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Molotov's Magic Lantern: A Journey in Russian History
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Review
'I'm not a Russianist, but one doesn't need to be a Russianist, or even to have any pre-existing strong interest in Russia, to recognise this book as a quite brilliant work - or to be compelled by it. Part of my great admiration for it comes from Rachel's style, which is continuously and unarchly elegant. I don't think I found a single sentence out of the tens of thousands I read that I wanted written any differently ... Its erudition would be alarming, were it not so gracefully and wittily worn ... A huge intellectual and stylistic achievement ... It's been a privilege to read the book.' --Robert MacFarlane
'Everywhere on this journey, Polonsky shows great curiosity about the web of personality and history, the connections between power and literature that form Russian history and society today, her erudition is always lightly worn ... I was gripped by this book.' --Simon Sebag Montefiore
'It's a gem as she has achieved the unimaginable: a serious non-fiction account of Russia, which is as wide-ranging as it is entertaining ... This is a wonderful account of a changing Russia ... If you have always wanted to read an accessible, profound and original history of modern Russia, this is the book for you.' --Sunday Express
'Everywhere on this journey, Polonsky shows great curiosity about the web of personality and history, the connections between power and literature that form Russian history and society today, her erudition is always lightly worn ... I was gripped by this book.' --Simon Sebag Montefiore
'It's a gem as she has achieved the unimaginable: a serious non-fiction account of Russia, which is as wide-ranging as it is entertaining ... This is a wonderful account of a changing Russia ... If you have always wanted to read an accessible, profound and original history of modern Russia, this is the book for you.' --Sunday Express
Review
Praise for "Molotov's Magic Lantern"
“Cogently descriptive, empathic, plucky, and acerbic, Polonsky begins with a tour of Moscow’s grim landmarks of the Stalin era, then ventures out into the countryside, excavating the tragic and heroic stories of writers and scientists who suffered banishment and worse, many the victims of Molotov’s industrious murderousness . . . Polonsky is so steeped in Russian history and literature that everywhere she goes, her inner magic lantern projects the past onto the present, the imagined onto the real, and what we see is an illuminated land of immense brutality and beauty, suffering and spirit.” —Donna Seaman, "Booklist "
“The result is an eccentric work, daring in conception, peculiar in construction, that incorporates all Polonsky’s teeming scholarly knowledge of Russia and the Russian people . . . In the course of her travels, Polonsky visits monasteries, dachas, sanatoriums and bath houses. H
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
47 of 49 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I was not prepared for the first chapter. It traced Polonsky's Moscow apartment building's story in every direction. This building has seen a seemingly unending flow of celebrities and historical figures live and visit. It seemed as though every door and brick had a story. No lead was too insignificant to follow up. The stories branch in every conceivable direction. It is either astonishing passion, or obsessive-compulsive condition that has forced her to find out absolutely everything there is to know about the building and anyone who has lived or visited there. It becomes a microcosm of Russian history.
She then takes her show on the road, applying not just her detective talents, but her descriptive abilities on a tour of Russia that you and I could never take. Along the way, she crosses paths with the figures who haunt her apartment building, and we piece together their lives and their roles in Russian history. From the Baltic Arctic to the Siberian steppe, we see Russia and Russians today, choosing what they want to be proud of, ignoring (or ignorant of) the rest.
I thought it was going to be about Molotov, but in fact, it is about books and writers. Books tie everything and everyone together, and Polonsky buys books at every stop along the way. Russians' appreciation of their books, their libraries, their need for intellectual stimulation and diversion all work together to give us insight into Russia itself.
I thought the book slowed down the farther away we got from Moscow, and I liked the historical allusions better than the present observations, but overall, this is a fascinating journey.
I've never read anything quite like it.
She then takes her show on the road, applying not just her detective talents, but her descriptive abilities on a tour of Russia that you and I could never take. Along the way, she crosses paths with the figures who haunt her apartment building, and we piece together their lives and their roles in Russian history. From the Baltic Arctic to the Siberian steppe, we see Russia and Russians today, choosing what they want to be proud of, ignoring (or ignorant of) the rest.
