House of Meetings

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe a debt to several recent books.

First, Anne Applebaum’s magisterial Gulag: A History (Allen Lane; Doubleday). Lucidly and elegantly constructed, simply and strongly written, and asking all the right questions, this is the single indispensable work, after Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, on the phenomenon of Soviet slavery.

With Andrew Meier’s Black Earth: Russia After the Fall (HarperCollins), you only have to look at the jacket photo of the author to know what lies ahead of you: honesty, intrepidity, wit, candor, and (a vital quality, hereabouts) cheerful unfastidiousness. This book combines travel writing and historiography at a formidably high level.

Orlando Figes’s Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (Penguin; Metropolitan Books). I have an informal method of evaluating tomes of this kind (729 pp.): I look to see how many notes I have made at the back of them (e.g., “39—serf theaters and orchestras…552—Nabokov Sr.’s murderer”). My edition of Natasha’s Dance ends, generously, with ten blank sides. I needed them all.

Like Anne Applebaum’s Gulag, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (Weidenfeld & Nicolson; Knopf) is partly the result of heroic labor in the newly opened archives. This book changes the picture, and in a disturbing way. The author is very meticulous and very moral; but he can’t prevent the emergence of a Stalin more personally impressive than we generally believed him to be — more complex and more intelligent. Stalin was in possession of a certain amount of political poetry; he was also, alas, in possession of a soul.

Masha Gessen’s Ester and Ruzya (Dial Press) has an informative subtitle: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler’s War and Stalin’s Peace. The family memoir is very smoothly assembled; but the experience of reading it is necessarily jagged and gaunt. Gessen is superlatively good at showing how state systems bend and tug the individual into all kinds of strange shapes. She is also especially evocative on the physical furniture and mental atmosphere of postwar Moscow.

As is Janusz Bardach, in Surviving Freedom: After the Gulag (University of California Press). In an earlier book of mine (Koba the Dread) I praised an earlier book of his (Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving Stalin’s Gulag); Dr. Bardach wrote to me, and we had a brief interchange in the months before his death. I knew the defector-historian Tibor Szamuely, who served time at Vorkuta. But Tibor died thirty years ago. And it was Janusz Bardach whom I felt to be my one human link to the events I describe in House of Meetings; and in my struggle, as I wrote it, I was greatly sustained by his ghost.

And by other ghosts — by Fyodor Dostoevsky, by Joseph Conrad, by Eugenia Ginzburg, and by the Tolstoy of the USSR, Vasily Grossman.