November 23, 2008h
Fever in the Blood
By LIESL SCHILLINGER
STALIN’S CHILDREN
Three Generations of Love, War, and SurvivalBy Owen Matthews
Illustrated. 308 pp. Walker & Company. $26
From “Stalin’s Children”
The author’s mother, left,
and aunt at a Soviet
orphanage, 1938. Sometimes the best way to get to know someone is to see his words on paper. And sometimes that’s the only way. When Boris Bibikov, the maternal grandfather of Owen Matthews, Newsweek’s Moscow bureau chief, was a soldier in the Red Army in the 1920s, his baby daughter, Lenina — Matthews’s aunt —knew her father only as a bundle of letters her mother kept in a tin box. In his resonant memoir, “Stalin’s Children: Three Generations of Love, War, and Survival,” Matthews writes that when his grandfather came home from military service, 2-year-old Lenina cried in fright. “ No, that’s not Daddy,” she insisted and pointed to the box. “That’s Daddy in there. ” A decade later, Bibikov disappeared in Stalin’s purges, never to return.
Almost 60 years after that, as long-closed K.G.B. records were opened, Matthews traveled to Ukraine to investigate the mystery of who his grandfather was. Opening a file crammed with “flimsy official onion-skin forms” and a few sheets of plain stationery on which Bibikov, under coercion, had confessed to being an enemy of the people, Matthews began to reconstruct the evidence of a life. “This stack of paper is the closest thing to Boris Bibikov’s earthly remains,” he writes. “He died a man without a past.” In uncovering his grandfather’s past, Matthews reclaimed his own.
At a recent reading in New York, Matthews explained that he began writing this book a decade ago, intending to record his adventures during Moscow’s brief window of post-Soviet, pre-Putin revelry in the mid-1990s, which he characterizes as a time of “rampant, filthy raucousness” that could have come from Gogol’s satires. In Russia, he found “not just another country, but a different reality.”
Matthews grew up in London, the son of Mervyn Matthews, a brooding Russophile scholar, and Boris Bibikov’s second daughter, Lyudmila (also known as Mila), whom he describes as a loving, high-strung “dynamo of emotional energy.” He arrived in Moscow in 1995, mostly by accident, after a couple of years of “hapless wandering” in Prague, Budapest and Sarajevo. When he called his mother in London, she informed him that he’d been offered a job at an English-language newspaper, The Moscow Times, where his brief would be “trawling the lower depths of Moscow’s underbelly for lurid features articles.” Matthews’s first language was Russian, but that seemed to him like an irrelevant, though exotic, technicality: “If languages have a color, Russian was the hot pink of my mother’s ’70s dresses, the warm red of an old Uzbek teapot . . . the kitschy black and gold of the painted Russian wooden spoons which hung on the wall in the kitchen.” English, the language he spoke with his father, was “the muted green of his study carpet, the faded brown of his tweed jackets.” But as Matthews researched his book he gained a broader understanding of his identity.
His parents, he learned, met and fell in love in Moscow in 1963, while his father was doing graduate work at Moscow State University. After they tried, unsuccessfully, to register their marriage, Mervyn was deported and sent back to England. For the next five and a half years, he sacrificed his career, his savings and his energies to a relentless campaign to rejoin Lyudmila,even as she slid into a “morbid depression.” “I think,” his son writes, “he had become infected by something of the irrationality and maximalism of Russia.” But Matthews’s mother was equally stubborn: “Both Mila and Mervyn had always refused to reconcile themselves to what others believed was reasonable.” On Oct. 30, 1969, their tireless suit finally succeeded. “If I have realized anything in writing this book,” Matthews notes, “it is that my father is a deeply honorable man. He had promised to marry Mila, and he would keep his word.” On paper and in life, their son came to see that his blended heritage was more significant than he had appreciated. “All of us,” he writes, “even me, who grew up in England — still carry something of Russia inside ourselves, infecting our blood like a fever.”
Matthews’s family saga unfolds during four historic epochs: the Stalin era, World War II, the cold war and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Reading his account of the privations suffered by his mother’s generation — his grandmother left her sister to die on a train platform to save her own life; his mother, crippled from tuberculosis and weakened by hunger, spent her childhood in Stalinist orphanages after her mother was sent to the gulag — you find echoes of Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, and of the filmmakers Mikhail Kalatozov, Nikita Mikhalkov and Grigory Chukhrai. In Chukhrai’s classic war film, “Ballad of a Soldier,” a young man travels by train across his war-ravaged country, encountering scenes of joy and hardship that showcase the Russian soul. In one of the most memorable, a soldier who has lost a leg tells him he doesn’t want to return to his wife, fearing she will shun him. And yet, spotting her husband across the crowded platform, the wife runs to embrace him. A similar drama occurred in the life of Matthews’s Aunt Lenina when her fiancé lost a leg after his car hit an antitank mine. When he broke off the engagement on a pretext, she flew to his side. “She was 19,” Matthews writes, “he was 26. Strangely, after a marriage that lasted nearly four decades, Lenina cannot now remember which leg he had lost.”
When Matthews’s maternal grandmother was released from the gulag in 1948, her reaction to the sight of 14-year-old Lyudmila, whom she’d last seen as a healthy toddler, was less heartwarming: “The first glimpse Martha had of her younger daughter was a crippled silhouette at the end of the hall. Martha called out Lyudmila’s name, and howled as the little girl ran lopsidedly towards her. Lyudmila remembered that awful wail all her life.” And yet, Matthews learned, his mother’s afflictions were part of what had drawn his father to her, just as his troubles attracted her. Like Mila, Mervyn was hospitalized in his adolescence, in his case for a crippled hip and pelvis. “I was very moved when she told me about what she’d been through, her childhood, the war,” he told his son. “She’d had such a miserable life I wanted to give her a decent deal.” For her part, Mila had pitied her fiancé for his “joyless, nasty, humiliated childhood.” She wanted, she wrote, “to make your life rich and happy.”
In the Victorian terraced home in London where Matthews grew up, amid family tensions that occasionally “crackled like frost,” he saw little evidence of the passion his parents once had for each other. But in the attic, he found proof: love letters they wrote during their years apart, stacked in an old steamer trunk. “At some moments,” Matthews writes, “their epistolary conversation is so intimate that reading the letters feels like a violation. At others the pain of separation is so intense that the paper seems to tremble with it. . . . The letters are charged with loss, and loneliness, and with a love so great, my mother wrote, ‘that it can move mountains and turn the world on its axis.’ ”
Call it irrationality, call it Russian maximalism, but the letters, papers and confidences Matthews inhabits in “Stalin’s Children” rehabilitate all the generations they touch — including his own — showing how their times shaped their choices. When Matthews found his own Russian bride at the end of the ’90s, he didn’t need to set off a diplomatic barrage to win her. “Neuzheli dozhili,” a friend of his mother’s wrote to her when Soviet Communism died. “Can it be that we have lived to see this day?” Some lived, some didn’t. Matthews’s book reminds his readers to mark the difference, to remember and to acknowledge how quickly luck can change — for a family or a country. h
Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/books ... ?ref=books
It's slways so busy there that it's hard to get one of the comfy chairs anymore. 
