Sashenka
Simon Montefiore, 2008
Simon & Schuster
544 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781416595557
Summary
Winter 1916: St. Petersburg, Russia, is on the brink of revolution. Outside the Smolny Institute for Noble Girls, an English governess is waiting for her young charge to be released from school. But so are the Tsar's secret police.
Beautiful and headstrong, Sashenka Zeitlin is just sixteen. As her mother parties with Rasputin and their dissolute friends, Sashenka slips into the frozen night to play her part in a dangerous game of conspiracy and seduction.
Twenty years on, Sashenka is married to a powerful, rising Red leader with whom she has two children. Around her people are disappearing, while in the secret world of the elite her own family is safe. But she's about to embark on a forbidden love affair that will have devastating consequences.
Sashenka's story lies hidden for half a century, until a young historian goes deep into Stalin's private archives and uncovers a heartbreaking tale of betrayal and redemption, savage cruelty and unexpected heroism—and one woman forced to make an unbearable choice. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 27, 1965
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—Cambridge University
• Awards—British Book Award, Costa Book
Award, Bruno Kreisky Award, Prix de la
Biographie Politque (all for Young Stalin).
• Currently—lives in London, England
Simon Jonathan Sebag Montefiore is a British historian and writer.
Biography
Montefiore's father, a doctor, is descended from a famous line of wealthy Sephardic Jews who became diplomats and bankers all over Europe. At the start of the 19th century, by playing the markets based on intelligence about the Battle of Waterloo, Simon's great-great uncle, Sir Moses Montefiore, became a banking partner of N M Rothschild & Sons. By contrast, Simon’s mother, April, a novelist, comes from a Lithuanian Jewish family of poor scholars. Her parents fled the Russian Empire at the turn of the 20th century. They bought tickets for New York City but were cheated and dropped off at Cork, Ireland. During the Limerick boycott of 1904 they left Ireland, despite offers of hospitality in Irish homes, and moved to Newcastle, England.
Simon was educated at Ludgrove School, Harrow, and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read history. He went on to work as a banker and foreign affairs journalist.
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he lives in London with his wife, the novelist Santa Montefiore, and their two children.
Writings
Montefiore’s books are world bestsellers, published in 33 languages. His first history book, Catherine the Great & Potemkin, was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson, Duff Cooper, and Marsh Biography Prizes. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar won History Book of the Year at the 2004 British Book Awards. Young Stalin won the LA Times Book Prize for Best Biography, the Costa Book Award, the Bruno Kreisky Award for Political Literature, the Prix de la Biographie Politique and was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Miramax Films and Ruby Films have bought the rights and are currently developing a movie of Young Stalin.
He also wrote a novel, Sashenka (2008), and his latest history book is Jerusalem: the Biography, a fresh history of the Middle East. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Sashenka is an intriguing portrait of the people who brought down the czars and went on to serve the Soviet state during Stalinism…has some pleasures of the great Russian novels.
New York Times
Simon Montefiore's first novel, is a historical whodunit with the epic sweep of a Hollywood movie. The author of the bestselling biography Young Stalin, Montefiore is a natural storyteller who brings his encyclopedic knowledge of Russian history to life in language that glitters like the ice of St. Petersburg.... Here's hoping we get more spellbinding historical fiction from him.
Washington Post
Despite [some] overblown sex scenes and cartoonish dialogue...Sashenka is an intriguing portrait of the people who brought down the czars and went on to serve the Soviet state during Stalinism.... Much of the novel's interest is the result of the years of prodigious research that Montefiore, a British journalist and author of several widely praised books of nonfiction...has done in once-sealed Russian archives.
Denver Post
(Starred review.) Lauded historian Montefiore (Young Stalin) ventures successfully into fiction with the epic story of Sashenka Zeitlin, a privileged Russian Jew caught up in the romance of the Russian revolution and then destroyed by the Stalinist secret police. The novel's first section, set in 1916, describes how, under the tutelage of her Bolshevik uncle, Sashenka becomes a naive, idealistic revolutionary charmed by her role as a courier for the underground and rejecting her own bourgeois background. Skip forward to 1939, when Sashenka and her party apparatchik husband are at the zenith of success until Sashenka's affair with a disgraced writer leads to arrests and accusations; in vivid scenes of psychological and physical torture, Sashenka is forced to choose between her family, her lover and her cause. But as this section ends, many questions remain, and it is up to historian Katinka Vinsky in 1994 to find the answers to what really happened to Sashenka and her family. Montefiore's prose is unexciting, but the tale is thick and complex, and the characters' lives take on a palpable urgency against a wonderfully realized backdrop. Readers with an interest in Russian history will particularly delight in Sashenka's story.
Publishers Weekly
Despite [Sashenka's] unscathed Stalin’s purges of 1937 and 1938, the revolution’s need to devour its children eventually overtakes even true believers made especially vulnerable by indiscreet love affairs. In 1994 the Soviet Union has collapsed, but Sashenka’s legacy cannot so easily be put to rest. Montefiore’s command of Russian history makes the novel’s details especially vibrant. —Mark Knoblauch
Booklist
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Sashenka:
1. Why is Sashenka arrested at the age of 16...and why is she released?
2. Why does Sashenka disapprove of her mother, Ariadna?
3. What do you think of Sashenka's uncle Mendel? Is it right that he has the amount of influence over his niece that he has? Is she too young to become involved in such a dangerous undertaking?
4. Talk about the ambiguous position of the Jews during the revolution. What is the Pale of Settlement? In what capacity were some Jews tolerated by the Czar...and in what way were some Jews useful to the Bolsheviks?
5. How does Montefiore portray Stalin in this work? How are other Bolsheviks portrayed? Are they as multilayered or complex in their characterizations as Stalin? Or are they more one-dimensional? Overall, how would you describe the author's attitude toward the Bolsheviks?
5. Why does Sashenka risk all to have an affair?
6. Why does Sashenka's world begin to fall apart after the May Day party at her Dacha?
7. What do you think of Sashenka's husband Vanya's response to the knowledge of her affair?
8. A number of reviewers have singled out the sexual episodes in the book as over-the-top. What do you think? Do you agree with the critics...or do you think the scenes are necessary to further the plot?
9. Were you surprised by the twists and turns of plot? What about the identity of Katinka?
10. Did you come away from this novel having learned something about the history of Russia, especially the Soviet Union and the monstrous cruelty of Stalin's regime? Did you gain an understanding of why the Bolshevik revolution occurred? What inspired it...what driving forces were behind it?
11. Do you feel the novel's three different sections are equal in their ability to engage readers? Do they merge well into a unifying story?