Years ago, Luigi, one of my colleagues at work in the European headquarters of ITT, the world’s biggest ‘conglomerate’ at the time, shared some family wisdom over lunch in his home as we enjoyed the spaghetti that he jokingly claimed was the end result of a thousand years of Italian culinary development. Based on his own marital experience of a failed first marriage, he warned that two artists in a family are one too many. To that I would add today, that one artist in the family is just right for purposes of putting bread on the table and having thought provoking conversation between the partners in a marriage.
In our family, we are both historians. As you probably know, I received a doctorate in history for which I produced a book that was published as separate articles in scholarly journals at the time. That is to say, I have an academic approach to history and employ the related investigative techniques in my essays, including parsing texts, on global politics today.
My wife, Larisa Vladimirovna Zalesova, is also interested in and writes about the historical past, both recent history and history going back to the start of the 20th century. But she practices a different craft as a novelist. Therein she is the ‘artist’ in our family.
Historical novels are especially attractive to the broad public because they are entertaining. The author enters the minds of the protagonists in a way that academic historians most often cannot do for lack of substantiating documentation, written and otherwise. The limitations of an academic historian in this regard became clear to me in my doctoral research when I entered the archival funds of the Russian legislators and statesmen responsible for the creation of Russia’s first parliament in 1905– and came up with dry dust, not living and breathing persons.
Historical novels like the one I am recommending here, the just published Nadine’s Story. Scenes from Life, draw on the author’s life experience with living and breathing people of today. There is no need to document every sentence with references, which can weigh down the writing of academic historians. And, as a bonus, the novelist can depict ‘scenes from life’ that your academic writer dares not touch such as the erotic and sexually explicit.
Nadine’s Story is a sophisticated piece of adult literature and I will say no more here on that issue.
Two weeks ago, Nadine’s Story was released as a paperback by Amazon into its worldwide distribution network of country websites, amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.fr, amazon.com.au, amazon.co.jp etc. It is now available through this same global network in ebook format at just under 10 dollars U.S. and the equivalent in local currencies outside the U.S.
Some of these websites already have a ‘look inside’ feature on the book’s web page that allows you to read the first 5 pages online to get a ‘feel’ for the writing style. Regrettably this ‘look inside’ omits the Foreword which I think is especially useful for potential readers to appreciate the work they are about to acquire. Accordingly, I reproduce that Foreword here below.
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Foreword
The novel Nadine’s Story was written over thirty years ago and is set in the time period of fifty years ago. In the meantime, almost all of our assumptions about life, about the “free world” and about the USSR have changed dramatically. This necessarily poses several questions which require an answer before the reader undertakes a journey into that world by opening the pages of this novel.
In the Soviet era, it was commonplace for authors to hold their manuscripts in a desk drawer for years before their eventual publication. The reason can be summed up in one word: censorship. Many widely recognized novels and works of documentary literature from the whole opus of 20th century publications had that fate. Individual works saw print during periods of “thaw,” as for example under the stewardship of Nikita Khrushchev. Many more saw the light of day when the Soviet system of thought control began to crumble under Mikhail Gorbachev and his policy of “Glasnost” in the 1980s. With the new freedoms which Russians enjoyed when the country closed the door on Communism in the 1990s, still more manuscripts were withdrawn from drawers and found publishers. One such work, Other People’s Letters by the author Alexander Morozov even won the Russian Booker Prize in 1998, though it stirred up much debate over the practice of publishing works decades after they were written.
In the case of Nadine’s Story, its long resting period till now was due to another kind of ‘censorship’ as practiced in the West: the stranglehold on publishing enjoyed till recently by the established network of publishing houses with their own agendas or ‘programs’ as they call it, interlinked with an established network of literary agents. The match between art and commerce was always fragile. The system had and has limited ability to promote more than a tiny fraction of works of merit outside their own stable of authors.
When Nadine fell victim to the exclusionary policies of publishers in the 1990s, the author moved on to other literary challenges, eventually finding a publisher in 2010 for her second novel, Live as Before (in Russian Живи как прежде) within the St Petersburg literary journal Zvezda, which had long published her articles on cultural affairs in Western Europe. In 2019, another well-established publisher in the same city, Liki Rossii, produced the Russian-language edition of the author’s next novel, Мозаика моей жизни. Meanwhile, for the English language edition, The Mosaic of My Life, the author turned to the American specialist company in self-publishing and print-on-demand, Author House.
This last favorable experience, which was reconfirmed with the publication soon afterwards of Zalesova’s first venture into travel literature, Dacha Tales: Life in the Russian Hinterland, persuaded her to dust off and publish Nadine.
As they say, what goes around, comes around. There is a new timeliness to this thirty-year-old manuscript which comes from immigration having become headline news in Western Europe and the USA these past few years. Indeed, the author’s last published novel, The Mosaic of My Life (2020), though covering the broad sweep of Russian history from before the Revolution to the 1970s, in passing had as an issue the question that tormented so many Russians over three generations: whether to remain in their homeland or to leave for better shores at the earliest opportunity come what may. In Nadine, this question is foremost in the mind of the heroine from start to finish.
In the course of the 20th century, Russia lost millions of its citizens not only to political repression and the cruelty of wartime. It also saw repeated exoduses, both officially sanctioned and by stealth. In the relative stable times under Leonid Brezhnev and his immediate successors, there were several high-profile defections that caught the imagination of the Western world, all the more so as those who fled were among the world’s most gifted artists who changed the perception of ballet the world over for several decades: Rudolf Nureyev, Alexander Baryshnikov, Natalya Makarova.
Their daring escapes were explained by one motive only: “I chose freedom.” What was largely overlooked was that these stars also chose full-blooded careers and artistic development that was denied to them not just because of the constraints of a command economy and authoritarian regime but by the excess of talent around them. Russia simply had too many of the world’s best talent on hand for the good of its star performers and their time on stage was much less ample than their ambition rightly demanded. With their departure, Russian performing arts obviously lost some of its best calling cards abroad, but did not implode.
In a broader sense, the emigration of countless talented people from Russia to Silicon Valley and to other employment niches in the West did not strip the country of its brains. The phoenix-like recovery of Russian industry, agriculture and culture in the new millennium attests to the sufficient supply in Russia of world quality masters in a great variety of domains.
The novel Nadine explores the question of staying or leaving from a variety of angles, mostly personal and imbedded in the family life of the heroine. I am confident this story will find its place in the ongoing exploration of emigration worldwide.
Gilbert Doctorow 