| Molotov's Magic Lantern: A Journey in Russian History |  | Author: Rachel Polonsky
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Category: Book
List Price: £20.00
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as of 10/9/2010 03:39 MDT details
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Seller: omnibooksuk
Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 9,023
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 416
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.5
ISBN: 0571237800
EAN: 9780571237807
ASIN: 0571237800
Publication Date: March 11, 2010
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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Product Description
When Rachel Polonsky went to live in Moscow, she found an apartment block in Romanov Street, once a residence of the Soviet elite. One of those ghostly neighbours was Stalin's henchman Vyacheslav Molotov. In Molotov's former apartment, Rachel Polonsky discovered his library and an old magic lantern.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 8
 Dense and pretentious July 11, 2010
cdc22 (Schweiz)
3 out of 10 found this review helpful
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 informative.
 A fascinating tour May 2, 2010
A. Surbey (Luxembourg)
2 out of 9 found this review helpful
I met the author once when she invited us to their place for a Christmas party. Her husband was my husband's boss, and we had been in Moscow all of ten minutes. I knew that her building was very historic (I could see all the plaques on the front), but I didn't know enough Russian history to fully appreciate it.
I'm sorry I didn't have a chance to read her book soon, but I'm enjoying it nonetheless. We left Moscow a few months ago, but I can see in my mind all the places in the city she describes (I knew those corners well).
It is certainly a very academic book, but well-written and engaging. I am not the Russophile the author is, but her love for the language, country, and culture is evident and compelling.
A lantern that casts much unexpected light April 17, 2010
R. H. Chandler (London England)
15 out of 16 found this review helpful
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.
 Preparing the cocktail April 15, 2010
Mr. P. I. Robbins (near Baldock, North Hertfordshire, England)
4 out of 10 found this review helpful
A good book about a very important character during and after the Bolshevik revolution. Most writers have portrayed him as a dull and boring man.
This book shows that there was far more to Molotov than met the eye.
Astonishingly interesting and informative April 12, 2010
Robert Renzi
12 out of 14 found this review helpful
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.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 8
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