Re read in January 2017 or actually listened to. This time hearing the correct pronunciation of names.

I really loved this book of the authors childhood at the beginning of the 20th Century up to the Russian revolution. She describes a lifestyle so different to now and conveys the horrors of what happened there so well. It is hard to imagine that this took place less than a hundred years ago. Would highly recommend this book. ( )

3.5 Stars

It's clear Eugenie Fraser was on a mission when she wrote her memoir of growing up during the last decades of czarist Russia. Born of a Scots mother and a Russian father in Archangel, she was witness as a teenager to the early days of the Russian Revolution; her mother's passport was her ticket (along with several of her immediate family members) of escape when the upheavals in her native land became increasingly violent and capricious. She finished her schooling in Scotland, married a Scotsman, and became the classic trailing wife as she followed him to job positions in India and Thailand. Mrs. Fraser came to writing only towards the end of a very long life, when she decided to write the story of her early years as a way of memorializing a way of living that has utterly disappeared, and to pay tribute to the many people that perished in the conflagrations of the Stalinist purges and WWII.

This was an admirable goal, certainly. The question is: how well did she succeed? Well, the answer is a bit complicated.

As a document of how people physically lived in an upper-middle class home it's brilliant. The fragrance of birch and pine pervading the rooms as the logs burned and crackled inside the great stove, the sour tang of the spiced cookie dough waiting weeks in great stone crocks before it would finally be rolled out into Christmas cookies, the itchy frustrations of a little girl frantically squirming to unfasten the final button of her long underwear--the details are immediate and vivid. Clearly Eugienie took great--almost animal delight--in recalling those sensory particulars. It's one of the greatest records I've come across of what things in a long ago era felt like, smelled like; as a catalogue of the sheer thinginess of things it is amazing. The exhaustive details never end; it's as if she were channeling Martha Stewart (and that is not meant as a disparagement as I admire Ms. Stewart as a force of nature; just don't look Martha in the eye or she'll find something for you to do, like maybe de-seeding a pomegranate or sanding down wooden clothespins to make them into Christmas ornaments) as Eugenie tells you how a household of that era was run:

Two young men dressed in high-necked, black cotton shirts came to polish these floors. After removing their boots, each slipped a thick sock over one foot. On the other was a special short boot fitted with a brush...Crossing one arm behind his back each man skated over the floor, the leg with the attached brush swinging back and fore in a wide sweep while the other dragged behind twisting and hopping...Their damp shirts clung to their backs, but they continued skating up and down the rooms, only stopping to change the boot to the other foot or to drink a glass of kvas--the cool beverage brewed from black bread and raisins, drunk all over Russia.

So yes, I take Ms Fraser's word for it when she informs you that this was the best way of polishing a parquet floor, or at least the way it was done back then. I have difficulties, however, with completely trusting her otherwise. For one thing, the POV is faulty; sometimes she relates her story only as she, a child at the time, would understand it back then; more often she is looking back at her childhood, with an older woman's comprehension (and understandable bitterness). You never are quite sure which Eugenie is telling a story, or how she came by that knowledge. I'm not referring to tales of her parents and her grandparents (particularly the dramatic account of her paternal Babushka journeying by troika to plead for clemency for her husband--though Eugenie succumbs to uncharacteristic vagueness as to whether her grandfather actually killed a man) as they would, naturally enough, pass into family legends. I'm talking about other stories, such as the monkey in the bathhouse, where it isn't clear that Eugenie was there or not. And there are a few no-way-do-I-buy-this moments, such as when Eugenie claims that, when she as a teenager, a group of soldiers entered her bedroom, lifted her up, and conducted a mattress sweep--all without her waking up. I'm sorry, I find that hard to believe that anyone could remain so profoundly asleep--unless he or she were drugged, drunk--or sustained a sharp knock on the head. She undermines her own credibility with nonsense like that; it's a shame.


