ISBN: Ostalo
Godina izdanja: .
Jezik: Engleski
Autor: Strani

odlično

ECHOES OF A NATIVE LAND Two Centuries of a Russian Village
By SERGE SCHMEMANN

Title Echoes of a Native Land : Two Centuries of a Russian Village
Author Schmemann, Serge
Binding Hardcover
Edition First Edition

Pages 350

Language ENG
Publisher Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, New York
Date 1997
Illustrated Yes
...

U ovoj knjizi dobitnik Pulitzerove nagrade Serge Schmemann otvara prozor u dva veka ruske istorije kroz priču o jednoj porodici i njenom selu. Autor, potekao iz ruskog plemićkog roda, vraća se u domovinu svojih predaka i, oslanjajući se na lična sećanja, porodičnu arhivu i susrete s potomcima seljaka i plemića, oblikuje živu sliku preokreta koje je Rusija doživela od careva i revolucije, preko sovjetske epohe, pa sve do novog postkomunističkog doba.
Echoes of a Native Land nije samo porodična hronika, već i duboko lično istraživanje identiteta, nostalgije i odnosa između zemlje, istorije i pojedinca. Knjiga spaja memoarsko, istorijsko i novinarsko pismo u jedno upečatljivo svedočanstvo o Rusiji kakvu retko srećemo u literaturi.

A Corner of Russia
This is the story of a Russian village, known at different times over its three centuries of recorded history as Goryainovo, Karovo, Sergiyevskoye, and now Koltsovo. It lies by the Oka River in the ancient Russian heartland, 90 miles south of Moscow, near the city of Kaluga. It is a village to which I was originally drawn because before the Russian Revolution it had been part of an estate owned by my mother`s family. But the Soviet government`s long refusal to let me go there turned my curiosity into a mission. I finally reached Koltsovo only when Communist rule began to wane. I came to know the people; I immersed myself in the local lore; I even bought a log house there. Koltsovo became my little corner of Russia-my entry into the charm, beauty, and romance of that vast northern land, and also its backwardness, cruelty, and suffering.

I first arrived in Russia with my family in 1980, but ten years passed before I reached the village. By then the stern ideological taboos of the Soviet era were lifting, and people in the village were starting to lose their fear of talking to foreigners. Gradually, they opened up their memories and their history: how the women fooled the German occupiers who wanted to chop down the stately larches of the Alley of Love, how the old drunk Prokhor Fomichyov took the church apart after the war to trade bricks for vodka. Some went further back and remembered how in the thirties the Bolsheviks sent industrious peasants into exile and herded the rest into collectives. A retired teacher even remembered how before the revolution the peasants would stop to listen to the great `silver bell` at the church, and how village girls would gape at the bows and smocks of the young mistresses on their way to Sunday worship. The people talked about the present, too-about how youths left the village as soon as they finished school, and only the old people and the drunks stayed on; how the love child of the albino accountant was beaten to death by his son in a drunken brawl; how nobody knew what to make of the new `democracy`; how the collective farm was selling off cattle to pay off its mounting debts while the director built himself a big new house.

The first person I met in the village was Lev Vasilievich Savitsky, the retired head of an orphanage that had operated there after the war, and a staunch Communist. He told me how a KGB agent had come out there a few years earlier because some foreign correspondent was trying to visit Koltsovo, claiming that his ancestors came from there. Lev Vasilievich said the agent and the village leaders concluded that the place was too rundown to show a foreign reporter, that he would only write how things had gotten worse under the Communists. And so I learned at last the real reason I had been barred so long from Koltsovo. When I told Lev Vasilievich that I was that inquisitive reporter, he fell silent, and for a while he eyed me with suspicion and unease.

Lev Vasilievich told me that the manor house had burned down in 1923, and all that remained of the old estate was a gutted bell tower, a crumbling stable, and the former parish school. The school had been a teachers` training institute after the revolution and an orphanage after the war; it was now a weekend `rest base` for workers from the giant turbine works in Kaluga, 25 miles to the west. The village and the lands were eventually formed into a kolkhoz, or Soviet collective farm, named Suvorov after the eighteenth-century Russian military commander. The kolkhoz produced milk and meat, though mostly it gobbled up government subsidies without ever turning a kopek of profit. After the Soviet Union collapsed and the collective farms were officially freed of tight government controls, the Suvorov Kolkhoz changed its name to the Koltsovo Agricultural Association and began gobbling up bank loans instead of government credits.

But on my first visit, that was not what I wanted to know. I wanted only to see beauty and romance, to walk where my ancestors had walked, to catch the echoes of a native land. It was the height of summer, I was in Russia on a brief visit, freedom was coming to the land, and the place was beautiful-a timeless Russian landscape of birches, winding rivers, log houses, and vast expanses. Lev Vasilievich`s grandson, Roma, his patched pants rolled up Tom Sawyer-style, led me to the places my own grandfather had so lovingly described: the old park planted two hundred years ago with ordered rows of linden trees; the lane of soaring larches known as the Alley of Love, which led past the Round Meadow, a low hill deliberately left wild for honeybees; the icy `Robbers` Spring,` whose waters my grandfather had tapped for the house; the steep descent through the oaks and birches of the Zaraza forest, which abruptly opened onto a stunning vista of the Oka River winding through lush flood meadows, bluffs, and forests of birch.


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