All in the family

Luigi, a sharp-tongued colleague from my first corporate job in Brussels, had many trenchant pieces of advice to share from his own life experience. One of these was “two artists in the family is one too many.”

 Indeed, from the standpoint of paying the monthly bills, that is all too often true. But there is another dimension to his observation that has borne itself out very well in my family life: a couple in which one spouse is academic minded and the other is artistic minded can be a complementary and mutually reinforcing partnership.

“Partnership” may seem an odd way to describe matrimony to the younger readers in the Community who know only about romance.  I myself was struck by the designation “partner” which Prince Gremin uses when presenting his recent bride Tatyana to Onegin at a ball in his palace (see Tchaikowsky, Yevgeny Onegin). But then again, Gremin is several decades her senior and after a certain age breeding ceases to be the defining element in a relationship and other points in common take over, or the relationship sours.

I will not expand this introduction longer than needed. But it is essential to make one other point here at the outset, a point which the Harvard of my days never grasped and which American higher education in general is unlikely to appreciate even today:  academic minds and artistic minds operate in entirely different ways although they may arrive at the same Truth in the end by their different pathways. Academic training prepares you to be a critic, meaning straight lines and 90-degree angles. Artistic training prepares you to be creative, meaning circuitous reasoning. And the final products of the two may meet up, but only at the end of the working process.

I have written narrative history based on archival sources. That requires a certain imagination to breathe life into dry papers. However, the names, facts about the historical personages are always precisely supported by footnoted references.  Historical novels have no such limitations on the imagination of the author.

I write to present the best novel written by my Russian wife, Larisa Vladimirovna Zalesova:  Mosaic of my Life. Regrettably, when it was first published the Covid pandemic, was about to strike and book promotion was not on our agenda.  Now we seek to make amends.

This is a sweeping history of Russia in the 20^th century from the pre-Revolutionary normality through the waves of suffering inflicted by Stalin on the broad population and horrors of World War II straight up into the last quarter of the century. The heroine of the novel is the daughter of an opera singer who performed in the Mariinsky Theater in the circle of the great Russian basso Shalyapin, as well as in the Paris opera. Some of the story line is taken from the reminiscences of the mother, whom my wife interviewed in Paris. Other story elements come from the lives of members of my wife’s family and friends in Petersburg.

Readers will be surprised by various adventures including the romance between the opera singer mother and a German officer who saved them amidst the fighting in the South of Russia during the war. But life is often filled with such contradictions to our expectations of relations.

I point out that the “Mosaic” in the title is not merely used in the abstract sense of life experiences but in the concrete sense of Roman-era paintings in stone: Crimea figures large in this novel, as it did in the life style of the Russian aristocracy in the 19^th century and early 20^th. The opening pages describe the fragments of Antique mosaics still found there which so impressed the heroine.

For those so interested, The Mosaic of My Life is also available in Russian in an e-book version. Larisa in fact produced both English and Russian texts in parallel so that both versions were released at the same time.

I direct readers to the Comments section at the bottom of the book’s Amazon.com web page. Yes, the reader correctly identifies the Tolstoyan sweep of this historical novel.  Bulgakov told us that ‘manuscripts do not burn” in his Master and Margarita. I suggest here that novels published five years ago do not age.  I urge readers to use the Look Inside function on Amazon to sample this work for themselves.