Molotov's Magic Lantern: A Journey in Russian History by Rachel Polonsky

What I am reading - Mr Floyd

This is an unusual book. Rachel Polonsky weaves together many different stories, from many different times. She writes sharply about the present day, as in these lines about the Manege, a huge exhibition hall close to the Kremlin: `A few years ago, on the March night of Putin's second election to the presidency, the Manege caught fire. (No one thought the catastrophe was accidental. The Mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, produced plans for a renovation - complete with three floors of underground parking - the very next morning.) The wind blew pieces of flaming roofbeams [...] into Romanov [the street where the Polonsky family was then living], where they dropped, burning, on the asphalt, and smouldered into ash beneath our windows.' She writes movingly about the Soviet past, about Varlam Shalamov (the Primo Levi of the Gulag) and his admiration for the poet Osip Mandelstam. I was still more struck by her account of the lives of two important scientists. Sergei Vavilov, a physicist, became President of the Academy of Sciences. His more talented and more idealistic brother Nikolai, a biologist, was arrested in 1940. Polonsky quotes a fellow-prisoner's description of how, in a narrow, overcrowded basement prison cell, Nikolai `tried to cheer up his companions... he arranged a series of lectures on history, biology and the timber industry. Each of them delivered a lecture in turn. They had to speak in a very low voice.' Sergei, meanwhile, petitioned unsuccessfully for his brother's release. The story of the painful compromises he made with the Soviet authorities is as moving as the story of his brother's heroism: `Two years later, Sergei Vavilov sat up all night [...], smoking through several packets of cigarettes, asking himself whether to accept the post of president of the Academy [of Sciences], or to allow the appointment of Stalin's favourite Trofim Lysenko and the further devastation of Soviet science and agriculture.'
Polonsky is at once a travel writer, a supremely well-read literary historian and a brilliant anthologist. In the course of Molotov's Magic Lantern we read about her encounters, both in their books and in towns where they lived, with a large number of both well-known and little-known writers, priests, scientists and politicians. Time and again she presents us with memorable quotations from and about these figures. Here, for example, is one of her heroes, the scholar Dmitry Likhachev, writing about Dostoevsky, `He would catch hold of a fact, a place, a chance meeting or a newspaper report, and give it a continuation. He would populate the streets, open the doors into apartments, go down into cellars, make up biographies for the people he passed in the streets.' Dostoevsky's genius, according to Likhachev, was not `to structure a reality, but to structure his novels around reality.' Polonsky's concern is with real, rather than fictional, lives, but she too has a gift for catching hold of unexpected facts, going down into cellars, opening doors we would otherwise never notice ...
One chapter is devoted to Novgorod the Great - once the most important of Russia's several mediaeval city-states. Polonsky writes that it is `the genius of Novgorod's geography to accommodate wilderness in well-populated space.' Molotov's Magic Lantern is a complex and subtle work, but its variety of historical perspectives and its many layers of literary allusion do not prevent it too from accommodating both brutality and wildness - on the contrary, they enable the reader to imagine both Soviet brutality and Russian wildness more vividly.