There are other problems. Ms Fraser is superb with stuff; with dealing with the abstract she's pretty much helpless. (There's an interview with Ms Fraser where she claims that she has an exceptional memory but isn't very bright, and that her mother wasn't very intelligent, either. I'm inclined to accept both of these statements; in general, when people insist to you that they aren't very smart, you should go ahead and believe them.) She talks about the "dusha" or the Russian soul, and says that the Russian part of her swallowed up her Scots part, without going into further explanations as to what that meant, exactly. Her analysis of the collapse of her parents' marriage is confused and truncated, and her description of the abandonment she felt when her mother left to live in St Petersburg for two years is brief and bland. Far too many friends, family members, and servants are described as "very special"; indeed, there are far too many names of people, particularly towards the end. It's clear that she wants to bring as many people out of the past that she can, but she just can't do it, they remain faceless shadows, merely part of a rather exhausting catalogue, no matter how terribly they died. It's simply beyond her capability to bring them back to life.

Ms Fraser demonstrates another, far more troubling incapacity in her memoir. Russia's involvement in WWI, the various uprisings, the civil war, and the Russian revolution take up the last sections of the book. If the book had been written entirely through Eugenie's viewpoint as a teenager I would expect the book to remain tightly focused, with no explanation, or acknowledgement of the reasons behind Russia's turmoil; teens tend to be self-absorbed. Nor would I expect the older woman to react with anything except bitterness towards the political and military machine that took so much away from her. But I kept waiting for some sort of understanding from the mature Eugenie as to *why* the Russian Revolution happened. The men and women who served her family, the peasants that she saw pushing the logs down the river--oh, they all did their jobs, whistling or singing cheerfully. I kept waiting--and waiting--and finally Eugenie had her moment of truth, or what I thought should have been her moment of truth: She trudges along with her dairy bucket (as always with Eugenie, the details of which are dutifully described) to a peasant woman's hut to get some milk. The woman shrugs at the sight of the formerly pampered young mistress of the house being reduced to such a task, and coldly recounts how she had to race back and forth across the same stretch of ground to breastfeed her own babies during her brief breaks while working in the fields. Is there a frisson of guilt from the girl, or a now-I-get-it little clang in her head? Is there even a pause in Eugenie's narrative, a "looking back at this moment I could see..." There was nothing. NOTHING. Only a description of the woman's "malicious" smile and further lamentations on the loss of another silver spoon. (You know, the silver spoon that would have kept the peasant woman's family alive for a little while longer.)

As an example of the clueless obtuseness of the aristocrat, it was breathtaking. More than anything I've ever read in any book on the French or Russian Revolution, it made me realize WHY the peasant picks up a stone to sharpen his scythe, or lashes a makeshift pike upon a pole. (Though of course, revolutions are normally started by people just a bit higher on the social scale; they can see what they're missing out on, while the truly destitute are usually just struggling to survive.) So I guess I should thank Ms Fraser for really bringing home to me the oblivious, tone-deaf arrogance of the upper classes--even as I was mentally picking up the nearest heavy object. Further whines, of the "arrogance" of the army officer who "dared" to question her mother, etc. just cemented my opinion: some people just do not get it.


Eugenie Fraser died about a decade after she wrote "The House by the Dvina". She wrote two more memoirs; one, an account of her life during the last days of the Raj, which I am sure is full of the sounds and smells of an "exotic" land--and which undoubtedly unwittingly shows the cluelessness that got the British chased out of the sub-continent. (There's a jaw-droppingly obtuse comment about "small yellow men" fighting the Russians that no editor should have allowed to remain, no matter what era the writer had been brought up in.) I would have loved to have met her, and to have taken her out to dinner. I would have enjoyed hearing the differences on the Scots and Russian methods on how to make wild berry preserves (the Scots mash up the berries; the Russians lower the berries slowly into the boiling syrup to preserve them whole) and to hear a few of the tales her family told when they were gathered cozily around the samovar. But in the end, after a few hours of listening to a relentless recount of things-things-things, I probably would have called for the check early--or maybe even for a tumbril.


For more on this interesting--and aggravating--woman, check out this interview:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkGxzCx8lb8



( )

35/2009. The opening, which I've read many times, is gorgeous - and then I would hit a wall a few chapters in as it seemed to be falling into rote descriptions of silver-age bourgeois life and apologies for the exploitations of Czarism. A full reading, done this year as due diligence on learning about Arkhangelsk while following the Arctic Sea, was more rewarding than I expected. The long-range structure of the book is carefully planned and the terror of the early revolutionary period is grippingly described with some compassion for the other side as well. I wonder what happened to the Finnish branch of the family.