsettling episodes like the Lake Hassan conflict, this is a staid, academic study that requires a certain amount of patience from the reader.
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