Sashenka: A Novel - Hardcover

Montefiore, Simon Sebag

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1416595546 ISBN 13: 9781416595540

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2008

Synopsis

In early twentieth-century Russia, Sashenka Zeitlin becomes caught up in the revolutionary fervor destined to bring down the czar, as she deals with arrest and imprisonment by the czarist's secret police, the bloody battles that engulf the country under the brutal leadership of Stalin, marriage and motherhood, and a forbidden love affair. A first novel. 100,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Simon Sebag Montefiore is a historian of Russia and author of Potemkin: Catherine the Great's Imperial Partner; Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar; and the bestselling Young Stalin, awarded the 2007 Costa Biography Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography. Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Montefiore lives in London with his wife, the novelist Santa Montefiore, and their two children.

Reviews

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Sashenka, Simon Montefiore's first novel, is a historical whodunit with the epic sweep of a Hollywood movie. The author of the bestselling biography Young Stalin, Montefiore is a natural storyteller who brings his encyclopedic knowledge of Russian history to life in language that glitters like the ice of St. Petersburg. The first section of the novel takes place in 1916, as the Russian revolution approaches. In a harrowing opening, police arrest 16-year old Sashenka Zeitlin at her private school and whisk her off to prison where she is accused of being a Bolshevik: code name "Comrade Snowfox." Her wealthy father secures her release, but the accusations are true. Her uncle, a party linchpin, has been training her in Marxism and sending her on secret missions. Sashenka wants to distance herself from her dissolute parents and craves the purity of revolution, the purging of decadence. "There is no one as sanctimonious as a teenage idealist," reflects her interrogator. Montefiore writes nuanced female characters, and Sashenka evolves into a complex heroine. In the second part of the book, set in Moscow in 1939, she is a restless wife in an arranged party marriage, devoted to her two children even as she engages in a passionate affair with a Jewish writer. The novel picks up after Stalin's reign of terror, when no one was safe from the draconian system of fabricated crimes and forced confessions. Sashenka's husband is one of Stalin's key officers, and she is still, to some extent, a believer, although she knows that Stalin has the power to shatter her family on a whim. When the dictator pays an unannounced visit to their dacha, Sashenka watches in horror as her little girl teases him, aware that loyal party members have been turned into "former persons" for less. In the final third of the book, set in 1994, a young historian is charged with figuring out what happened to Sashenka and her family. Montefiore shows that the historian seeking the truth must call upon creativity as much as upon meticulous research. It must not have been a stretch for this biographer to turn novelist. Here's hoping we get more spellbinding historical fiction from him.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Starred Review. 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 naive, 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. (Nov.)
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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 couple’s surviving unscathed Stalin’s purges of 1937 and 1938, the revolution’s 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 Sashenka’s legacy cannot so easily be put to rest. Montefiore’s command of Russian history makes the novel’s details especially vibrant. --Mark Knoblauch

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1416595546
• ISBN 13: 9781416595540
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 544