A Train to Moscow by Elena Gorokhova - #BookReview

 

She immediately knows something is wrong. The door to Marik's house is ajar, and there is a black car blocking the street just a few meters away. Not really a car - there aren't many cars in Ivanovo. It looks more like a wagon that plucks drunks off the sidewalks on holidays and deposits them at the sobering station in the towns centre.

Who is this wagon waiting for? Not for her friend Marik, for sure. Marik is seven, like Sasha, and no driver would waste time plowing through snow all the way to the edge of Ivanovo to stand by while a first grader pulls on his itchy uniform and tosses his books into a schoolbag.

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In post–World War II Russia, a girl must reconcile a tragic past with her hope for the future in this powerful and poignant novel about family secrets, passion and loss, perseverance and ambition.

In a small, provincial town behind the Iron Curtain, Sasha lives in a house full of secrets, one of which is her own dream of becoming an actress. When she leaves for Moscow to audition for drama school, she defies her mother and grandparents and abandons her first love, Andrei.

Before she leaves, Sasha discovers the hidden war journal of her uncle Kolya, an artist still missing in action years after the war has ended. His pages expose the official lies and the forbidden truth of Stalin’s brutality. Kolya’s revelations and his tragic love story guide Sasha through drama school and cement her determination to live a thousand lives onstage. After graduation, she begins acting in Leningrad, where Andrei, now a Communist Party apparatchik, becomes a censor of her work. As a past secret comes to light, Sasha’s ambitions converge with Andrei’s duties, and Sasha must decide if her dreams are truly worth the necessary sacrifice and if, as her grandmother likes to say, all will indeed be well.

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This is Ms Korokhova's first foray into fiction and she has made a excellent job of it. She has previously written two non-fiction books, A Mountain of Crumbs and Russian Tattoo, about her own life in Russia.

The main character, Sasha, leaves her village which is still reeling from it's past, to pursue her dream of becoming an actress. This is in opposition to the opinion of her mother and grandfather, who expect her to pursue a more useful role in Soviet society. 

However, what the author skilfully does, through Sasha's rebellion, is to use theatre as a metaphor for that which was happening in post war Russia. It was an interesting book to read during the current situation involving Russia and Ukraine. I am not making any political point here as I do not think this is the place for it, but it was interesting to see how Russia was reacting during it's post war period.

What the reader quickly realises is that Sasha is not only leaving behind her family and village, but family secrets that neither she, nor the reader can fathom at this point. She takes with her diaries which were written by her uncle who went missing during the war. The diaries were subsequently hidden away until being discovered by Sasha. We can read the diary entries alongside Sasha, and understand what life was like during Stalin's regime. 

This book has been intelligently created by an author who is insightful and astute. I think it will appeal to readers who enjoy historical fiction. I would love to hear you thoughts on this book.

ISBN: 978 1542033879

Publisher: Lake Union

Formats: Hardback, audio and e-book

No. of Pages: 316 (hardback)

About the Author:

Elena Gorokhova grew up in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, in a courtyard that became a more accurate emblem for the Soviet life than the ubiquitous hammer and sickle: a crumbling façade with locked doors and stinking garbage bins behind them.  Like everyone else, when she was nine, Elena joined the Young Pioneers and had a red kerchief tied around her neck.  A tiny cell in the body of a Leningrad school collective, she promised to live, study, and work as the great Lenin bequeathed every citizen to do.

But she harboured a passion that grew into an un-Soviet failing: at age ten she was seduced by the beauty of the English language and spent the next eight years deciphering its secrets at Leningrad English school # 238, to her mother’s bewilderment.  Her mother – born three years before the Soviet state – became a mirror image of her Motherland: overbearing, protective, difficult to leave.  A front-line surgeon during WWII, she wanted her daughter to be a doctor and a builder of communism, but Elena, in her mother’s words, was “stubborn as a goat.”  What followed was the English Department of Leningrad University, a marriage to a visiting American student, and a scandal, both public and private.  After six months of official hurdles and family turmoil, Elena left for America, a ravaged suitcase on the KGB inspector’s table with twenty kilograms of what used to be her life.  What followed was unknown, and frightening, and filled with mystery.

In the United States, Elena received  a Doctorate in Language Education and has taught English as a Second Language, Linguistics and Russian at various colleges and universities. She has also written three books. She is married and has a daughter, who is beautiful, talented and smart. And stubborn as a goat.

(photo courtesy of Goodreads/bio info courtesy of the authors website/ARC courtesy of NetGalley)