Recommendations from our site
“I just love the way it recreates this world of Kyiv where there’s chaos, essentially. There are various contenders for power: the Germans have set up a puppet government, Petlyura and his nationalists are trying to topple it; the Bolsheviks are attacking Kyiv from the east. In the middle of all of this turmoil, there’s a family, the Turbins, who have fled south, as so many did after the October Revolution. They’re trying to eke out an existence in Kyiv, to make sense of what’s happening and where they should put their efforts—whether they should join the White Guards who are assembling in the South, in the Don and Kuban, at that time. It’s a novel that perfectly evokes a short period of time, only a few weeks, in 1918. What I love about it is it does in a novel what you would want to do in a history book but can’t because you have to write history. It’s released from all the anchors of history writing, footnotes and archives and all the rest of it. In brilliant prose, it manages to conjure up that atmosphere better than anything you could do as a historian.” Read more...
Orlando Figes, Historian
