Sashenka

Starred review from September 15, 2008
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 naïve, 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.

Starred review from November 1, 2008
Through the prisms of the years 1917, 1939, and 1994, Montefiore digs into the tribulations of one family as it strives to survive the upheavals of 20th-century Russia. The pampered darling of a bourgeois Jewish family, Sashenka converts to Bolshevism in her teens. She becomes a highly placed apparatchik, but that does not save her from the 1930s Stalinist purges. By 1994, families separated by war and exile are digging in the archives to find lost connections. Not-so-blind fate intervenes to produce a surprise ending for Sashenka's progeny. Montefiore, already a celebrated historian ("Young Stalin"), makes his fiction debut chillingly realistic with his close knowledge of Stalin and his circle. Indeed, the telling details of the era redeem the novel's somewhat stilted opening chapters. The Russian voices of Vassily Aksyonov and Boris Pasternak have recounted the personal tragedies of the era in their captivating books "The Generations of Winter" and "Dr. Zhivago", respectively; Montefiore's "Sashen" "ka" shows us that the Soviet interlude in Russia's blood-spattered history still makes for a gripping read in the 21st century. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 7/08.]Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2008
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 couples surviving unscathed Stalins purges of 1937 and 1938, the revolutions 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 Sashenkas legacy cannot so easily be put to rest. Montefiores command of Russian history makes the novels details especially vibrant.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)