Russia: A Long-Shot Romance - Hardcover

Durden-Smith, Jo

3.5

8 ratings by Goodreads

9780394582573: Russia: A Long-Shot Romance

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394582578 ISBN 13: 9780394582573

Publisher: Knopf, 1994

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When in 1988 Jo Durden-Smith undertook to write an article about Leningrad for an American travel magazine, the Soviet Union loomed like "a black hole on the edge of Europe . . . impenetrable and incomprehensible," yielding faint traces of meaning only "against the odds of the local gravity." From the moment he stepped off the airplane, Durden-Smith found himself as an unchaperoned (and unusually tall) Westerner in the early months of glasnost, to be a genuine curiosity, both on the street and at the gatherings of Russian intelligentsia to which he was graciously admitted. What he was unprepared for was the force of his own curiosity, how swiftly he grew convinced that Mikhail Gorbachev's Soviet Union was "the most interesting place on earth: a place that offered . . . a sort of salvation." Of course, curiosity is no guarantee of understanding, and the more engrossed he became in Russian ideas, habits, and passions, the more paradoxical they appeared.
Until he met Yelena. An interpreter for the Soviet film industry, Yelena Zagrevskaya was "as defensively ladylike as any class-climbing Englishwoman." Carefully dressed in Western fashions, she was exotic yet familiar - at least, so she seemed at first. For even Yelena could not solve Russia for Durden-Smith; as he got to know her, falling in love with "the bottomless, unfathomable drama of her," he realized that a paradox is a paradox only to the uninitiated. And his own initiation would stretch over years, carrying him through a blighted film project and a failed coup, and finally landing him in a ramshackle bungalow outside Moscow with a wife and baby daughter - never happier.
This book of warmth and intelligence will serve as the reader's initiation into a land of perilous dreams and vanishing certainties. Russia may be experimenting with democracy, but to the Westerner its culture remains utterly foreign. "This is not any kind of Europe we know. It's China. It's the moon; it's Byzantium." It's inexhaustibly fascinating.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

From British journalist and filmmaker Jo Durden-Smith (Who Killed George Jackson?, 1976), a warm and perceptive memoir of his love affair with Russia and with the woman he married, which began with a casual visit in 1988 to a country he considered ``a black hole on the edge of Europe.'' Russia under Gorbachev was changing, acquiring the trappings of a civil society, and Durden-Smith, who admits that he came ``along for the ride'' with two friends, soon found himself in love. In love with Russia, ``its dreams and passions, its struggles with history, its monumental search for a memory, its intensity of feeling.'' On this first visit, he met ``the Russian Bob Dylan,'' Boris Grebenshchikov. Interested in making a movie of this underground rock star, he flew to Leningrad, to meet this ``chameleonic and sort of medieval Russian Clark Kent,'' who lived on the top floor of an abandoned building. How the liberalization changed Boris, who became rich and famous after the movie was made, and how he now lives in the US, where he judges television music competitions, is symbolic of what happened to Russian society as it emerged from the protective constraints of communism. Unprepared for capitalism and let down by the West, Russia, laments Durden- Smith, is now run by the Mafia and the ``new swash-buckling nomenklatura.'' As well as offering closely observed portraits of the Russians he came to know, he tells the story of his other romance: his falling in love with, and eventual marriage to, Yelena, a media executive, mother of a teenaged daughter, and herself the daughter of an old Stalinist. Confessing to be ``hooked,'' he currently lives in Russia, a place that unlike the West, he says, ``is still alive with future possibility.'' A moving love letter to a country, a people, and a woman, as well as a remarkable record of Russian private life in the midst of yet another revolution. -- Copyright �1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Durden-Smith is angry, so incensed that his raw emotion and loss of perspective make his contentions in these pages tedious and questionable. The West, he argues, missed the opportunity to advance Russian reform and instead has pushed the country backward to autocracy, corruption and suspicion. "Western" and "democracy" have become "dirty" words in Russia. Durden-Smith's perceptions follow from his avowal, "God, how I love this place." A British documentary filmmaker and freelance journalist, he has dual residences in England and Russia with his Russian wife, Yelena, their toddler daughter, his mother-in-law and stepdaughter, a student at Moscow University. Durden-Smith ( Who Killed George Jackson? ) re-creates his trips to Russia under both Gorbachev and Yeltsin; he writes mawkishly and at boring length of his courtship of his wife, even to providing a graphic account of their first lovemaking. Yelena emerges as often bad-mannered not only toward Durden-Smith's colleagues but also toward him. On her first visit to London, to serve as the translator for Russian filmmakers, Yelena "forced" the courting author to play the role of "a sugar daddy buying clothes for an avaricious teenager." To define his befuddlement over his adopted country--and presumably over his wife whom he seems to consider emblematic--Durden-Smith concludes with a metaphor: the "Russian soul" is akin to two strips of film running side by side but in opposition to each other.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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