I thought it was going to be about Molotov, but in fact, it is about books and writers. Books tie everything and everyone together, and Polonsky buys books at every stop along the way. Russians' appreciation of their books, their libraries, their need for intellectual stimulation and diversion all work together to give us insight into Russia itself.
I thought the book slowed down the farther away we got from Moscow, and I liked the historical allusions better than the present observations, but overall, this is a fascinating journey.
I've never read anything quite like it.
32 of 34 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
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.
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.
21 of 24 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is a superb book. It clothes its deep and wide-ranging scholarship in the most agreeable garb -- panoramic and intimate views of Russia's vast landscapes, remarkable capital city, greatest poets, novelists and other writers, wicked rulers, obsessive librarians, its streets, apartments, monasteries... For those who know little or nothing of Russia, and for those who know Russia well, this is a great read and a completely fresh take on its history, its geography, its literature, its place in our world and its self-understanding and -misunderstanding. The author has seen Russia, not from a chauffeured car (except on occasions when having a driver maximises the gain both to the visitor and the local economy), but from the ground, close-up, by a kind of immersion, over almost a decade. And has done so with astonishing powers of observation, memory, historical research, imagination and re-imagination, and first-hand love of this book-loving nation's books. As for Molotov himself, his psychology is penetratingly revealed, his grim career as Stalin's most faithful killer is detailed, his love of books is laid before us without varnishing or evasion, and the psychpathologies of Marxism itself and of its Bolshevist embodiment are pinned down with an apparently effortless precision that political philosophers and political historians may envy. No footnotes, but rich, throughout, in telling quotations. There is a helpful bibliographical note tucked away at the end, a very fine index too, and the whole book seems more reliably informative than most works armoured with citations. A great tour, and, as I said, a great read.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Molotov, monstrous bibliophile
Molotov's Magic Lantern
>>>> In the 1990s Rachel Polonsky went to live in Moscow with her family. Read more
>>>> In the 1990s Rachel Polonsky went to live in Moscow with her family. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Dr René Codoni
too much information
There's no doubting the author's passion for and knowledge of the subject matter. This is both the book's strength and weakness. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Boris
Too many small details obscure the big ones
Rachel Polonsky is a British journalist who enjoys a dream trip to Russia to explore Moscow and the city, and even stay in a historic apartment building. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Amy Henry
Magic of Molotov
This is a beautifully written book, blending personal experience with scholarship. Quite why Orlando Figes, a fine scholar in his own right, gave this writer such a hard time I... Read more
Published 13 months ago by S. G. THOMAS
fantastic book
Molotov's lantern is a little like its name: a combination of highly unexpected things. Molotov was one of the most dreary and dull of the Soviet politicians, not absolutely evil... Read more
Published 14 months ago by Jippu
Have access to Wiki close by!
British writer Rachel Polonsky lived in Moscow with her husband and four children for many years in the 1990's and later. Read more
Published 16 months ago by Jill Meyer
Figes had a point...
These are rambling reminiscences of the experience of living a privileged existence in Moscow, downstairs from the flat Molotov was allocated after his fall from grace, and getting... Read more
Published 16 months ago by Dr. G. SPORTON
Russian Journey
This is not a history of a Russia chronologically recorded, but an impressionistic account by an author deeply immerged in Russian literature. Read more
Published 20 months ago by Leif Asbjørnsen
Thank You, Stalin, For Our Happy Childhood! (?)
This book could never be fairly awarded anything but 5 stars. It traces the modern history of Russia through, initially, the building in Moscow where the authoress (uncertain, but... Read more
Published 20 months ago by Ian Millard
Dense and pretentious
I was really looking forward to reading this. However, I found the writing far too self-conscious and the thread of the narrative too weak for the book to be either enjoyable or... Read more
Published 22 months ago by cdc22
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