Sashenka (Montefiore) - Book Reviews

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