All in the family. A new book for your consideration: ‘Nadine’s Story’

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 20^th 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 20^th 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 20^th 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.

A special essay for WordPress readers

As some of you may be aware, I use this WordPress platform to publish my video interviews and their transcripts. I maintain this platform mainly for the purpose of giving viewers access to my earliest archived essays going back more than a decade. All of my current essays are published elsewhere, on my Substack channel – Armageddon Newsletter. That is open to both free and paid subscribers, and I note that the numbers of subscribers and readers there are many times greater than here on WordPress.

I call this fact out in particular to my Japanese audience. I am very pleased that my latest book “War Diaries” has found a significant number of purchasers on Amazon.co.jp not only in ebook but also in paperback format. This is quite remarkable, because the Japanese market is very hard to crack for writers in English. Since I see Japan among the dozen leading countries watching this WordPress platform daily, may I suggest that you sign up for my Substack platform so that you can read my daily essays and not just see podcasts.

Today I make an exception to my rule against publishing essays on WordPress. The growing controversy in Alternative Media that I have precipitated has become bitter and ad hominem in nature. Accordingly I am obliged to respond, as I do in the essay below:

A riposte to Scott Ritter’s latest calumny

At the top of the profession, the world of geopolitical interview podcasts is fairly narrow. In terms of popularity as measured by viewer numbers on each and every broadcast, there is a cluster of names that come up again and again: Scott Ritter, Larry Johnson, Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer.

To my surprise, over the past 18 months since my first debut on ‘Judging Freedom’ hosted by Andrew Napolitano, I find myself among these leading names. I say ‘surprise’ because this kind of public activity was never in my plans or expectations. I have been in ‘public intellectual’ mode since 2010, when I began publishing analytical essays online and my audience over the years reached to hundreds, then thousands of readers. To be sure, in 2016, when I was the guest on mainstream Russian talk shows on all federal channels, I appeared on programs watched by very large audiences, but that ended in 2017 when Russian TV’s fascination with Americans in the Trump camp came to an end.

cThe idea of reaching 200,000 viewers with a single half-hour interview, as has happened repeatedly over the past year, was something I did not strive for and did not have the means to achieve until my good friend Ray McGovern put me together with Judge Napolitano.

With respect to Napolitano’s program, where the host himself shares broadly the views of the aforementioned guests, I am an outlier who serves as a useful demonstration of the program’s openness to diversity of opinion, if nothing more, since none of his guests agrees with my positions on this or that as regards Russia. And why should they? Apart from Ray and me, not a single one of the guests on this channel is a Russia expert. Not a single one of them knows more than three words of Russian. We work from very different methodologies, which by itself predetermines outcomes of analysis.

On another channel, one which came later to prominence and still has lower subscription numbers, that of Professor Glenn Diesen, my views are closer to those of the host and, presumably, to his target audience.

The end result of this process is that I am at the center of controversy in Alternative Media. In an ideal world, that would not be a problem. But in the real world, the controversy has too often been highly personalized and venomous. There is no one more active in spreading venom than Scott Ritter, who has on air in recent months described me as ‘a moron’ and as ‘a piece of shit.’ So much for politesse.

In his latest interview with The Judge, he is more careful in choosing his words though in his remark about my travels in Russia, ‘if they let Doctorow back in’ you get an inkling to what kind of skullduggery he is attempting in Moscow and Petersburg during his ongoing visit there.

I invite the Community to watch Ritter’s latest interview with The Judge. He gratuitously attacks me three or four times over issues big and small. But that is NOT the reason I recommend viewing this interview. It is to see and consider Ritter’s thinking processes, because they are emblematic of how this very popular public figure in Alternative Media bases everything he says about Russia today on what he hears from front line military commanders including the director of a drone unit, from government officials in the energy sector, from intelligence officials. These are, for Ritter, the whole of Russian society, which is fully backing the war, the way it is being waged, the collegial government around President Putin, and Putin himself. He is not being feted by RT, he says, but is on a book promotion tour. Indeed! And one may ask who his publisher is and who actually is putting up the funds to host him. He is admittedly not paying his way, which should make the Buyer beware. I pay for every visit to Petersburg out of my own pocket.

To be very kindly about it, there is a strange naivete in Ritter’s thinking about how Russia stands apart from the ways in which the rest of the world operates. There can be no internal contradictions between different Russian government agencies! Everyone is pulling in the same direction! No personal ambitions seem to exist!

I have been criticized not only by Ritter for using anecdotal evidence in support of generalizations in my travel reports. I do not deny that because it would be impossible to take in everything happening in that vast country in a methodical, scientific manner in a three-week visit, or even in a three-year visit. A great deal rests on the judgment and prior experience of the observer. My experience goes back to 1967. I lived and worked as a head of corporate representations in Moscow and Petersburg from 1994 to 2000. None of my peers can say the same. They bring different background experience to the table when they speak and so it is no wonder that we come to different conclusions.

To suggest that my dinner hosts on National Unity Day were Navalny supporters, meaning subversives, as Ritter does in this interview, is gratuitous calumny.

Enjoy the show. And think over carefully the mental processes you see the hero of the piece bringing to bear on the vital questions of our times.

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.